Passed OUT! But I FINALLY finished!

   So, I woke up this morning in one of the most amusing ways. I stayed up last night until like 2am writing down my plan for today and searching a bunch of food info and stuff that I wanted to share with everyone....and I guess I tried to push myself an eency bit too hard, and I PASSED OUT with my laptop ON MY LAP, my pen IN MY MOUTH, and my notepad IN MY HAND. I woke up about 40min later than I had planned on...and I just sort of looked around like WTF? Everything was still exactly where it was when I was working on it...I guess I'm lucky that I didn't kick the laptop off the bed at any point in the night. Then I had that moment of panic that everyone who has ever fallen asleep studying for an exam knows about-where I was like OMG I DIDN'T SUBMIT MY POST IN TIME!!!!! But then I came to my senses and realized that this blog is actually NOT being graded by anyone, and that my future hasn't been ruined, lol.
   Anyway, like I said I meant to wake up at 10:30 this morning (I had planned on going to bed around 2:30am, which still gave me 8 hours), but since I ended up passing out who-knows-when without setting an alarm, that ended up being 11:08am. That's right-11:08 exactly. I know this because I looked at my phone and yelled "AHHHH, IT'S 11:08!!" Since then I have eaten breakfast and done an hour of fake-yoga (I call stretching on a yoga mat with Enya playing in the background "fake-yoga")-so I'm feeling refreshed and energized and ready to finally sit down and type out what I'm going to be doing in the next weeks to remedy my binge-induced weight gain.
   Most of you have probably heard about eating 6-8 small meals a day instead of 3 big meals-the concept isn't very new, it's been around for a while. The problem is, when most people do it, they break up a "regular" daily intake of 1,500-2,000cals into those 6-8 small meals. Obviously, I don't want to consume anywhere NEAR that many calories...but I really like the idea of eating less more often, and the science behind it seems to be that this eating pattern promotes a faster and more efficient metabolism, which allows your body to burn fat more effectively.
   Many of you have probably ALSO heard of the 2-4-6-8 diet that's uber-popular among the ED community, which is 200cal one day, 400cal the next day, and so on. The logic behind this is ALSO to keep your metabolism from slowing down too much, by sort of "tricking" it into a pattern where it never gets used to ONLY having one set amount, which would make it sort of plateau.
   Additionally, I've written before about how I'm really into getting the daily amount of fiber in the least amount of calories possible. I've also written before about how I'm sort of obsessed with Tanya Zuckerbrot, who wrote the F-Factor diet all about losing weight with fiber and founded my FAV website, SkinnyintheCity.com. Right, well the whole idea of enough fiber aiding in weight-loss is that fiber is basically undigestable, meaning that it is not absorbed by your colon. That is why it is so helpful in aiding digestion, because it pretty much goes right through you since it can't be digested itself.
   Then, of course, there is my old BFF, the negative-calorie diet, which consists only of foods that burn more calories in their digestion than they contain, in essence cancelling themselves out and allowing you to eat your fill of these foods without the guilt.
   So what to make of all this? What I've been doing the last few days is trying to make a plan that basically COMBINES all of these ideas into one diet, and then add in exercise. What I've come up with is the following:

Day 1: 300 Calories

300 calories DIVIDED by 6 meals = Six 50cal meals

Day 2: 450 Calories

450 calories DIVIDED by 6 meals = Six 75cal meals

Day 3: 600 Calories

600 calories DIVIDED by 6 meals = Six 100cal meals

Day 4: 750 Calories

750 calories DIVIDED by 6 meals = Six 125cal meals

Day 5: Start Cycle Over at 300 Calories.

This is the most basic way to explain the diet. In addition to that foundation, which combines the 6 small meals and 2-4-6-8 method:

*Within the 6 meals, you must meet 100% of daily fiber value (mine is ~20grams, find yours at http://www.healthcalculators.org/calculators/fiber.asp)

*Hunger felt in between meals can be satieted with negative-calorie snacks

*Must integrate at least 60minutes of high-calorie burning exercise each day (My favorite is 60 minutes on the treadmill at 15% incline and between 3.5 and 4.5 speed-burns between 500 and 650 calories in just one hour!)

OK, so how do you do this? Below is a list of foods and snacks that are ALL ONLY 50 CALORIES:

Volumetric:

1 cup Manischewitz Matzo Ball & Soup Mix

1/2 of a large grapefruit

2.5 cups sugarfree flavored gelatin

12 baby carrots

3/4 cup serving of fruit smoothie (1 c nonfat sugar-free yogurt, 1 c strawberries, 1 banana, 3 c crushed ice)

10 dill pickle spears

1.25 c spinich, boiled and drained

3/4 cup gazpacho (no bread)

1 c chopped cantalope or watermelon

Surf 'n' Turf

1 think slice smoked salmon

1.5 pieces California roll

1/3 slim jim

1.5 strips bacon

2 thin slices turkey breast

Vegan

1/2 Nature Valley Oats 'N Honey Granola Bar

1 Lightlife Smart Dogs Meatless Franks

1/2 cup vegetarian barley soup

2 pieces Turtle Island Tofurkey Jurky

Combo

1/2 wedge of honeydew melon w/thin slice honey ham

3 saltines each topped w/ two thin slices turkey pepperoni

3 Nabisco Original Wheat Thins topped w/ low-fat cream cheese and thin slice of pickle

10 medium strawberries w/ 1 tbsp Cool Whip topping

1/2 c diced watermelon mixed w/ 1 tbsp lowfat yogurt

Sweet

1 fig bar

1 Charms Junior blow Pop

1 tbsp honey

2 hershey kisses

5 Brach's jelly beans

12 M&M's Chocolate Candies

Crunchy

5 potato chips

2 cups light microwave popcorn

4 lowfat Honey Maid Honey Grahams

11 dry roasted peanuts

Frozen

6 oz. Dannon Light & Fit nonfat yogurt

1/2 low-fat ice cream sandwich

1 Breyers "Pure Fruit" Fruit & Cream Bar

1 Dove Ice Cream Miniature

Mediterranean

15 seedless grapes

1.5 cups chopped cucumber w/ 3/4 tbsp olive oil, squirt of lemon juice and salt

2 medium tomatoes or 16 cherry tomatoes

4 pimiento-stuffed Queen olives

7 almonds

2 oz. red or white wine

Bottoms Up

1 cup V8 100% vegetable juice

1 cup light apple juice

1 cup coffee w/ 1 tbsp half-and-half and 1 tsp sugar

1 diet root beer float w/ 1/4 cup light vanilla ice cream

unlimited iced tea

6 oz. Bud Light

2 oz. red or white wine

And here is a list of all the negative-calorie foods:

Negative Calorie Vegetables

Asparagus

Beet Root

Broccoli

Cabbage

Carrot

Cauliflower

Celery Chicory

Hot Chili

Cucumber

Garden cress

Garlic

Green Beans

Lettuce

Onion

Radish

Spinach

Turnip

Zucchini

Negative Calorie Fruits

Apple

Blueberries

Cantaloupe

Cranberry

Grapefruit Honeydew

Lemon/Lime

Mango

Orange

Papaya

Peach Pineapple

Raspberry

Strawberry

Tomato

Tangerine

Turnip

Watermelon

But What about the Fiber?! High fiber-foods include vegetables, whole grains, beans and legumes. A food item is considered to be high fiber if it contains at least 5 g of fiber per serving. The Mayo Clinic offers guidelines of some favorite foods and their fiber content. LOW-calorie, HIGH fiber foods:

Fruits

* Raspberries rank as one of the highest high fiber low calorie foods, at 8.0 g per serving and 1 calorie per raspberry

*Raspberries are followed by Pears at 5.1 g, with about 51 calories for a medium sized pear

*Next are Apples at 4.4, at roughly 55 calories for a small apple

*Then Blueberries, roughly 40 calories for 50 berries and 3.5 grams fiber

*And Strawberries, which average about 2 calories per strawberry and 3.3 grams of fiber each

*Finally, Raisins, which provide 1.6 grams of fiber per 1.5 ounce serving and roughly 42 calories for a 5-ounce box.

Grains

*Whole-wheat Spaghetti weighs in at 6.3 g of fiber per serving and approximately 174 calories per 1-cup serving

*One cup of Oatmeal provides 4.0 grams and about 60 calories per serving

*Whole-wheat or Multigrain Breads offer 1.9 grams per slice and about 65 calories per slice.

Vegetables

*Cooked Peas, at a whopping 8.8 g of fiber and a low 67 calories per cup serving size

*Boiled Turnip Greens, which offer about 5.0 grams of fiber per cup sized serving and about 48 calories

*Raw Carrots offer 1.7 grams of fiber and 21 calories for a small carrot

*Boiled Broccoli offering 5.1 g of fiber and about 52 calories per cup

Also, seeds and nuts help supplement your low calorie and high fiber food diet, but I had a harder time finding exact serving sizes and calories, because there are so many styles and brands...but:

*Sunflower seeds

*Sesame seeds and

*Pumpkin Seeds

Just be sure to look at labels when purchasing store-bought food to determine the grams of fiber as well as calories per serving.

   As you can (hopefully) tell, this took me a lot of time to put together and I scoured the internet and all of the diet books I own to come up with this routine, so I do apologize for it taking so long to compile...but I hope that you find the lists useful regardless of whether or not you have any interest in trying the "plan"-everyone can use low calories snack lists! What I'll be doing is following the 6-meal, incremental calorie plan by making up all of the meals from combinations of the foods from the previous lists. Let's see how this goes!!

-LM