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SweetTea · Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Posts: 117 Location: Kansas City, MO

This is a combination of two articles I wrote on dieting and living on restricted caloric intake. Starting in late february 2008, I went on a restricted calorie diet with a maximum of 2000 calories. I got more and more used to eating less and less, and I am now on a maximum of 1000 calories, with almost every day falling between 600 and 700.

This first article was written when I just started:

All of these tips come from my own personal experiences living on a maximum of 2K calories a day on a moderately active lifestyle which includes a minimum of 200 calories of exercise in addition to my daily activities. I'm used to between 2500-3000 calories a day. To help mitigate my situation, I've decided to pretend that I'm bugging in and having to ration my food down to 2000 calories a day. In a real bug-in, I would probably be doing less work and would be ok with rationing down to 1750 or even 1500 if I was just sitting around waiting for the emergency to die down. Don't do anything extreme and die, and don't start any sort of diet regimen without talking to a doctor. There will be recipes at the end. Now on to the tips:

1- Keep a fuzzy calorie count. There's no need for a journal or anything like that to make you miserable. You're already having to ration your food, don't throw math on top of it. Round to the nearest multiple of 50 and move on. I refuse to count in anything finer than 50 calorie increments.

2- Condiments are your friends. There's no crappy food that you're eating because you have to that can't be improved with hot sauce, lemon juice, soy sauce, mustard, or teriyaki sauce, all of which are calorie free. The same goes for any herb or spice you can think of. Pretty much all of these condiments are shelf stable and should be stashed away to make your 50lb bag of rice and lentil mix actually taste like something.

3- Fiber is paramount. If you're bugging in, you're probaby eating packaged foods and bulk grains as opposed to fresh fruits and vegetables. This can cause a pretty severe fiber deficiency. While the poop issues are obvious (especially if you're like me and like things spicy), there's another way that lack of fiber can screw you over in a rationing situation. Fiber is one of the main things that tells your body that it's full. Keeping powdered fiber drink mix is very important to helping give you that full feeling as well as quelling down any heartburn or "bathroom troubles."

4- Break the monotony with tea or black coffee. These no-calorie drinks are a huge morale booster. In a bug-in, tea is easier to make because it can be brewed at room temperature. Powdered is ok, but how hard is it to make sun tea? Sorry, coffee fans, you're stuck with instant.

5- Snack throughout the day. You will feel more full and your digestive system won't have the huge shock of going from empty to bursting full. A typical day for me consists of a luna bar (200), 1 cup rice with another 250 calories of something meatish like fish or lentils (500), a glass of fiber drink (negligible), a prepackaged meal that has some kind of vegetable (300), 3 veggie burger patties over-microwaved into wafers (300), a toasted slice of sourdough bread (150), and maybe 2 cans of waterpacked tuna (300). By spacing them out throughout the day, I feel like I've eaten plenty when in reality my daily consumption is between 1500-1800.

6- Eat slowly. Even if you totally feasted as fast as you could, it would take your brain about 20 minutes to recognize the leptin secreted by your body and turn off the hunger response. By nibbling, you'll feel more full at the end of your snack than you would by just wolfing it down. In that same vein, eat with chopsticks instead of western flatware. It's good for your dexterity anyway and forces you to eat more slowly.

7- Eat after working. After you've just done strenuous exercise, you won't be as hungry and you'll feel fuller once you eat. Also, you don't want to eat and then do some work because you'll get nauseated.

8- Conserve energy. Stay warm so that your body doesn't waste energy just to make up for lost heat.

Recipies

Rice pilaf:
2 parts rice (I like short grain or brown long-grain, that's just me)
1 part lentils (I like masoor dal aka the red ones)
various condiments as mentioned above

Boil these in salted water just like you would pasta. Drain through a sieve. Take however much you want and stir in a dash of onion powder, 10 grinds of black pepper, a bit of soy sauce, a bit of lemon juice, and as much hot sauce as you like. If you have meat, you can skip the lentils and stir in an equal ammount of meat along with the condiments. 2 cups is 500 calories. This is my main meal that I have at about 1600 with the glass of fiber drink.

Healty tuna salad:
2 cans of water packed tuna
various condiments

open and drain the juice from the cans into your bowl. Drink the juice, it's good for you and tastes good, plus wasting is bad. Add the now dry tuna and mix in 15ish grinds of black pepper, a squirt or two of lemon juice, and about 1.5 tablespoons of mustard. Eat out of the bowl with chopsticks or with your toasted sourdough slice for dipping. Mayo is for chumps.

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Part two was written about 6 weeks later:

A couple of things have changed since I started this, and I feel that I have information that could be useful to other people, so I suppose an update is in order.

First, the personal updates:

1- I am now living on 600-1000 calories per day and feeling fine. My lifestyle is regular student stuff (sitting for an hour taking notes and then lugging a 35# backpack to the next class), and I believe that that should be comparable to standard issue office work or other non-physical jobs. Yes, this is a drastic cut in calories. However, I eased into it and I feel fine.
2- I have gone from 235 to 210-220. All of that loss is fat, and I may have lost more fat and gained some muscle.

Now on to added tips:

1- You probably think that anyone on a sub-1000 calorie diet is going to die. That simply isn't the case. I have had no atrophy or anemia, I just feel hungry more often. Once you get over the 3 day hump, you can get used to anything. I restricted my caloric intake gradually, starting at a 2000 calorie cap and then easing down at a rate of a 50-100 calorie reduction per week. However, this worked for me and might not work for you. Ease into it so that you can bump back up if you get so low that you get migranes, dizzyness, or weakness.

2- If you're going to go on a triple digit diet, you need to take some measures against atrophy. It's easier for you body to get energy by eating your muscles than it is to digest fat. Basically, think of your body as a middle manager with budget problems. It's always looking at muscles and asking "Could we downsize this? What exactly do you do?" When calories get tight, your muscles will atrophy if you don't work them. This consists of doing strength training and muscle building exercises to work out your muscles. This way, when the body goes to the abs and tries to downsize, they can say "are you kidding? We did 75 situps just yesterday!" Only by using your muscles can you stave off atrophy. In order to make sure you keep all of it, you have to use all of it. You need to "redline" your muscles, taking them to the most they can do so that all of it remains. I alternate ab/core days and arm/chest days by doing situps until I drop one day and then pushups until I drop the next. I have actually gained muscle despite the calorie cuts, and muscle maintanence burns calories.

3- Think of the calories you've allotted for the day as money. Sure, you could spend 400 calories on a mondo bowl of trix, but for that same ammount you could have 3 carrots and 2 cups of rice and lentils that will fill you up a lot more than the trix would. Similarly, a 300 calorie frozen burrito the size of my fist costs the same as 2 cans of tuna.

4- Do your homework and make sure you keep your nutrition up. There are a lot of different things that you could accidentally cut out that could lead to serious health risks. I take a multivitamin every day to ensure that I don't get any deficiencies, and I make sure I have enough complete protien. Dietary deficiencies are really dangerous, cover your ass.

5- Stay hydrated. Burning fat takes more water than burning carbohydrates or protiens because it makes more waste products that need to be flushed out. I drink at least 3 liters a day, but I try to stay around 4. Use your pee as a guage to how hydrated you are, anything darker than school bus yellow is trouble.

6- Watch your psychological situation. Essentially, you're shutting off your brain's natural hunger response. This is like going from an automatic transmission to a manual: you have more control, but you can easily mess up big time. As you adapt to living on less and less, you'll start feeling full at lower daily intake ammounts. Recently, I felt full when I had only had 400 calories that day. Anything lower than 500 is dangerous and could be a sign of pre-anorexic behavior. On the weekends, take a day off and go back to a 2000 calorie cap. I do this because I work and hike on the weekends, both of which can burn up to 3000 calories for a whole day's activity. It sounds weird, but you can get addicted to not eating, and being strung out on starvation is a really bad place to be.

For those of you who want to try this, here's a sample diet for one weekday:

no breakfast (I'm not a morning person, so I pretty much fall out of bed and go straight to school)

lunch (11:45-12:15): 1 carrot (50 calories), 1 liter of water

late lunch (3:30-4): about 200 calories, either a huge salad w/ light cesaer dressing laced with malt vinegar or 1 bag of fat free popcorn with iced tea sweetened with splenda

dinner (5:30-6): 1 glass of metamucil, either orange flavored dissolved in water or unflavored dissolved into no-calorie lemonade.

late dinner (7:30ish): about 300 calories, either a healthy choice cafe steamer added to a cup of frozen spinach or broccoli, or 1.3 cups rice and lentils

late-night snack (9ish): about 100 calories, 1.5 pieces of toast

I would love to answer any questions you might have, but know that everything is from my experience as well as my somewhat goodish education in anatomy/physiology and nutrition. I'm not a doctor, don't do anything drastic without consulting one.

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