Hello everyone. I’m really looking forward to starting the 8 week 800 calories diet. However, I have a problem. I am highly allergic to nuts. As in they will kill me. There seem to be a lot of nuts in this diet. Does anyone have any suggestions for for substitutes? Thank you

Are you talking about the recipe book? I haven’t read it so I don’t know if it’s nut-heavy, but some nuts are a good low-carb source of healthy fats and proteins. Also of calories. Lots and lots of calories. That’s why I wouldn’t think any BSD menu could be all that nut-intensive.

You don’t have to follow anybody’s recipes to do the BSD. I’ve never made a single one from the recipe book or the recipes in the back of the BSD book and I’ve been doing the Fast800 for 13 months straight. If you weigh and measure everything, look up the nutritional panels and ingredients of the foods while you’re planning meals, you can make the same kinds of foods you made before, only with something else in place of the sugar, wheat, grains, cereals and starchy veg.

I use MyFitnessPal to plan and log everything I make. It has a database of nutrional data on thousands of products, brands and general foodstuffs. Search for an item and select the one that matches. The app will fill in your diary with all the nutritional info and tally up the totals. I have my daily carb limit set to 20 grams. That’s very low because I’m insulin resistant. If you’re not concerned about blood sugar, you can up that number by quite a bit. Most people here aim for about 50 grams a day because that seems to be the sweet spot for remaining in ketosis (in a fat-burning state).

Avoiding nuts should be easy for your version of the BSD because you don’t have them in the house anyway. If there’s some recipe you desperately want to try, I would say seeds would be reasonable substitutes — pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, flax. They are also extremely high in calories. Extremely. You must weigh and plan this kind of ingredient carefully or you can easily find yourself blowing way past the 800 calorie limit.

Good luck!

Hi Rose
I agree entirely with Esnecca. I’m in my 9th month of this WOE and love nuts but far too high in cals to use regularly or in any great number. I never use them in meals but occasionally have a few (5 Brazils) as an emergency snack, but I tend not to have them in the house because a) they are far too tempting for me and, far more importantly b) like you, my granddaughter is severely allergic to them – likewise all seeds, so they sadly don’t have a place in my kitchen either. 😢 BSD is entirely doable without either – and like Esnecca, I have never used a recipe from either book, but reached goal and am maintaining nicely just by adapting my own. I use FatSecret app for logging. Good luck.