Actually fun fact that 2000 calorie recommendation isn’t actually scientifically accurate and is based on surveys of dieting adults in the US from the 1990s. When it comes to caloric intake every person’s body is different so they actually recommend using like a fitness tracker to figure out what your average caloric intake is over two weeks, then if you want to lose weight you work to lower it by 300-500 calories depending on how much your average is. But the range for an adult can actually be anywhere between 1500-3000 calories a day, so you might have more flexibility than you realize.

Don’t even get me started on sodium. I’m limited to around 1000-1500 mg a day because of my new medical condition and it is ROUGH. I’m pretty much guaranteed to have to have at least one meal a day that’s either pasta or rice because they have pretty much no sodium in them (unless you add like cheese or butter), because the combination of breakfast and lunch/dinner, regardless of what it is has such high sodium that it’ll knock out my allotted sodium for the rest of the day. I have to have pretty much exclusively eat Swiss cheese because the sodium content of all the others is too high to have regularly. Soups are pretty much a no go. Most chips, fast food, and other like junk or fried foods are out too because again, too much sodium. Most meat is out too because salt is used as a preservative so like any sort of pork or beef is just completely out and chicken is on thin ice. It depends on the brand for that.

I’ve gotten around it some with like low sodium chips and getting grilled chicken or no salt fries from fast food restaurants but you never really realize how much sodium is in stuff until you can’t have it. Like we were looking at ordering pizza a few weeks back and legitimately like I couldn’t have more than a single slice of Dominos because it was like 500 mg a slice or something. It’s nuts.