Posted with permission from Lola

Diet & How to Get Rid of Unwanted Muscle

Many of you are concerned about your masculine proportions (big arms/shoulders/upper back), and would like a way to feminize your body naturally. Here's the simplest way to resolve this issue: diet

The diet will consist of:

A good, reliable multivitamin & multimineral. Most of you won't have a balanced diet so this will be necessary.

Flaxseed/fish oil. Capsules preferably, no more than 6-7 grams/day

Protein: about 0.5 grams/kg of weight. [1kg=2.2 lbs]

Carbohydrates: You want these low. A high carbohydrate intake makes your body release tons of insulin, which is the one of the hormones the body uses to store fat and build muscle. Most people do well around 40% of daily calories on carbs.

Fat: Fats will fill the remaining calories you need to complete your intake. Make sure most of these are healthy fats, but some of these are "unhealthy" (I hate this term since cholesterol is necessary for some important functions).

Calories: This will depend on your size, weight and level of activity. Here's a calculator. Fill in the numbers and find how much you burn a day, then take away as many as possible WITHOUT GOING BELOW YOUR BMR (This will slow your metabolism while you're dieting and you don't want this. This is the main cause of the yo-yo effect)

Calculate your daily intake here:

http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/CalRequire.html

From the number you obtain, take as much as you want WITHOUT GOING BELOW YOUR BMR calories (upper right corner on that screen).

And don't start with a monstrous deficit of say, 800 kcal (more than enough to burn muscle). Start with a small deficit of, say, 100 kcal, and build to the total deficit in 2 weeks in small increments. This way your body will be able to adapt better to it.

Normal diets don't tell you to take out as many calories (they usually go on the 500 kcal range), but normal diets are made to preserve your muscle mass, which is what we don't want. Oh, and by normal diets I mean good ones, not the shittier attacks against health performed by women magazines under names like "the watermelon diet" or "the X calories diet". A diet should always be tailored to the dieter's daily calorie expenditure and lifestyle.

General tips:

-AVOID red meat: it increases your testosterone, and we don't want that.

-Protein in vegetables usually won't be absorbed by the body (it's incomplete and has low bio-availability) so be careful with soy as a protein source.

- You want your proteins low, but you still want protein: You want to destroy muscle, but you want to preserve vital organs, right? Don't worry, your body is smart. Most protein will go to repair organs. Don't neglect your protein intake, though.

- Not all muscles are bad: you want a tasty and meaty bottom, right? There's a way to preserve it: exercise those muscles while you diet. This way your body will think those muscles are still necessary and will make an effort to preserve them.

- On the other side, try to use the muscles you don't want as little as you can. If your body doesn't use them enough, they will become the primary source of protein for any other uses (and thus, they will start to shrink).

- Be careful with how fat you are, you don't want any health problems, so check your bf% (body fat %) with a caliper (you can buy these online for around 5 dollars) or try one of those bio-impedance machines, but they're a little inaccurate, and you should measure your fat always in the same conditions