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High calorie foods
I am really struggling to keep weight on since starting this diet. I've lost loads (and i was slim to begin with) - I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions for high calorie foods to put weight on whilst doing low vitamin A.
Thanks for any help.
Get a rice cooker, preferably one that can "stay warm" for 24 hours and just dump a whole bunch of rice in there in the morning and you have easy calories all day. Short-grain rice is the most digestible so you could probably eat more of it than other types of rice. White bread if you tolerate gluten, avoid breads baked with oils, rye, or durum. If you drink coffee add extra sugar to it maybe. Add extra fats to your meals, a lot of people here like treated bright olive oil, lately I've been using MCT-oil. Snack on sun-dried raisins. Roasted peanuts and cashews, although some people get VA symptoms from them so be careful and see how you feel. Potato chips fried in sunflower oil makes me feel like trash but I don't get any VA symptoms, they are very calorie dense.
Here are some calorically dense foods I eat:
- Sugar
- Vegan chocolate
- Coconut (oil/slices/canned milk)
- Roasted sunflower seeds
- Almonds
- Sunflower Oil
- White Corn Chips
If you’re eating gluten, pasta, bread, cookies and crackers can help a lot, too! If not, here are some GF high-cal meal/snack ideas:
- Beef and cauliflower stir-fry with plenty of oil (tamari, garlic, sugar, and onion for flavour) and a handful of almonds, served with a plateful of rice.
- Refried beans made with lots of oil (garlic and onion for flavour) served with white corn chips.
- Porridge with sunflower oil, sunflower seeds, and raisins (I use 1 cup—measured before cookiing—Scottish oatmeal, 1/4 cup sunflower seeds, 2 tbls raisins, and 1 tbs sunflower oil, which = over 900 calories)
- Trail mix with almonds, coconut slices, marshmallows, and vegan chocolate chunks/chips
- Strawberry “ice cream” (If you have a good blender, you can use almonds to make milk or use canned coconut milk. Add sugar and frozen strawberries. 1 cup of frozen strawberries has about 17 IU of VA.)
- Bean dip (blend almonds with beans and oil and garlic) with crackers or chips.
- Nut-based ”cheese sauce” made with nutritional yeast (Brag’s brand is confirmed to be free of VA) and oils can add calories to a starchy meal (if you search the web for “vegan cheese sauce recipes,” you can learn how to make this).
- Vegan black bean brownies (lots of recipes on the web)
If I don’t track calories, I will undereat as well. One thing I do to makes this diet easier is choose a measurement of grains/legumes and oils to try to eat every day as a baseline to ensure I’m getting enough (for breakfast I will eat 1 cup—measured before cooking—Scottish oatmeal or brown rice + 1 tablespoon sunflower oil, for lunch or supper I will eat 1 cup—measured before cooking—white rice + 1 tablespoon sunflower oil and have 2 cups of canned beans + 1 tablespoon coconut oil = over 2000 calories total, to which I add beef and whatever else will take me to 2700-3000 calories for the day, depending on hunger.)
How long have you been eating low-VA, guest?
Hi puddleduck, I've been going for about 2 months now.
Post accutane victim looking to fix extreme dry facialfacia and anxiety.
That was meant to say facial skin, d'oh!
Yeah I'm trying to work that out as well. I mean it is easy to eat high calorie foods but hard to know which ones are healthy.
Here are some thoughts:
Some say avoid cooked (and thus oxidized) PUFAs and their reasons are good, they are linked to heart disease. PUFAs are also a poor fuel for the body compared with saturated and mono unsaturated fats (which are the fats that the body creates from excess carbohydrate).
Some say avoid cooked animal fats (beef tallow is low VA) and their reasons are good, oxidized cholesterol is linked to heart disease. The saturated fat and cholesterol arguments are nonsense but when the cholesterol becomes oxidized it is implicated in heart disease. Butter is really the only animal fat with low levels of oxidized cholesterol and it is high VA. There are numerous reports of longevity from different areas of the world in which people consume uncooked dairy products as their main protein and fat source, perhaps this is why. In some places it is normal to eat animal fat raw (Salo: https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/salo-pork-ukraine). I suspect Salo contains less oxidized cholesterol.
Some say avoid fructose. Their arguments are reasonable but I would be less concerned with fructose intake long term compared with fried animal fat.
There are two fats that are probably safe for cooking with and are low in PUFAs. They are palm oil and coconut oil. I'm thinking coconut oil may be something I need to eat more of with this diet.
Perhaps I could try making a low VA cake with egg whites and coconut oil. Nothing stimulates my appetite like cake!
The USDA report for palm oil says it has zero carotenoids. Some brands of instant noodles use palm oil and they are a very easy way to get calories. Anyone know if palm oil is safe for a low VA diet?
Quote from tim on February 15, 2019, 6:55 pmYeah I'm trying to work that out as well. I mean it is easy to eat high calorie foods but hard to know which ones are healthy.
Here are some thoughts:
Some say avoid cooked (and thus oxidized) PUFAs and their reasons are good, they are linked to heart disease. PUFAs are also a poor fuel for the body compared with saturated and mono unsaturated fats (which are the fats that the body creates from excess carbohydrate).
Some say avoid cooked animal fats (beef tallow is low VA) and their reasons are good, oxidized cholesterol is linked to heart disease. The saturated fat and cholesterol arguments are nonsense but when the cholesterol becomes oxidized it is implicated in heart disease. Butter is really the only animal fat with low levels of oxidized cholesterol and it is high VA. There are numerous reports of longevity from different areas of the world in which people consume uncooked dairy products as their main protein and fat source, perhaps this is why. In some places it is normal to eat animal fat raw (Salo: https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/salo-pork-ukraine). I suspect Salo contains less oxidized cholesterol.
Some say avoid fructose. Their arguments are reasonable but I would be less concerned with fructose intake long term compared with fried animal fat.
There are two fats that are probably safe for cooking with and are low in PUFAs. They are palm oil and coconut oil. I'm thinking coconut oil may be something I need to eat more of with this diet.
Perhaps I could try making a low VA cake with egg whites and coconut oil. Nothing stimulates my appetite like cake!
The USDA report for palm oil says it has zero carotenoids. Some brands of instant noodles use palm oil and they are a very easy way to get calories. Anyone know if palm oil is safe for a low VA diet?
According to Dr. Smith, palm oil is not safe. Maybe it is just red palm oil - the red would be from carotenoids but I am not sure on this. When I took a vitamin E supplement based from red palm oil I had worse insomnia. This was a few years before trying the low vitamin A diet.
As for coconut oil, since it has high amounts stearic acid, it can make vitamin A worse according to Smith. Beef has high amounts too but has other compouds to counter the active fatty acids so beef isn't as much of a problem. Sorry can't remember all the science behind these fats but in summary, Dr. Smith isn't a big fan of palm or coconut fats but thinks grassfed beef is a good food to consume. Others here eat coconut fat but don't seem too worse off. I think it is a personal thing that you have to experiment with unfortunately. I don't think Grant ate those fats.
Thanks. I prefer beef fat anyway.
To counter what I said about animal fat above Okinawan centenarians ate a lot of lard for most of their lives so animal fat can't be that bad. The study that was done in 1949 that reported they were eating a low calorie near vegan diet apparently failed to mention that they were starving and had bad food shortages.
Industrial palm oil doesn't have carotenoids, it's white. But a lot of people get VA symptoms from coconut oil, palm oil, beef fat et. al presumably because of the fatty acids, apparently some fatty acids increase the circulation of VA or something like that. Ccoconut and palm oil give me serious VA symptoms although they only last for a day, if I eat a food with a lot of actual VA I get sick for days. I'm currently using MCT oil made from coconut oil and it doesn't give me any symptoms which makes sense because it has different fatty acids.
Quote from Guest on February 15, 2019, 2:37 pmHi puddleduck, I've been going for about 2 months now.
Post accutane victim looking to fix extreme dry facialfacia and anxiety.
Ah I’m sorry to hear that, guest. Anxiety can be a nightmare.
Weight loss exacerbated my mental health symptoms (and skin problems too, for that matter), so I’m glad you’re looking to increase caloric intake. Even though healing takes time, I do hope you’ll start to see improvements before too long.