[Alliecat]

Hi Alliecat! You visited my thread. I wanted to return your well wishes for success!

A few things, if you don't mind my advice? Check out chronometer website. It's a free nutrition online tracker. You enter the food you eat and it calculates your exact calories, vitamin, mineral, and macro intake. I was surprised how much I needed to eat to meet my calorie and nutrition needs. You need adequate nutrition to see growth. You need healthy fat, enough carbs and enough protein. You also need calcium, vit C, and more nutrients for collagen production and healthy skin growth.

It sounds like you don't eat meat or dairy? Do you eat rice, sweet potatoes, or squash? These can help you meet your carb intake needs. Beans and quinoa will give you protein. I recommend soaking beans overnight and discarding soak water before cooking, if you don't already. Coconut oil, avacados, black olives, and nuts are healthy fats. Walnuts contain omega 3s, good for you. If you aren't eating meat or much oils you may not get enough omega 6. Evening Primrose Oil contains healthy omega 6. If your not against soy, soymilk is good fat, protein, calorie boost and easy to fit in your day, drank alone or added to coffee, tea, smoothie.

Be careful supplementing B12. B12 is necessary but a lot of supps are too high and can cause an imbalance with other B vitamins. Maybe use a B complex, a lower dose B12, or be sure your diet includes enough of the other B's. Soymilk usually has B vitamins added. You might get adequate intake if you drink it.

I think focusing on massage is a good plan. I suggest starting a thread in the massage section and asking the seasoned persons if 4x a day would have more benefit over 2x a day. Sometimes less is more, sometimes more is more.

Happy growing!

Thank you, your advice is very welcome and appreciated! I LOVE that chronometer website, I signed up today and I am definitely going to be using that from now on. It seems like it will be such a huge help in keeping track of my food intake, especially since that has been one of my biggest struggles with NBE.

Your nutrition advice is great. Some of those I eat already but some I do not so now I can add those to my diet. I know avocados are good for me but I have yet to find anything that I like eating them with. The texture is weird for me and they don't seem to have much of a flavor. But I won't give up on them, once I find a good recipe/way to eat them.

Vixy and Sweetalyssa have had great success with growth from massage so I have been reading their threads and got some great tips from them about massage.

Happy growing back to you! I love that we are all doing this together and can keep each other motivated and encouraged It helps tremendously.