Hi AG72,

As Bcjmmac described, I also aim to roughly average my TDEE on my NFDs. My TDEE is pretty low – around 1400.
On FD you are meant to have 25% of your TDEE, but I have 500 calories, as 25% of 1400 (350cals) is just more restriction than I can manage on a regular basis. Keeping my FDs at 500cals hasn’t stopped me losing weight with intermittent fasting.
As my TDEE is low I did initially count calories on NFDs to be sure that I wasn’t regularly overeating. Once I was confident that I knew what the right serving sizes should be I stopped counting calories. If I stop losing weight I may recheck this as it’s possible for quantities to slowly creep up without you realising it.

Although complex carbs (veg, fruit & high fibre wholegrains) are part of my normal diet, I do mostly avoid them on FD. I generally have 1 serve of protein, 1 serve of dairy, a small serve of fruit and 3-4 serves of low cal vegetables in my FD. Often some of my protein comes from legumes on FDs (which also contain complex carbs) as I find them filling and their carb content is converted to energy slowly so they help to keep blood sugar at a reasonable level. (Well they do for me.)
An example of what this looks like is: vegetable soup with lentils for lunch, strawberries and several cups of milky tea throughout the afternoon, an eggwhite omelette with a filling of tomato, spinach and parmesan cheese for dinner. What I like about using strawberries as my afternoon snack is that I can graze on them slowly over the afternoon rather than eat them all at once – harder to do with most other fruits and I can have a whole 250gram punnet for just 65 calories.

If hypoglycemia is an issue I think allocating most of your calories between brunch/lunch and dinner, but with the remaining calories as 1-2 snacks in between is sensible as it spaces your food across most of the day without large time gaps. It’s wise to avoid foods that are converted to energy quickly, if you want to avoid the dramatic peaks and troughs in blood sugar.

Hope this goes well for you.

Everyone has their own way of getting through a FD. Some people are more forceful than others in expressing their opinion of how it should be approached so it can come across as certain things being frowned upon. Just remember that the vast majority of what is said on these forum threads is not scientifically proven, it is opinion and you are not obliged to follow it. Do what works for you and keeps you feeling healthy. I’ve noticed there is actually a wide variety of ways that people approach their FDs.

The only real rule is that you need to stay under the calorie limit. How you use those calories and where you allocate them in your day is entirely up to you. This is important to remember if you start to doubt yourself. Michael Mosely (who wrote the 5:2 book) is an example of this. The intermittent fasting research he looked at (Krista Varaday’s research) used a single meal at lunch time on FDs. He changed it to splitting the calories between breakfast and dinner because he said he found it too difficult to go to work on an empty stomach. This shows that knowing when your appetite is strongest and allocating calories to when you you know you’ll need them is actually the sensible thing to do.

I experimented a bit for the first few weeks until I found a pattern that worked well for me. I found that I didn’t need food in the morning so I don’t have anything but a cup or two of milky tea in the morning. Most people avoid drinks containing calories on FDs. I don’t – I choose to allocate 20% of my calories to milk which I use to make hot cups of milky black tea, just the way I enjoy them. I can easily skip a meal or a snack if I can enjoy a cup of tea instead. I have also found that my food across a FD varies depending on climate. On hot days I often don’t feel hungry until mid-afternoon and can skip breakfast and lunch and have a solid snack at mid-afternoon and then dinner. In cold weather I’m hungry by lunch time or even late morning so I need to allocate food earlier in the day – I added extra veg to accommodate this, usually in the form of soup, and cut back on the calories in the mid-afternoon snack so I stay under 500.

Try not to worry if what works for you doesn’t match what other’s describe. We aren’t you and something I’ve learned is that everyone is different and that’s OK, it’s not realistic that someone else’s solution will work for everyone else.