Whenever I’m dieting, I’m always reminded of the Jesse’s Diet skits from The Fast Show. I’ve tried almost every diet there is, or so I thought. Once I started looking into it, I found there’s lots of stuff I didn’t try! I’m not planning on doing it now, that’s for sure as I’m now only interested in eating healthy and not gaining back the lost weight.
I know what 500 calories a day looks like now. I would never, ever try this without HCG. I’d be starving, feeling like crap and I’d be burning muscle. In fact, knowing all I do now, I don’t think semi-starvation diets actually work anyway, not for long at least.
It’s easiest for me to eat 2 meals instead of spreading the food out. It’s more satisfying somehow. Also, when you split it into four bits, it looks laughably small! My meals usually came out to one at 200 and one at 300 with the 300 being the lunch meal.
- 3.5oz. very lean beef, skinless boneless chicken breast, white fish, crab or shrimp
- 1 apple, orange, 1/2 grapefruit or handful of strawberries
- 1 grissini-style breadstick (I found some gluten-free)
- One type of vegetable only to be chosen from the following: spinach, chard, chicory, beet-greens, green salad, tomatoes, celery, fennel, onions, red radishes, cucumbers, asparagus, cabbage.
No oils of any kind, ever. Salt, pepper, vinegar and dry herbs may be used. Balsamic is frowned upon because it contains calories. Saccharin and other zero calorie sweeteners are allowed. Coffee, tea, mineral water and water may be consumed at any time in any quantity. Plain water is set at a 2 liter minimum, but I found that I lost better if I had nearly double that. The juice of one lemon per day is allowed, as is one tablespoon of milk. That’s it. If it’s not on the list, don’t eat it.
If I ever see another grilled skinless boneless chicken breast, it will be too soon! I ate a lot of lean steak and grass-fed beef, using that for one of my meals most days. I almost never ate fish, but I did eat a lot of shrimp. I ate crab three or four times.
The vegetable portion turns out to be quite a bit since these are all very low in calories. I gained a little weight twice after eating asparagus, so I dropped it. I can only eat cabbage cooked, never raw, or I don’t lose weight that day. I ate a lot of cooked cabbage. I hate plain celery, and I didn’t try fennel. I didn’t eat spinach because I don’t like it without fat, and I just never tried fennel as the idea of *that* plain was equally loathsome to me. Before this, I didn’t like radishes, but as it turned out, it was because I had never tried cooking them. I did wind up eating a lot of seasoned, dry-roasted radishes.
I started out eating one apple and one orange per day, then I swapped the orange out for strawberries or another apple. I wound up eating exclusively apples as the fruit. I buy those bags of 2.5″ apples, so they have 55 calories a piece and were worth every calorie! I hate grapefruit, so I never ate that. Later in the process, I figured out that I could count a tomato as a fruit and effectively have two vegetables instead of a fruit and a vegetable.
I now have to enter a three-week maintenance plan wherein I am allowed no starches (bread, pasta, potatoes, etc) and no sugar. Fruit is OK – just no actual sugar – no honey, agave nectar, sweetened yogurt, etc. This is a piece of cake (well, no cake!) compared to the other diet!
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