The smaller meals might give you more energy and stave off hunger pangs, but it all depends when you feel you get hungriest. If you're like me, you'll crave a good feed quite late in the evening - so I like to save up a few cals during the day so I can have a big meal at night. Hopefully you don't suffer from the noctural nibbles like that, though! I'd definitely have a good breakfast, and maybe two small meals after that, one at 1pm-ish, then something around 4-5pm. If you're on 1300 cals, you could have a good breakfast and a good evening meal and have plenty left over for those two smaller meals, and maybe a couple of snacks, too.
No time to eat before the commute, I'm guessing? If you do, I'd go for a couple of boiled eggs with Nimble toast and some lean ham... something like that. If you're eating on the move at work, maybe make up a couple of hard-boiled eggs the night before so you've got them to hand? Team that with a weightwatchers/muller light yoghurt and a banana and you should be okay until lunch. That'd be around 320 calories. Then for lunch you could either grab a healthy option sandwich (around 300) or bring a John West Light lunch meal with you (200 calories) and follow it up with an Alpen light cereal bar and a peach (100). For late afternoon, a soup would be great. Batchelor's soupfuls pouches are easily portable if you have somewhere to heat them up, just 3 mins in the microwave and they're lovely and filling. The harvest vegetable, and chicken and country vegetable flavours are both only 160 calories for the whole pouch, too. If you're peckish on the commute home (unlikely after the soup, but still!) you could have another cereal bar (60).
If you tot up those 3 meals and snacks that would take your calorie total to around 800-900 depending on your early lunch choice. That still leaves you a 400-500 allowance for an evening meal. You'll be knackered when you get in, so a ready meal might work for you. There's loads of ranges in the supermarkets, not sure which ones you have down south, but the calorie counts vary a lot. Weightwatchers' range of frozen ready meals are mostly under 300 - their beef hotpot is only 209! But the portion is very small, so I bulk it out with a massive mountain of steamed broccoli. You could have a 300 calorie ready meal, plenty of veg and a skinny cow double choc lolly for something sweet, and you'd still be within your 1300 a day.
Just have to find what works best for you, but once you've got a routine down, you'll be flying. I think the trick is never to allow yourself to get too hungry. Keep a big made-up bowl of Hartley's sugarfree jelly in the fridge - it's virtually free, and really delicious with some strawberries/raspberries. If you're famished when you get in, you can grab it while dinner's cooking!
Thanks for the kind words!
I'd been yo-yoing for years when I decided to finally get rid of it once and for all in January 2007. Tried to do it too quickly and fell off the wagon, putting most of it back on again. So I started again in May of last year and vowed to take it slow. It's taken just over 13 months to ditch 7.5 stone, but the last stone has taken 4 months on its own to shift! I haven't done any exercise, so that's definitely slowed things down.
I'm still counting calories... it's kind of automatic now, been doing it for so long. I aim for around 1300 a day, but I try not to be fascist about it. I'm crap at maths and hate weighing things, so I go for a lot of ready meals and calorie-counted snacks. I did get a wee set of Salter electronic scales off amazon, mainly to measure my cereal. Found out I was having 60g instead of the recommended 30g! (Who can possibly be filled up by 30g of coco pops for goodness sake?!)
Do I have to watch out for anything? Well, I have a terrible sweet tooth - it was chocolate that got me into trouble in the first place - so I have a tendency to snack on exclusively sweet things like cereal bars, popcorn, fruit, jelly and yoghurt, which are lovely, but not as satisfying as something protein-rich. One change I made to lose the last stone was axing the coco pops in the morning and going for eggs/fish/beans on toast, that kind of thing. Seems to keep me fuller for longer. I still have the sweet snacks, though! Also, I was eating plenty but when I looked at my fat intake, it was too low. So I make an effort to get the oily fish in now, have the odd portion of brazil nuts, and don't stint on the rapeseed oil-based dressings. Easy to forget that the body needs its good essential fats.
One thing I've found is that you'll hit plateaus where the body seems to get too used to what you're eating. This was tough for me because when I find foods I like and get into a routine that works, I don't want to change it. But varying things up and choosing a new food regularly, or slightly changing the portion sizes or times when you eat... seems to budge the body back into cooperating.
1300 sounds reasonable to me for steady weight loss. If you find you're too hungry you can try tweaking up a bit to 1400 for a week and seeing what happens. Or if the weight loss is too slow, or as you lose weight and need less calories, you can edge it down a little to 1250. I wouldn't go much lower than that, though. Sounds like you have a hectic life, and trying to cut too low would leave you drained and miserable.
Crikey, this has turned into War and Peace. I'll quit nattering now! If you need any more tips for yummy low-cal stuff, let me know!
