Hi,

I don't have a lot of menu ideas, just make sure that everything you eat is real food (I eat baby carrots at snacks and sugar snap peas for breakfast) but pick things you like.

I can tell you this. I was a patient of Dr. Schwarzbein and I gained 40 pounds when I first started her diet after low carbing (Atkins) for many years. I thought she was crazy and every day I wanted to ditch this diet and go back to low carbing or starving. But somehow I knew that I wasn't going to get there by limiting my eating. I started eating fruit, milk, and grains, things I hadn't touched in a decade. I am also hypothyroid and I know that when I was low-carbing too much, my thyroid didn't work right even with medication. Through Dr. Schwarzbein I learned to stop dieting and start eating again. Every meal I eat contains some good protein, good fat, a vegetable, fruit, dairy, and grain product. I eat more food than I ever did in my life. And I haven't lost much weight, but I have lost some.

But Dr. Schwarzbein is now my favorite doctor ever because I know I would have dieted myself to death's door. Since I've been eating, my thyroid medication actually works. What have I lost? Insomnia, irregular periods, foot pain, joint pain, tedonitis, shoulder pain, depression, heart palpitations, and water retension. I am on my way to losing weight, my hair and nails are better and I feel more normal than I ever did when I was on any diet.

So my advice is to stop dieting, start feeding yourself, do not leave out whole classifications of food and do not eat anything that you cannot pick, hunt, fish, or milk. Eliminate any food allergies or sensitivites and get hormone replacement if you have low thyroid or estrogen (bioidentical hormones only). Then exercise, but not too much (Dr. Schwarbein would cringe at the 7 days of week of cardio, that's guaranteed to burn out your adrenals).

Remember it's about health not weight. You need to get healthy to lose all your weight. You can lose weight by lowering carbs too low but you can also turn down you thyroid and estrogen and burn out your adrenal glands. You will then be thin but not healthy!

Good Luck.