Original email for context: My calories only came out to 264 today when I skipped the fruits and Melba. Is that bad? How do I increase to 500 calories if I don’t want the fruit or bread?
Very good question! So here’s my take.
Is it okay to eat less than 500 calories, some days? Personally, I think it is- IF you are not hungry. I have a detailed article discussing this less than 500 cals thing here.
But in general, you will likely find that many days you do need all 500 calories. AND as you become leaner and have only say 10-20 lbs to lose, you may actually need more than 500 calories, up to 600-800 calories, some days.
I too did not eat the fruits or melba on P2 during 2 of my hCG rounds, and I replaced the fruit calories each day with fat-free Greek yogurt. Here’s my blogpost on that where you can see how much yogurt to replace with etc.
Outside of this, the calories in your 2 protein servings will vary depending on which meat you choose- 100g of shrimp (107 calories) has fewer calories than 100g of lean beef (133 calories). While this isn’t a huge difference, in 2 meals worth that makes up about 52 calories difference, which 52 calories is 10% of the 500 calorie diet. So you can raise your calories by eating a higher calorie meat. Beef has the most calories per oz on this protocol, then chicken, then seafood.
Lastly, we have veggies – you can always increase your veggies! If you’d like to track your calories with veggies accurately, if you have a MyFitnessPal account, and you search “Rayzel asparagus” or whatever P2 fruit or veggie you are thinking of, you will find an accurate calorie count by weight for these foods. We spent a lot of time finding this information in the USDA Nutrition Database and then entering it as our custom ingredients into MFP in order to make sure our P2 hcgchica recipes were accurate. We didn’t want you to have too little or too much food on the diet. Many MFP entries are inaccurate and represent cooked food vs. raw food etc, and in no time you could be undereating or overeating.
