When it comes to diet, weight control is the number one concern for people choosing to actively modify their meals for the sake of changing how much they weigh. No matter what your weight control goals are, understanding how the body processes nourishment can help you meet your weight control goals. These four simple principals should help you take control of your diet and meet your weight control needs.

First, your diet must be high in quality. Consider this: The standard American diet is high in sugar, high in fat, high in salt, highly processed and low in nutrition. Regardless of your goals for weight control, a healthier diet, from whole, unprocessed foods, will improve your health by eliminating toxins and help your body make the most of the nourishment in the food you eat. Would you choose the lowest quality gasoline, filled with impurities and additives that damage your car? Why then would you choose equivalent foods and put them in your body?

Second, nourishment in your diet must be complete. The facts show that the level of essential nutrients in a "good diet" is far lower compared to measurements from just 20 years ago. Because of this, you need to choose high-quality, food-based supplements to ensure that your body has the micronutrients it needs to support correct cell function.

Third, for optimal health, the amount of nourishment you receive from your diet must be appropriate for your needs. The diet of some movie star is not necessarily right, or even safe, for you. If your weight control desire is to loose weight, you should reduce your calories and favor low-glycemic foods which take longer to digest and slow your insulin response.

Fourth, your diet must be balanced. On average, you should receive twenty percent of your daily calories from protein, thirty percent from fat and fifty percent from carbohydrates. However, if we remember the first principal, a meal with fat from fried appetizers and carbohydrates from simple starches and refined sugars in not a high quality source of nourishment. Your protein should come from high quality sources such as fish, legumes and beans. Fat should also come from fish, and legumes, as well as flax seed, avocados, extra virgin olive oil and other high quality fat sources. The carbohydrates should come from whole produce and as much of it as possible should be raw. It's very unlikely that you will find any of these things in the drive through or from the frozen section of the grocery store. It might be time to buy a cook book or two and learn how to prepare simple meals from real ingredients.

If your weight control goals are for weight gain, the four principals still apply. You simply need more calories from your diet. Instead of increasing portion sizes, add one or more extra meals a day. There are limits to how much the body can process from a single meal so adding an extra meal or two will allow your body to make the most of your additional intake.

Everyone should be able to enjoy the foods we include in our diet. Weight control is simply a matter of adjusting the intake of calories compared to how much is being consumed through exercise and basal metabolism. By following these four simple principals we can enjoy better health and help our bodies achieve our own, individual healthy weight.