Anyone else mentally struggling with eating the empty cals?

[HopingWishingPraying]

Hi everyone

Is anyone else really struggling with feeling ok about eating the "empty calories"? I know we need to, but I am struggling with feeling ok about it! Most days I am finishing my day at around 1000 calories. My usual eating pattern is to eat:
Morning tea: An apple and a pear (I will cut this "snacK" out closer to ovulation and eat them with a meal instead of as morning tea).
Lunch: Either have 2 pieces of mountain bread with leaks, a scraping of mayo and a little sprinkle of low fat cheese melted on it, OR a cup of rice with pureed corn and a sprinkle of low fat cheese melted through it plus a no fat yoghurt.
Dinner: Something carb based - pizza base, pasta or rice with some sort of low fat topping and some veggies on it.

I get to the end of the day and I am STARVING... I have heaps of calories to "spend" (I am breastfeeding an 11 month old so I know I need to get at least 1500 calories to maintain my milk supply, plus the fact that I am not attempting until September)... but I simply HATE the idea of sitting here and eating lollies / cake etc. Not because I don't enjoy those things, more because I cant get over feeling like I am defeating my hard work and not feeling enough like I am on a "diet" when I eat those sorts of things. I feel so much more satisfaction and like I am doing something towards getting my girl when I dont eat anything extra after dinner... when I do sit here and snack I get all depressed and feel like I am not doing enough... like it should be harder... and like I am more than likely to "get her" if I dont eat all these extras. I also get panicky about what if the information FitDay gives is incorrect, and I am actually eating way more calories / fat etc than what it tells me. I KNOW that it is fine and essential to eat these empty carbs, I just cant get past it feeling wrong. I have only been on the LE diet for a week, haven't weighed myself yet to see if I have lost anything... just wanted to know if anyone else is also struggling with this?

[dramabird]

Absolutely eat those empty calories! If you put yourself in starvation mode, you won't ovulate and you can't get pg with your DD without that.

Lots of "pink" moms report having junky diets, including lots of treats. Empty calories are a-okay. I personally did a lot of ice cream, because that didn't bring too much sodium to the party ... plus if I ate it in an ice cream cone, it was an easy way to portion control and it felt like eating it took awhile, so I could enjoy it longer. I also ate lots of Skittles and fat-free chocolate cookies. (Don't know what I'm having yet, but God willing it's our daughter.)

Please don't starve yourself!!

[NCBeachyGrl]

I would try to at more during your meals so you don't have so many empty calories to eat and you won't feel like you are starving!

[Mochagirl]

I was all about the empty calories when I was on the diet. They're usually necessary to make sure you get enough calories. If you're worried about FitDay being wrong, do what I did and enter all your usual foods as 'custom foods' using the nutritional info on the packages.

[Indira]

I do recognize how you feel. During my sway I also felt the more I suffered (eating less), the higher my changes for a girl were. I did feel this was not good but it was hard to change that feeling.
Now I feel if I had managed to chill out a bit more about the food and feel more relaxed, my sway would have been better, feeling so restricted (I did that to myself like you´re describing) certainly didn´t help to lower my testosterone.

I don´t know if you have a lot of weight to loose, but really a lot of us girl swayers lost weight so quickly on the LE diet, we didn´t get pregnant in the first couple of months because FR/abstain + JAD + sylk + antihystamine + new moon/jonas or what ever lol was too much, then when our sway was all down to the diet, we started to ovulate late or not ovulate. At that point you start feeling you really need to gain weight to ovulate or for your health and then your sway really gets in trouble, more then if you eat your needed empty calories now. So please be sure you get enough calories! :luck:

[atomic sagebrush]

1000 calories is NOT LE Diet and not allowed. Not good for you and not good for starting off a healthy pg. What you're doing may even backfire because firstly, you're pretty much rewarding yourself with feeling that sense of accomplishment "if only I'm strict enough, then I'm guaranteed a girl" and that's the kind of mindset that can raise testosterone. Secondly because if you send your body into crisis mode, your body will slowly shut down production of the hormones that you need to get pregnant, and may temporarily increase levels of testosterone because it "thinks" you're in a fight for your very survival. Gradually declining in maternal condition is best for TTC pink.

You DON'T have to suffer on the LE Diet. It's meant to be a better alternative that you can stick to in the long term.

Think of all those women out there who conceived both boys and girls without even thinking about it. Most of them weren't starving themselves and miserable all the time, they just ate when and how they were in the mood. It's just luck that their diets and eating habits was such that their bodies "thought" that a girl would have a better shot of survival. Not because they were going through every day white-knucked and depriving themselves of every morsel of food (some did, but most didn't.)