Help with diet

I am assuming your goal is to lose weight. If you continue as you are you will lose weight but you are likely to gain it back and become very frustrated. You are making drastic changes that are unlikely to be sustainable. I understand your desire to prepare the same meal over and over for simplicity and I too recycle the same dishes weekly but you have so little variety in your meals that you are likely to be missing out on nutrients. Vegetables and fruit add fibre as well as many vitamins we need. I lost 100+ pounds and I can tell you that when I find I'm struggling the most it's because I got lazy about getting my veggies. I use shredded cabbage alot instead of lettuce in salads and as a filler for tacos etc and I find it really makes me feel full. Steamed broccoli fills me up too and with a little butter and salt and pepper added it's tasty. Losing weight meant I had to cook more but now it has become a habit and I don't mind.

One of the reasons you are always hungry is the lack of fibre in your diet. For example if you eat a chocolate bar it's about 180 calories. That's the equivalent of 2 or more apples. Which do you think would fill you up? If you compare that to veggies you are really getting alot more bulk. You're hungry because you are eating high calorie foods that have little bulk. If you change that it will help.

jekkarez wrote: »

ceiswyn wrote: »

jekkarez wrote: »

ceiswyn wrote: »

jekkarez wrote: »

Panini911 wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

You are WAY under eating for your stats and activity. I’m a 5’2 female at 125 and I eat more than 1680/day.

Are you trying to lose weight? What did you put in MFP for your goal?

you have very little to lose right? what rate of loss did you select?
and again, YOU NEED TO EAT THE EXERCISE CALORIES BACK. you say you spend two hours at the gym, then you need to estimate how many calorie burned and add those to your day.

fat: what is your fat goal? I can hit it without eating tons of PB and I eat pretty low cal. But you can eat a yummy dessert. Use full milk VS skim. add cheese. Cook your chicken in oil. use oil based maridnate for chicken. Add butter or cheese to the broccoli.

reducing carbs: you can mix rice and cauliflower rice but there are yummy ways to make cauliflower rice (and you can use coconut butter making ti to increase fat!)

~Sigh....

The yummi bit is irrelevant right now.... It is just that I feel hungry.

I don't know an effective way to estimate my calorie loss when at the gym yet.... The fitness app the dude who made my training gave me says that it's around 300 calories a day so I can estimate that.

I am not sure what loss rate I chose, but I think it was round loosing 500 cal a day or something

The yummy part is entirely relevant to feeling hungry. It should not come as a surprise that if you eat things that you don't enjoy much, you are not going to feel satisfied afterwards. Hunger is only half physical, and you're completely ignoring the mental side.

At the age of 30 I am pretty sure I know how I feel about hunger and why

Yeah, at the age of 30 I knew everything too.

At the age of 40 it turned out I'd been wrong about most of it.

If you're that confident of your skills and knowledge in this area, I'm not really sure why you're posting to ask for help.

What I am not asking is what mental state I need to enjoy my food

That's good because that's not what I advised you about either

One other thing about the rice and veggies. I keep a few frozen bags of things such as peas and carrots, corn, onions, bell peppers to add to things such as rice to help bulk them up. I just saute them in a little olive oil ( remember not to drink it out of the bottle) then add my rice. It is a great way to use up leftover rice. I do the same thing with pasta but I usually add a few tomatoes (fresh or canned) to them.

So the bottom line is you still feel hungry after eating your meals. Right?

Sub out the rice for other forms of carbs like broccoli or cauliflower. Get to eat waaaaaaay more for the same numbers. Sub out even more carbs in general for more protein/fat as those are more satiating for most people. Make sure you are eating enough in general as 2 hours 5 days a week depending on what you are doing can be a *kitten* ton of calorie burn.

And then there's this...you are eating at a deficit. Chances are you are going to be hungry.

jekkarez wrote: »

cheryldumais wrote: »

I am assuming your goal is to lose weight. If you continue as you are you will lose weight but you are likely to gain it back and become very frustrated. You are making drastic changes that are unlikely to be sustainable. I understand your desire to prepare the same meal over and over for simplicity and I too recycle the same dishes weekly but you have so little variety in your meals that you are likely to be missing out on nutrients. Vegetables and fruit add fibre as well as many vitamins we need. I lost 100+ pounds and I can tell you that when I find I'm struggling the most it's because I got lazy about getting my veggies. I use shredded cabbage alot instead of lettuce in salads and as a filler for tacos etc and I find it really makes me feel full. Steamed broccoli fills me up too and with a little butter and salt and pepper added it's tasty. Losing weight meant I had to cook more but now it has become a habit and I don't mind.

One of the reasons you are always hungry is the lack of fibre in your diet. For example if you eat a chocolate bar it's about 180 calories. That's the equivalent of 2 or more apples. Which do you think would fill you up? If you compare that to veggies you are really getting alot more bulk. You're hungry because you are eating high calorie foods that have little bulk. If you change that it will help.

Fair enough

What would you suggest dropping? And what are the potential substitutes? Veggies and that are great abstraction.... But I would like specifics

Because my maintenance calories are about 1500 I would forget the almond butter or reduce the rice or reduce the chicken. Broccoli adds about 30 calories/cup. Shredded cabbage is less than that. Since most folks on here are telling you that you're not eating enough anyway I don't know why you feel you have to drop anything? I often add shredded cabbage and broccoli to a stir fry with a little soya sauce and sesame oil. You could do that with your chicken and serve it over the rice. If you make a large panful of that you can eat it several times throughout the week. Drop the almond butter and you have loads of calories for veggies and sesame oil.

jekkarez wrote: »

Annie_01 wrote: »

You don't have to drop the rice. I eat rice and/or pasta every day and keep my calories below 1400...closer to 1300.

Try bacon and eggs for breakfast with cheese. All 3 or those things have fat and protein. Cut back on the almond butter to account for those calories. You don't need 400 calories worth of almond butter.

Mix some veggies with your rice and it will give you more volume for very little additional calories. It certainly would be more volume that 4 Tbl of almond butter.

I am opposed to almond butter...prefer peanut butter...but you have to realize that if you eat that much almond butter you are cheating yourself out of food that would help with the hunger issues.

Add beef to your diet. It is fattier that chicken. I sometimes do about 2lbs of ground beef into patties...cook them up...grab and eat.

I don't like avocados either...they go bad too quickly for me.

How much rice/ pasta do you eat a day?

Before the butter it was 80 grams of avocado and the sole reason was to add up the fat after I've already reached 1400-1500 calories with rice and chicken and oats.... I needed something wit lots of fat and almost nothing else. (Was 150 grams rice at lunch and 170 at dinner)

It varies depending on how many available calories that I have left and how many vegetables that I have added to bulk it up. If I was going to estimate maybe between 1/2 to 3/4 of a serving. Though there are times when I eat a full serving of either one. It all depends on what I have added to the dish.

One bit that I have learned along the way and I think most people will agree...If you are constantly hungry your chances of failure are high. You will soon cave in and start eating everything in site at least that has held true for me in the past. We can only tell you what we have done to avoid that.

Just to maybe help put your mind at ease - I am female, older than you, 5'8" and weigh about 40 lbs less than you. I lose on 1900-2000 calories a day. The loss is slow, by choice.

You should definitely be eating more. I will say my logging is generally pretty on point. I use a scale and double check entries when I first use them. I want to get the most out of my calories as I can. If you're a loose logger, you may need to increase your calories, but leave some on the table as a buffer.

Even though I like chicken, I would definitely try eating some other protein...beef, pork, fish. I would get awfully tired of it for every meal.

@jekkarez It looks like you are weighing your food and pretty much have a handle on how to log your intake. It's not clear to me whether you are using MFP to calculate how much you can really eat. It sounds like your trainer told you that you've only earned 300 calories? Have you used the "exercise" tab at the top? Input every day what you're doing at the gym for two hours to find out how many additional calories you can eat that day. I'd bet you are burning more than 300 calories! YOU WILL STILL LOSE WEIGHT. So if you're supposed to eat 1600 calories a day, and you run and burn 700 calories, you get to eat 2300 calories that day. It doesn't sound like you are eating the calories you earned by exercising, which of course will lead to your feeling hungry because you are probably not adequately fueling your body for the exercise.

You need to eat more calories, period. You don't have much to lose and exercising 2 hours a day will burn more than 300 calories. You are hungry because you are undereating. You should be closer to 2000 a day at a minimum. And you honestly don't need to workout 2 hours a day. I am 5'8, smaller, work out much less time than you and lose easily on 1800. You also need to eat more fiber and filling foods in the form of fruit and vegetables and whole grains.

Ideas:

I would be starving soon after your breakfast. Why don't you add the eggs to your breakfast so you have some fat with your breakfast and more protein. Wouldn't hurt to add a fruit.

Sub white rice to brown rice for fiber and eat less of it to make room for other foods such as much more veggies.

Eat some fruit as a snack, maybe with a few nuts.

I know you don't care about flavor, but satiety is not just in the macros. I would make a stir fry with the chicken, a bunch of veggies and some soy sauce and serve over a smaller portion of brown rice. Or mix it up and have whole wheat spaghetti with turkey meat sauce and a salad or vegetables. There are so many other foods that can fit your calories (which must be increased) and keep you full that is not just chicken and rice.