PCOS Diet

[carmella_marie]

Ive recently switched to the PCOS LE. I swayed in 2011 for 12 weeks with tranditional LE and I've been following LE 2 months already this time around so I am having a hard time switching over to PCOS diet. I feel like I am just eating too healthy! But the good news is I lost 1 lb this week after gaining on tradition LE (even with 60 mins cardio a day and 1500 calries!!)

Is anyone else doing PCOS diet? I feel like I am eating so much and so healthy I'm scared! Does this look ok, this was yesterday:

Breakfast (since I work out I have to eat something)
--2 egg whites

Lunch
--cream top brown cow yogurt
--coconut water
--rye krisp crackers with 2 T hummus
--1 apple
--1/2 cup black beans with salsa

Dinner
--1/2 cup brown rice
--corn on the cob with margarine and parmesean
--iceberg, cucumber, bell pepper, cherry tomato salad with low fat dressing
--2 glasses white wine

[shree]

I am so glad u have posted this. I am also strating
the le alternative diet. Can I ask where u are getting your ideas from for breakfast lunch dinner. I am struggling to know what to eat as I am alsi vegetarian. Do we need to eat a certain number of cals, fat, protein etc?
thank u

[Nahri]

Im on the PCOS LE version (suspected insulin resistant) with more of a veggie lean just based on some additional medical studies I've read. I cant say no to a cup of raw green beans as a snack when I feel I just need something more. I always do a salad for lunch with my coconut water, In the "morning" ,since I stick to the no breakfast 16 hours between dinner and first meal of the day, I do the graham cracker and peanut butter or yogurt or egg whites, Dinner Is usually a half cup of rice or pasta with the sauce.

The protein amounts etc are all listed on the diet plan page so you know what to shoot for.

[bluebonnet22]

carmella - I tried the PCOS diet for a week or so and from what I remember what you're doing looks great. I dropped it because like you said, it felt too "healthy" to me and was throwing me off! I know you've done LE before, but I will say in my experience I wasn't able to lose weight on "traditional" LE at first. For the first month I think I lost mb 2 lbs in an entire month, then mb 4 lbs the next? Since then I dropped 8 lbs each of the next 2 months. I was so frustrated at first because I was convinced traditional LE + cardio didnt' work for me. I think my body had to get used to the crazy high level of cardio and was holding onto the weight first. Additionally I gave up sugar (or mostly) and that seemed to help a ton! I'm still eating mostly carbs (and I stuck with white rice and white pasta) but I'm not eating any desserts or sugary drinks or things like that.

[carmella_marie]

I have PCOS tendencies., although not officially diagnosed: cysts on ovaries, cystic acne, high cholesterol and LH, irregular cycles, etc.

I'd been doing 60 mins cardio and LE for 2 months so I think my body had adjusted to the cardio

Avoiding sugar us actually something suggested in the PCOS version of the diet.

[carmella_marie]

I lost 15 lbs on the LE diet last time I swayed. I only have 10 lbs to lose this time.

I'm not as concerned about weight loss as I am about the LE diet swaying blue for me. While not officially diagnosed, I do have a lot of symptoms of PCOS and the LE diet may raise my testosterone and insulin and sway blue! So AS said there's no harm in trying the PCOS diet this time.

if you research the foods on the PCOS diet-peanut butter, beans, brown rice, whole grains-- you'll see that while a bit healthier than traditional LE foods, they actually still have very very little nutritional value, so that makes me feel better. The powerhouses of nutrition are really meat and whole eggs and the vibrantly colored fruits and fats like avocado, coconut oil, tree nuts, etc.

[atomic sagebrush]

Looks great to me!

[atomic sagebrush]

I am so glad u have posted this. I am also strating
the le alternative diet. Can I ask where u are getting your ideas from for breakfast lunch dinner. I am struggling to know what to eat as I am alsi vegetarian. Do we need to eat a certain number of cals, fat, protein etc?
thank u

Shree, this should be in your plan but sometimes I drop the ball and forget to put it in there.

The cals are 1500-1800 (altho some with a stronger insulin resistance or a lot of weight to spare may wish to drop to 1200-1500)

Protein is 50-60 g

Fat is more like 30% cals from fat and NOT the 20-25% range that some eat on the standard LE Diet. The reason is that you will drop carb intake to some extent and you will need cals from somewhere to make up for that, so we get a bit more fat. This is also better for egg quality and one of the reasons why the alt. diets are better for fertility as well.

CArbs should be primarily from wholegrains and higher carb fruit and veg, UNLESS you drop wheat all together. If you drop wheat all together you can get away with white rice (which seems to be tolerated a lot better than sugar and white flour and may actually be better for fertility than brown rice is)

Sugar should be dropped

Low carb veg are as always free on all diets. YOu can have as much as you want.

[atomic sagebrush]

carmella - I tried the PCOS diet for a week or so and from what I remember what you're doing looks great. I dropped it because like you said, it felt too "healthy" to me and was throwing me off! I know you've done LE before, but I will say in my experience I wasn't able to lose weight on "traditional" LE at first. For the first month I think I lost mb 2 lbs in an entire month, then mb 4 lbs the next? Since then I dropped 8 lbs each of the next 2 months. I was so frustrated at first because I was convinced traditional LE + cardio didnt' work for me. I think my body had to get used to the crazy high level of cardio and was holding onto the weight first. Additionally I gave up sugar (or mostly) and that seemed to help a ton! I'm still eating mostly carbs (and I stuck with white rice and white pasta) but I'm not eating any desserts or sugary drinks or things like that.

Here's the thing tho. IF you're gaining weight or not losing it on standard LE, that means something. It means you aren't tolerating carbs as well as you "should" be - your blood sugar is staying higher for longer and that in turn raises your testosterone. This can make your cycles go nutty in a bad way and lower egg quality, and perhaps most important for our purposes here - it sways BLUE. So healthy, not healthy, dismiss that from your mind if you aren't reacting well to the straight LE Diet - it is bad juju for you even if the alt. diet feels like a little more nutrients.

(Aside - if I had a time machine I would travel back in time and change the name of Low Everything Diet to SUPER HEALTHY swaying diet because honestly that is the main reason why I made the darn thing to begin with. It pains me when people are scared to eat SOME nutrients on LE because it's not NO nutrients, it's LOW nutrients, and it's even really not that LOW in nutrients. IT's low-normal.)

But, what happens (and your experience demonstrates this perfectly, thx for sharing) is that even if you do have some insulin resistance going on, losing a small amount of weight and exercising help to fix that. It's ben the case for many people that they start off on one of the alternate diets and then are able to gradually add in more empty carbs over time - and in fact HAVE to because they will lose too much weight otherwise.

[atomic sagebrush]

I lost 15 lbs on the LE diet last time I swayed. I only have 10 lbs to lose this time.

I'm not as concerned about weight loss as I am about the LE diet swaying blue for me. While not officially diagnosed, I do have a lot of symptoms of PCOS and the LE diet may raise my testosterone and insulin and sway blue! So AS said there's no harm in trying the PCOS diet this time.

if you research the foods on the PCOS diet-peanut butter, beans, brown rice, whole grains-- you'll see that while a bit healthier than traditional LE foods, they actually still have very very little nutritional value, so that makes me feel better. The powerhouses of nutrition are really meat and whole eggs and the vibrantly colored fruits and fats like avocado, coconut oil, tree nuts, etc.

Funnily enough, a couple of the foods that I think are pretty good pink PCOS sway foods, like seeds, beans, almonds, and nut butters were originally thought to sway pink because of the acid-alkaline diet. So you can def. get a girl eating them (not because the acid-alkaline diet works, because it doesn't, but because small amounts of those foods will STILL be much better for a girl than a steak taco with guacamole and a blueberry milkshake. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good and the reason why those old-school sway diets have endured is because they did get some things right just from sheer luck, even tho their explanations were wackadoo.)