Why would you purposefully starve to get under calories? Why are you taking so long to find stuff?
Either it fits your calorie goal or it doesn’t. Find a way to make it work or eat something else instead.
It sounds like you have a great and sustainable plan. 500 calorie a day deficit is high but not super high so you definitely want to be diligent since there’s not a huge margin of error (vs 1000 calorie deficit which is less sustainable perhaps but somewhat huge margin for error). I ate like 400+ calories of almond butter today and would have guessed more like 200. Do something like that twice and there ya go, deficit shot for the day.
Idk if you’ve used a food scale before but I find them really pragmatic. I don’t eyeball stuff anymore if I can help it. If I want 300 calories of pasta, I weigh out 3 oz. of dry pasta. If I want a serving of nuts, I weigh out 28. G of nuts. Makes life easy and then I go about my day.
Today I used too much vegenaise (vegan mayo). I weighed it out and logged it cause I ate it. Tomorrow I could eat less to account for what I overeat vs. what fits in my calorie count today or I could do some extra exercise (tracked on my smart watch) to compensate for today. Or since it was only a minimal amount of calories, I can just shrug it off and let it balance out over the next several months since my input and output isn’t an exact science and an extra hundred calories or so over one day isn’t going to bust my ass spread out over a long period of time, particularly when I have been so conservative with my calories burned (meaning that I’m burning even more than I account for probably, sometimes by several hundreds day after day without noticing until weeks later).
Just gotta find what margin of error you’re comfortable with. While it’s weirdly satisfying to hit exactly 1200 calories on Myfitnesspal and it can be disappointing to go 5 calories over and be “in the red”, one is never or hardly ever eating exactly 1200 calories on the dot. And if they were, we would have LITERALLY no way of knowing that. Save for maybe NASA......