Alright, good start. Are we talking sweetened ice tea? Something store bought? Or straight up brewed tea poured over ice?
And not liking the texture of most fruit, how do you feel about smoothies? Also, any lactose digestion problems?
I’ve been living on rice and beans for about the last three years. It’s the same, but it’s dirt cheap. And by rice and bean, you can substitute. For instance, instead of beans, sometimes I’ll have rice and chickpeas or rice and lentils. Or I substitute barley for the rice and have barley and beans. What you want is one grain (like rice or barley) and one legume (lentil, chickpea, bean, etc)
And then on Sunday I’ll throw in some milk, meat or eggs instead. And of course on my birthday I have cake.
Don’t. Whatever you are dieting for isn’t worth the tedium of the same food every day.
Just be sensible. Eat well and not too much.
The best advice I can give is to ***have ***a diet, don’t go on a diet. You are best off changing your eating habits to something that you can stick to for the rest of your life.
At home I drink instant iced tea, unsweetened. When I go out I have whatever unsweetened brewed iced tea they have.
No lactose problems. Smoothies are better than fruit, nowthatyoumentionit.
“Just be sensible” gives me way too much leeway. It’s a personal problem, but no less of a problem for that.
Well good luck with that. But at some point you will have to stop the diet and what will happen then?
I once calulated the most completely nutritional meal with the fewest ingredients.
The closest I got was:
1 cups of almonds
2 cups of 2% milk
2 oranges
1 banana (combine oranges and banana into smoothie with milk and ice for easier consumption)
4oz lean steak
1,571 calories, fulfilles your US RDA completely in 12 vitamins, and 50-75% in 5 more. It’s a little low on salt, so go for the salted almonds. You have 120 calories for discretionary indulgence.
You could never keep this diet up though. You’de be starving. I guess if you zap a scoop of fiber into the smoothie you might make it through the day. Seriously, don’t try this at home. I am not a nutritionist, and I am not giving you nutritional advice. Nor do I advocate a month long diet of 5 foods exclusively.
For breakfast almost every day is oatmeal made with milk, sweetened with 2 tablespoons of raisins or dried cranberries, and cinnamon to taste.
Midmorning snack is typically 2 tbsp hummus with some form of raw veggie
Lunch most of the time is a chopped salad based on cabbage, romaine, celery, carrots, radishes when I can get them, chick peas or frozen green peas, frozen corn kernals, some form of sprout [mung, alfalfa and radish are my 3 favorite kinds] to the tune of 1.5 cups total, with 2 tbsp of balsamic vinaigrette that I make [basically olive oil, fines herbes, balsamic or cider vinegar and a dash of water to help emulsify]
midafternoon snack is usually a drained single fruit cup [i particularly like pears] or a single serve of unsweetened applesauce [i like to add cinnamon to fruit]
dinner varies but is typically 3 oz protein, 1 cup total veggies and half a cup equivalent of fruit
bedtime snack tends to be mostly protein - cottage cheese with paprica is a favorite, or a devilied egg.
My nutritionist baked in a random 180 calories as a wildcard snack anytime during the day, she said I could take a spoon to a bag of sugar if I felt like it, as long as it was under 180 cal. I rarely do the random snack, though I do like to treat myself to a hershey’s kiss once a week or so. I drink mainly water, water wish a dash of lemon or lime juice, and plain black tea iced or hot. I can’t handle the caffeine in coffee any more so i gave coffee up 
Do you know the answer to that question?
I tend to eat much the same thing every day for weeks at a time: when I was obese, it was the same junk foods, when I started to slim down, it was the same healthy foods. I mean, I change things, but it happens at a pretty slow rate. Not everyone needs variety, and that’s not a failure.
Staples that I found really useful when losing weight:
[ul]
[li]Plain baked chicken breast. You can eat it with mustard, low-sugar ketchup, salsa, hot sauce, spaghetti sauce . . . all kinds of delicious things.[/li][li]Cottage cheese: it goes savory or sweet. you can put artificial sweetener in it and cinnamon or cocoa; you can put fruit in it; you can put hot sauce or seasoned salt in it. It’s basically pure protein (really. It’s a crazy amount of protein).[/li][li]Big bags of vegetables. Those steam in a bag ones? Buy 4-5 of the low cal varieties and eat a whole bag each day. Hot sauce can be your friend here, too.[/li][li]Oatmeal. Very filling and it takes a lot of different flavors, as well.[/li][/ul]
ETA: most of the successful dieters I have known stick to the exact same breakfast and lunch at least 5 days a week. Having the less important meals be basically on autopilot really, really cuts down on mindless overeating, the kind you do just from carelessness, not for pleasure. For those of us with tendencies in that direction, routine is a lifesaver.
I’ve eaten various not terribly nutritionally complete things for periods of up to 6 weeks everyday:
6 weeks (or so) of nothing but home-made fried potatoes (24 hour fast every other day – lost 15 pounds).
Various amounts of weeks:
whole-wheat pasta, olive oil, pecorino cheese (every day – made my sweat smell like cheese after a while, especially in the crotch)
white rice, green peas (spinach can be substituted), chickpeas, salt, butter, spices
white rice, beans, spices (especially hot), bacon fat
Now, I only eat bread, cheese, and a few steaks total for the past few weeks. Plus multivitamin.
well…no, that’s why I asked the question. Have you thought about it?
Well, you’ve certainly put me off wanting to try to help.
Shawarma.
Remember Super-Size Me, that film about the guy who ate nothing but MacDonald’s for a year? Well, shortly after that came out, an Israeli journalist decided to see what would happen if he ate only shawarma - with everything, obviously - for a month. The result: he stayed perfectly healthy, lost a bit of weight, and other than emitting a persistent oder of amba, experienced no negative side effects.