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Dolly from LoseIt asks: “I am too often not hungry enough to eat above 1,000 calories a day and I know I should be eating at least 1,200, my budget is just over 1,400. I am not exercising per se, just usual daily stuff. What can I do to safely add those extra calories? I’m losing weight, but I want the loss to be a healthy one :-)”
That’s a great question, Dolly, and my simple answer is:
Eat Real Food!
What I mean is ignore the “low fat” and “fat-free” versions of food and eat the real version. Fat-free salad dressings are loaded with sugar, salt, and thickeners. Other foods that reduce their fat content also need to add salt, sugar and other ingredients to make them palatable. The one exception is skim milk and product made from skim (fat-free) milk. When milk is skimmed, the cream is removed and nothing is added back.
What else can you eat?
- Instead of chicken breasts (easy to overcook and dry out) use chicken thighs. Cheaper. Tastier.
- Whole eggs, not just egg whites. (And no “egg beaters.”)
- Real half-and-half in your coffee, not “non-dairy creamer”.
- Add avocados to your sandwiches and salads.
- Eat fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel) instead of white fish.
- Chocolate is your friend, especially dark chocolate.
- Nuts and nut butter are delicious and healthy.
- You can use butter on your toast or baked potato. You can even use real sour cream.
- An absolutely delicious breakfast is a bowl of seasonal berries topped with half-and-half. But when I make this, I splurge and use heavy cream.
The key with all those higher calorie foods is you MUST use care. Measure/weigh the foods and log it all. Keep to your budget, but eat your full budget. These high fat foods will also help make you feel full for longer, and let you fill your budget with foods that you love.
And Dolly, in your particular case, you need to add about 400 calories per day. My go-to evening snack is an ounce of almond and an ounce of dark chocolate. That is about 350 calories of deliciousness. I’m sure that even though you feel you are full at 1000 calories, you can find the room for a snack that is a total of two ounces (by weight.)
Picture via Pixabay, by beatrize (Chocolate Nuts) and Jill111 (Blueberries in Cream)
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Music composed and performed by Jason Shaw, courtesy of Audionautix.com
Voiceover courtesy of Matt Young. Matt is a professional voiceover artist. If you have any need of voice-over work, for your podcast, radio spot, or whatever, you can reach Matt by a variety of methods. He is on LinkedIn. On Twitter. And Google+. Follow his Facebook page to learn how to better use social media. Matt was also my guest on MYST 54. Give his story a listen!
All images are Creative Common Zero.