1500 calorie days
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I'm just very pessimistic about eating something that doesn't have calories on the carton at this time. But thanks for suggestions everyone.
You can try eating self contained items like eggs that you know have standard calories so you can slowly learn and become comfortable. A large egg is 70 calories. You can hard boil them, or make an omelet with 1tb olive oil and spinach or zucchini. Even if you go over on the spinach, it has few calories. You can also eat a lot of green salad. Get mixed greens, or an iceberg lettuce and top them with a can of tuna in olive oil and nothing else except grated carrots or tomatoes. That way you will have a low calorie item, ie lettuce which is ok if you do not have an accurate weight and combine it with a packaged item. Bake potatoes but top them with Greek yogurt and pepper. Eat fresh fruits, low fat fruits and vegetables like tomatoes. These will be items that is ok if you go over the caloric limits. Have you eliminated soda?0 -
A friend of mine lost a lot of weight without logging - he was about 8 stone overweight at the time. What worked for him was to only eat meals or individual foods that were 5% fat or less. It became a very easy way to check whether something was OK or not, and it's not hard to find out as lots of food (as well as processed meals) will say on the packet.0
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Not sure if someone has already mentioned this but the weights on packages actually aren't that accurate. Basically when the package says 250 grams it's actually allowed to weigh more (but not less). So if you're just eating out of packages and taking all the numbers at face value you may well be eating more than you think you are. Try weighing some of the packages and see.
As the others have said, the recipe builder is great for calculating cals of regular meals that you cook, but also websites like http://www.recipe.com have lots of recipes with the nutritional information already calculated.
Hope you break the plateau and start losing weight again
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Do whatever is working for you. While I myself follow the TDEE/BMR, I am not going to push it onto someone else. And furthermore, you weren't asking if you were eating too little, you were simply asking for recipe ideas. That being said....
All of my recipes I input myself on here. I have my inputs for roasted veggies, meatloaf, etc... that I use. The best part is if you switch it up, you can go in and tweak the recipe a little to reflect the updated version of what you cooked. I would take a look at skinnytaste.com or go out and buy some low calorie cookbooks. Believe it or not, Bobby Dean (Paula Dean's son) has a really good cookbook out that has a lot of redone recipes that are awesome. I have taken some of them and tweaked them even further to be even less in calories. And there are lots of other books out there that are awesome!
Sit down and plan out your day the day before. Go over breakfast, lunch and dinner...and your snacks!0 -
I eat 1500 calories daily, sometimes 1600. I'm 5'3.
Peanut butter is your best friend! (only all natural though. no ingredients except peanuts!)
You could introduce new whole grains into your diet.
Cheese can be a good way to get calories, if eaten in moderation. I stick to about an ounce (30 grams) daily or every other day.
Use chicken a lot to get good, wholesome protein. This goes for all meat, provided it's not processed and crappy.
Fat is your friend - eat higher fat foods. No, I don't mean mcdonalds. I mean avocados, and nuts. Just one walnut has 20 calories!
Make zucchini bread to snack on.
Introduce healthy oils to your diet (like coconut oil)
Try Peanut butter and banana icecream. I make it all the time, and it's about 200 calories... OF PURE BLISS.
and remember: Treat yourself. If it fits your macros, have a cookie! ( the trick is only eating one!)0 -
As people have stated 1500 seems to be very low and I agree, however being 295 @ 6'2" I actually am gaining weight at 2000 calories a day (gained 4 pounds last week). I highly doubt it is muscle due to the fact that I haven't been working out the last couple of weeks. I'm only doing 1500 calories to push myself over the plateau I am at.
Entering the raw ingredients sounds like a good idea, I'd just need to start measuring food and weighing it before I start eating it. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
That doesn't sound possible. Maybe you have a medical condition? Or maybe you didn't log accurately? I'm a female, 5'4" and 200 pounds and losing on 2000 calories. My TDEE is 2500.0 -
It's interesting that a lot of people find 1500 too little. I'm 5'11" and started around 250 lbs. I started eating around 14-1500 for an average day and i usually have about 12-1300 these days now that I'm a bit under 200 I lose an average of about 1.5-2 lbs a week and feel fine. It's not like I'm avoiding eating either (though a few times this last week, I've been a bit bad with eating something large in one meal and not much else for the others - horrible plan overall).Good luck either way, I hope you can do it!
As 1200 calories is for females, 1600 is for males. It's not recommended to go below that. You could be losing too much muscle mass that way. :ohwell:0 -
I cook mostly from scratch (though my diary doesn't always reflect it because I'll use closest-approximations sometimes).
If I'm eating a meal made of whole foods cooked relatively simply, I just add the components. So when we have chicken/bean burritos, I add how much grilled chicken, black beans, cheese, and greens I put into my tortilla. If we have chicken, asparagus, and couscous -- I just add those three things to my diary.
If I'm making a one-pot meal, like a curry, I add everything to the recipe creator and set "servings" to the number of servings I get when I divide the pot between our plates. That has the advantage of everything being there the next time I make it.
There are some recipe calculator sites I like better than the way MFP works, so I also have used those and then input the results as though they were a food product.
Remember, the nutrition labels on packaged foods are not required to be completely accurate -- they're allowed a LOT of leeway. This means that those labels are not necessarily more accurate than using the calculators yourself. It also means that you shouldn't let the labels be the reason you don't eat the food you want to be eating.0 -
The freezer and my kitchen scale are my favorite tools! Build a recipe (trying to stay as healthy as possible) in the food recipe calculator. Adjust the number of servings in the recipe to achieve your desired calorie intake.
Use your kitchen scale to calculate the weight of the entire recipe. Divide the amount by the number of servings you decided in the recipe builder and freeze the portions in zip lock bags. If you do that 5 times you could easily have as many as 20 meals.... Double up on your favorite recipes & build a freezer full of favorites!
You can freeze almost everything! Be sure to label and date your meals. Believe me, after meals are frozen, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out what you have. As an added bonus, it is very simple to add that item in your daily diary.0 -
As people have stated 1500 seems to be very low and I agree, however being 295 @ 6'2" I actually am gaining weight at 2000 calories a day (gained 4 pounds last week). I highly doubt it is muscle due to the fact that I haven't been working out the last couple of weeks. I'm only doing 1500 calories to push myself over the plateau I am at.
Entering the raw ingredients sounds like a good idea, I'd just need to start measuring food and weighing it before I start eating it. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
A lot of people miscalculate their daily calories. Make your diary viewable. 2000 calories with light to moderate exercise and you should lose no problem.0 -
As people have stated 1500 seems to be very low and I agree, however being 295 @ 6'2" I actually am gaining weight at 2000 calories a day (gained 4 pounds last week). I highly doubt it is muscle due to the fact that I haven't been working out the last couple of weeks. I'm only doing 1500 calories to push myself over the plateau I am at.
No, no you aren't. When I started on this site I was 276 lbs at 6'1". I ate 2200 cals a day and I lost 2 lbs a week like clockwork. There is no way on this earth you are getting fatter on 2000 cals per day and it's impossible to gain 4 lbs in one week unless you at 3 large deep dish pizza PER DAY.
Make your life easier and set your calorie goal back to 2000.
edited to add: And please note that I lost all the weight eating burgers at McDonalds, tacos at Taco Bell, and full egg breakfast sandwiches at Subway. You can make weight loss really easy for yourself, or really hard for yourself. I chose easy and enjoyable and I'm pleased with the results.0 -
Try skinnytaste.com and preventionrd.com
They both have healthy recipes and provide calorie counts as well as serving size so you know how much you are eating! I think it would be a good place to start, I also love the recipe builder on here 0 -
Entering the raw ingredients sounds like a good idea, I'd just need to start measuring food and weighing it before I start eating it. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
If you haven't been weighing and measuring your food, then you are very likely grossly underestimating your calorie consumption.
Before you do anything else, you really need to go to a Bed, Bath & Beyond type store and select a digital food scale. Weigh absolutely everything. You will be amazed what you find. I have been at this for years now, and I'm still prone to underestimate calories consumed. Particularly the high calorie items, like ice cream because a spoonful here and there will really add up. Packaged foods will only get you so far. The nutrition and sodium are far better in self-prepared foods.
Just keep it up and you'll see results.0 -
I'm really trying to stop eating highly processed foods or frozen foods, but it seems that they are the only way I can actually lose weight as they have calorie counts on the packages. Does anyone have any recipes with accurate calorie counts in which to make a goal of 1500 calories in a day? Would be appreciated.
Hi, I eat 1200-1500 a day. You can look at my diary, but ignore the weekend days. They are my free days. Lolz.0 -
I eat about 1500-1600 calories a day. While I agree you probably should be eating a bit more, feel free to browse my diary for ideas.0
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1500 calories a day seems really low for a man, how much less than your TDEE is it?
Regarding home cooked meals, what I do is log each ingredient individually, raw, so I get a value for the whole recipe. That's if I'm cooking for just me... if it's a family meal I log the whole meal, then save it in "my meals" (click on "quick tools" to get a drop down menu that allows you to do this) and remove the ingredients from my diary - then I weigh the whole recipe cooked, and weigh my own serving, and work out what fraction of the whole meal I ate. Then I go back to my diary, and enter it as the fraction of the whole thing that I ate... e.g. if I ate one quarter of it, I enter that as 0.25 of 1 meal. (and the same if I make batches to be reheated later, I put the whole recipe in "my meals" then log it as what fraction of the whole recipe it is.
I have found this to be the best way to deal with home cooking, especially as I'm not one to follow a recipe accurately. that way I have a value for what I've actually eaten, not someone else's version of the same recipe
I second this. This has been the only thing I've found to work. I was wondering why I wasn't using weight and it was because my homecooked meals were inaccurate. But this method has saved my life. And I'm back to losing. Try it and you won't regret it!0 -
May have been mentioned already, but sites like www.skinnytaste.com have the calorie counts listed. You can also Google things like, "recipes under 400 calories" or whatever you are looking for!0
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I make a big batch of soups and other freezer friendly meals then weigh them into separate containers so I can then freeze them. I use the recipe builder then have a freezer full of my own frozen meals ready to go. Yes, it can take time and while it is easy, its not fast the first time but for me its worth the extra effort.
When I make my soups, I make a lot of potato, cauliflower, butternut squash etc types so the vegetable amount various so I do have to weigh then change in the saved recipe when I make a new batch but that doesn't take long. I do the same with turkey and chicken breast. Make a bunch one day then freeze individually to add to my soups or make sandwiches or what have you.
I make stir frys and pasta dishes to freeze. I also have a batch of Tikka Masala sauce individually frozen so I can pour over fish or a poultry with some veggies then add a grain for some quick meal options.0 -
I'll be honest. I didn't read every comment, but I'll throw in my 2 or 3 cents...
1.) 1500cal/day seems low for a dude, sure you can lose weight on that, but you are also losing lean body mass (such as muscle). The higher your LBM (lean body mass) the better your metabolism... so lose LBM and your metabolism drops meaning it will take fewer and fewer calories to continue losing weight and then maintain. Here is a good place to start researching how many calories you should be eating: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/819055-setting-your-calorie-and-macro-targets
2.) Calorie counts on nutrition labels can be off by 20% (so that 400 calorie frozen diet meal can be more like 480 calorie). Cooking and measuring your own food puts you in control. Use the database here to look up calories. If there is a * next to the item then it was submitted by a MFP user so look to see how many confirmations there are. If there isn't a * that means the info was proved by myfitnesspal and it tends to be accurate. You can also double check with other calorie counting websites if you aren't sure.
3.) If you don't own one, buy a food scale. You don't need to spend more than $20 on one. And here is why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVjWPclrWVY
Good luck!0 -
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