Please help me with my diet - not getting enough calories and struggling to eat any more!

thank you everyone, it really does make it so much clearer to talk this through

so really... just skipping breakfast could be OK lol. Even if nothing else changed - you'd be having a few hundred less calories overall.


my plan is to now often skip breakfast, to avoid red meat and very salty fish... I'll continue to eat poultry every couple of days or the very low sodium fish I've found in Tesco, but overall try to pick vegetarian foods.

salads I'll restrict my ingredients to the LE diet girl friendly ones (avoiding coleslaw, celery, raw tomatoes, etc.) but with an odd different one added now and again
vegetables with meals - again, limit to the girl friendly ones, perhaps with the occasional carrot or broccoli
I used to really love my potatoes, so I'll avoid those. Bye bye chips and delicious roast potatoes!

I'm going to change to white rice/pasta, choosing low sodium white bread/pitta now and again but not get too picky about how much I eat of this

I'll keep my snacks as usual choice-wise... but try to stretch the time out between them and eat some smaller portions of cake and chocolate. (Milk chocolate, or white).

Dairy - I'll switch to semi-skimmed milk, choose low sodium cheeses or just regular cheese in smaller portions

Most importantly I won't count nutrients. I've never done this before - as long as I'm eating 2 good meals per day and a good proportion of fruit+veg I'm not going to stress about the details. I've always trusted my instincts before and my body would tell me if I'm undereating. I know what I'm eating will be on the whole more pink, and that I'll be eating a bit less overall, and both of those things will sway.


How does that sound?

If that is fine by you, it's fine by me! As long as you're moving in the general direction of less, you're still swaying pink (I would LOVE to see you switch to fat free milk and drop meat all together though.)

I thought the chicken was a good idea to help keep the protein up?

TBH if I'm not having my breakfast cereal I'm not actually drinking much milk anyway! Only if I have coco pops as a snack in the evenings, which isn't very often.

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Originally Posted by atomic sagebrush

There is a lot of wiggle room between what is BEST, or optimal, and what is acceptible and a lot of the difference is how good a sway you want and how much weight you have to lose.

It is best to not snack and skip breakfast throughout your cycle, of course.

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Sigh...wishful thinking, I guess. I have the hang of this diet after 4+ months on it anyway, so it's not a huge deal. As I said elsewhere, skipping breakfast is no biggie for me as long as I can have my coffee. The no snacking rule's tough but I have a snack in the evening that I count as my third meal, and it helps keep me happy - it gives me something to look forward to after the kids are in bed.

rainbow - I think you're definitely on the right track with your new diet plan!

Great post Atomic, really informative. Thank you!

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Originally Posted by rainbowflower

I thought the chicken was a good idea to help keep the protein up?

TBH if I'm not having my breakfast cereal I'm not actually drinking much milk anyway! Only if I have coco pops as a snack in the evenings, which isn't very often.

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Ok I understand. White meat chicken is def. a low cal source of protein, I just thought you were not getting enough calories and getting too much protein ?right? in which case the chicken would def. be something to consider dropping.

This is a really good post! I just wanted to say (I know I'm mixing threads but I wasn't on yesterday so I have a lot of catching up to do) atomic, I think the information is actually really clear, the only thing I think could go in (which may already has and I've missed it!) is WARNING if you are thin and have very little weight to lose you MUST stick to the higher calorie limit as you will definitely lose a lot of weight if you don't. I did read your posts thoroughly but having never dieted in my life as I'm naturally small I had no idea I would lose so much weight. It sounds really silly but I'd been basically the same weight the whole of my adult life, put on one stone with each of my pregnancies and returned to normal ipwithin 2 weeks so I just thought I wouldn't lose weight, I thought I'd actually struggle to lose any as there wasn't any to lose, I was very wrong!!!! This is definitely my error but there may be many women like me that have never dieted and do not realise there is still a lot of weight to go!!


Also, I completely agree with the girls, life comes first and you already give so much of your own time!!! We can have no guilt swaying and you can have no guilt support!!!!!:)

Also wanted to add that knowing there was a bit more flexibility with the sodium would help me as eating out/buying wraps out for lunch would be SO much easier if you could relax on sodium sometimes and they often offer more calories

I think a warning like swish suggests would be a good idea... but perhaps weight LOSS is not appropriate for women who genuinely don't have much to lose. Perhaps telling women who only have a few spare lbs that even losing a couple of pounds will sway encourages them to do the diet fully and maybe it's not actually possible to do the diet at all without losing weight because the ratio of what you're eating changes.

Or maybe for women who can't lose weight the "reducing maternal quality" thing that sways by weight loss could be achieved in some way by maintaining steady weight but reducing the variety (and quantity) of nutrients and also aiming to lower blood glucose by choosing regular white rice/pasta instead of wholegrain. Perhaps a completely different sort of swaying diet is needed in those circumstances. It could be that in the studies the weight loss was not the thing that sways but rather the limited diet, and the weight loss can be a side effect.

The Oxford study showed that weight itself was not a swaying factor as the boy-mums and girl-mums in that sample had identical BMIs on average at the time of conception... so that does make me wonder too. It does say that by 8 weeks the BMIs were different with girl-mums being lower, but I don't think that means that the females were necessarily dieting at the time.