Tanking up to lose later?

[Clothespin]

I am a pretty thin person, and I tend to lose weight quite quickly. I want to ttc a girl, and desperately want to do a le diet. However, I know my body, and I know I realistically won't be able to go more than a month on it without my weight becoming really very low. Too low. Especially when I add on exercise. Should I focus on gaining some weight now (for the next six months or so) so i can be on the le diet a bit longer? If I gain plenty of weight now, I could probably do an le diet for the 3 month goal I want to do before ttc. Or am I just totally undermining my sway?

[ksmom]

No, I would just up calories until weight is stable. If you do exercise, it's critical you eat more. I'm very thin as well and found the only way I was able to stabilize my weight on LE was upping calories and reducing exercise from 6/7 days a week to 4-5.

[MrsEnglish]

Maybe atomic knows whether LE diet with no exercise or exercise with regular diet is a better sway tactic, but I think you should do at most one of them. IMO better to do exercise and no diet because that is a healthier lifestyle in general.

You could still be vegetarian without losing much weight, and vegetarian alone sways girl. If you do vegetarian + exercise + one attempt, that sounds like a decent sway without doing any other diet stuff.

I did lose weight when I conceived my girl, but I had a medium BMI to start out with (20 - 21), so even though I didn't HAVE to lose weight, I could lose weight and still have a normal BMI.

[atomic sagebrush]

DO NOT gain weight to lose it later. That has been DISASTER for several swayers (myself included, with DS 4) when they accidentally got pregnant when actively gaining, and has never been shown to aid a sway in any way. Plus, it's just allowing your body to save up a lot of resources that even when you are on diet 3 months after, may still not be depleted.

What you need to do is eat LE-style but up calories as much as it takes to keep weight on. This is ok to do. So instead of 1500-1800 cals a day, 40-50 g protein, and 50-60 g fat, you boost this to 2000-2200 cals (to start with) or even more if you need to, 50-60 g protein and fat (and you may up that to 65 g or even 70 if you need to, but most can prevent weight gain just from adding cals of mostly carbs alone). OR, you can just go vegetarian and not count calories. Whichever option you prefer. The vegetarian diet has worked for people as well.

Exercise is the best of the best non-medical tactic (Clomid/Femara may be better) and so I want you to do exercise, but boost cals to whatever it takes to keep weight on.

[atomic sagebrush]

No, I would just up calories until weight is stable. If you do exercise, it's critical you eat more. I'm very thin as well and found the only way I was able to stabilize my weight on LE was upping calories and reducing exercise from 6/7 days a week to 4-5.

:agree: and the good news is that even 4-5 days of exercise has been pretty effective as long as it goes 60 minutes so that is definitely an option. You could also start off at 4 days of exercise and max cals and see what happens. If you give yourself that wiggle room in terms of lead time, you will have time to gradually up exercise and decrease cals (you will likely always need more than some do, though).