Beginner- I don't have enough carbs to eat 3 meals a day?! Meal Plan Included


(Charlotte Davey) #1

I have calculated my carb intake at 25g a day but I am struggling to understand how anybody can fit three meals into this limit… I feel like I am barely eating! I have left my meal plan below and would really appreciate it if somebody let me know if I’m on the right track.

Breakfast

Yoghurt & Berries (7.8g/ 10.3g)

100g Authentic Greek Yoghurt (3.8 g)

50g Strawberries/ 30g Blueberries (4g)

Inc. 1 Teaspoon Chia Seeds (2.5g)

Cheesy Scrambled eggs with Broccoli (4.3g)

2 Eggs (1.2g)

30g Broccoli (2g)

30g Spinach (1.1g)

Mature Cheddar

Sausage & Eggs (8.3g)

1 Quorn Sausage (6g)

2 Eggs (1.2g)

Spinach (1.1g)

Dinner/Tea

Salad

Spicy Noodles (11.1g)

Noodles

Garlic

Chilli

Paprika

Cumin

¼ Onion (2.5g)

½ Pepper (3.6g)

60g Mushrooms (2g)

2 Tbsp Chopped Tomatoes (2g)

1 Tsp Tomato Puree (1g)

Stuffed Pepper with Mozzarella & Tomatoes (10.4g)

100g Sweet Pepper (6g)

60g Plum Tomatoes (2.4g)

30g Green Beans (2g)
Mozarella

Chilli (13.9g)

50g Quorn Mince (2.3g)
½ Green Bell Pepper (3g)
¼ Onion (2.5g)

30g Spinach (1.1g)

1 Tsp Tomato Puree (1g)

250ml Vegetable stock

Chilli

Cumin

Garlic

Mature Cheddar

Curry (9.2g)

50g Quorn Chicken (1.5g)
1 tbsp Coconut Oil

¼ Onion (2.5g)

¼ Red Chilli (1g)

1 tsp tomato Puree (1g)

1 tbsp ground almonds (1.8g)

25ml coconut milk (1.4g)

25 ml vegetable stock
½ tsp curry powder
Ginger
Garlic

Salad (12.6g)

50g Quorn Chicken (1.5g)
100g Lettuce (2.9g)
50g Cucumber (1.3)

60g Plum Tomatoes (2.4g)

½ Avocado (4.5g)

Garlic

Thyme

Feta Cheese

Olive Oil/Mayonaise


(squirrel-kissing paper tamer) #2

Welcome Charlotte. I eat three meals a day and this is what it looks like:

Breakfast:
Coffee with cream (1 g)
5 eggs with butter (3 g)
1 small tomato chopped (2 g)

Lunch:
Salad with cheddar, bacon, ceasar dressing, olives (8 g)

Dinner:
1 piece Tilapia in butter(1 g)
1 cup cooked broccoli and cheese (4 g)

Total 19 grams

If you feel like this wouldn’t be enough for you, adjust to meet your needs. Eat more of the things you like with the lowest carbs, and less of the higher carb things. Hope this helps.


(Full Metal KETO AF) #3

A lot of the carbs you have look wrong. I ran about 8 of them on Cronometer and yours are significantly higher. If my food was going to include lots of vegetables I would definitely invest in a cheap digital scale and use a tracking app. Use gram measurements. If you’re using a scale weigh onions, don’t estimate by size.

The Sausage looks too high, I don’t buy sausages with over two grams per link. It’s kind of hard when you’re diet is vegetarian. Meat is zero carb, substitutes are not.

I believe Quorn products also contain vegetable oil. I myself take a single ingredient Whole Foods approach and avoid processed foods. It is recommended on KETO to cut out vegetable/seed oils. These are processed and bad for a number of reasons you can read about here if you wish. They were not originally intended for food use but as industrial lubricants. To make them palatable they are processed with solvents and deodorized. They are a source of inflammation. :cowboy_hat_face:


(Jane) #4

Well after you have done keto for a couple of months you won’t be eating “3 meals a day” as that just stimulates insulin response which you want to avoid.

Eating under 20 is easy peasy. Protein first, add fat (sour cream, cheese, butter, full fat dressing) make sure your electrolytes are good). No hunger. Burn fat.


(Doug) #5

I think there are easy eliminations - the berries and noodles… And one sausage has 6 grams of carbohydrates? Definitely would be eliminating that one/switching to another type. This, in my opinion, is really just a matter of deciding to really go low-carb or not.


(Jack Bennett) #6

Hello and welcome!

The noodles definitely stood out to me. Their carb content isn’t listed. Are they shirataki or similar zero-carb noodle? Typical noodles like rice or wheat would certainly blow away a 25g carb limit unless the portion size was really tiny.


(Susan) #7

Welcome to the forum, Charlotte =).

To give you an idea of how you could have 3 meals for the day, and keep your carbs at a good level, I will show you a sample I made for someone else one day that might give you an idea :smiley:

This is 3 meals, with no snacks, and the total net carbs for the day is 13.6 and the calories are 1703 --you could have more proteins or healthy fats to increase the calories if that doesn’t keep you feeling satiated, but it is a rough guide to give you an idea.

cronometer.com is a free app you can use to track your macros =). Best wishes in figuring it all out =).


(Scott) #9

I typically aim for around 50g of carbs but that is mainly because I enjoy wine with my dinner. Wine alone is probably 10 to 15 carbs daily. The rest I get from veggies and a few sneaky carbs in nuts and things. When I look at your meals I see too much fruit (I eat none) and some fruit like veggies like tomatoes. The other thing that surprised me was 8g in sausage, that seems high to me. Is something added like sugar cured?


(Karen) #10

If you are doing keto as a vegetarian, get eggs and butter in there, and cheese. No starch veg. Big salads. 5-6 berries couple of times a week. Your meals look healthy by current guidelines but not very ketogenic. You can adjust. Good luck

As a vegan though, it’s very difficult.


(Bunny) #11

I’m not a three meal a day person, I like to keep it extremely simple so I just eat when hungry.

25 grams of carbohydrates for one day? That is something I would do for three days to initiate or induce ketosis and no longer.

It should be (depending on what methodology or paradigm your adhering to?) 25 grams per meal at 3 meals a day after the three day induction phase?

Just thought I would point that out, I’m very old school with the ketogenic diet but some like to challenge the limitations long-term but only time will tell who can maintain that (20 grams of carbohydrates per meal or per day?) 10 years down the road?

The Virta health people have a pretty good idea what works for the majority of the worlds populous long-term as you can see in the example below:


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #12

I’m surprised no one has yet linked to the following. So here it is:

PS: Just like you! many of us started out pondering what in the world am I going to eat when you limit carbs to sub-20 grams per day. That’s ‘carb-centric’ thinking and you’ll get over it eventually.

My advice for the first few weeks until you get the hang of it is stop meticulously planning your meals, just cut the carbs completely, eat protein and fats only - yes! you can. If you don’t want to eat meat and meat products, that will make it a little tougher, but you can still do it.

I notice you’re eating eggs and cheese. Those are both excellent foods! Eggs contain both fat and protein and very little carbs. You can find many cheeses that contain zero or very low carbs as well. Cracker Barrel has several hard cheeses with zero carbs. There are also several soft cheeses with very low and/or zero carbs. Read the label carefully!

If you can’t live without, select veggies very carefully! I always recommend bok choy in any of its many varieties because it contains more micronutrients and fewer carbs than anything else worth eating. You can eat a lot of bok choy without paying a big carb tax. There are several other veggies that are fairly low carb in small amounts. Ultimately, you will learn that veggies are not necessary.

Best wishes.


(Jane) #13

My husband can have up to 100 gms of carbs per day and hasn’t gained any weight back. Don’t know if he is still in ketosis at that level but his joint pain has not come back. He doesn’t do that every day - some days he is almost carnivore.

I start to gain weight at that level of carbs so my upper limit on maintenance is around 50. Like my husband, some days I eat very few carbs. And 0 when fasting.


(Bunny) #14

It could be a combination of muscle volume (he has more muscle volume) and your ability to oxidize glucose without the increased muscle mass and female hormones without DIM support?

I think with time you will be able to increase carbohydrate intake!

By not eating more carbohydrates your blunting your metabolisms ability to oxidize glucose and yes you might gain a little weight in the process but it will start burning body fat again? That’s why we increase our fat intake to keep fire burning.


#15

I don’t get why it matters how many meals we eat. I eat once but I have 4-7 courses and all have carbs. I need to plan well.

There’s something very wrong. 30g broccoli is surely not multiple grams of net carbs. Chia seeds are very low-carb as far as I know, I see other wrong numbers too, you probably use total carbs… Use net carbs, fiber shouldn’t be included.
Garlic and spices are carby too, maybe you use little of them but it’s not zero, it’s pretty significant in some of my recipes and I made sure to use net carbs.

Yogurt is that awfully carby? Right, dairy, I almost only eat some hard cheese and butter as dairy, those are better. Many people eat yogurt with berries, it’s fine IF you can squeeze it into your day. You spend much carbs on it and get very little calories, I personally tend to avoid that as I need carbs for more important things and I need my calories. So I focus on my very low-carb protein rich food, add veggies and nuts and whatever I really want and if I have some carbs left, I can eat something carbier in the right amount.
Eggs are fine. Not in unlimited amount but they have protein, fat, lots of nutrients and not very much carbs. If I want to do a great vegetarian keto day, I focus on eggs :slight_smile: They are pretty satiating too, in general. Of course, there are other good choices even for a vegetarian (I’m not that but I was and still eat close to no meat so I must depend on other protein sources).

Vegetables are carby. You probably can’t continue eating vegetable dishes all the time or the amounts should be small. It was the hardest thing I had to do for keto but I surprisingly didn’t suffer, it just took some time to get used to even though my carb limit is higher than yours.

Raw vegetables are so great and you don’t need very much of them (unless you love and need veggies even more I did, keto might be not for you then). I still eat veggie soups in moderation, even other veggie dishes in moderation. But I have very low-carb dishes too and those what gives me most of the nutrition and calories. It’s fine. We don’t need so many carby food. If you ate very much carbs until now, it’s probably very hard for you. I did the very high-carb -> 80g jump first and it helped a lot, I was lost in the beginning but started to use lower-carb recipes. 25g is doable just don’t try to add veggies and a lot of other carby thing to everything (carby from a ketoer’s viewpoint). Be careful with higher-carb veggies like onion, garlic, carrots…

Sausage and eggs. If quorn sausage is so carby, use a smaller amount and add more eggs or cheese or something. Or if you want the whole sausage, you need to use some more keto-friendly dishes too.

Calorie intake matters too, it often changes the food choices or ratios. I had 20-30g days at 2000 kcal, that’s nothing special. I could plan 25g days at 4000 kcal just fine, that would be different, many times as much added fat (obviously we can’t just eat more using the same food if our food is somewhat carby and our protein need doesn’t get twice as much just because we need twice as much energy). If your vague calorie limit or goal or need or whatever you have is really small, it becomes different again as you can’t depend on very fatty dishes so much especially with a higher protein need. Even I need to be careful with nuts. The lower-carb ones would be fine in somewhat bigger amounts but not with my caloric need, too much fat for too little protein and satiation. So I focus on my eggs. Or find some lean, super low-carb protein source to enjoy a decent amount of a very fatty but not very protein rich food.

There are great really low-carb egg dishes and a vegetable dish easily may include lots of protein and more or less fat. I focus on those recipes. But I eat other things as well. Just never the mostly carb vegetable dishes where my daily carb allowance is a too small portion, obviously.


(Sky) #16

So you eat no vegetables what so ever - you are missing out on a lot of micro nutrients surely - I am a newbie to Keto so not lecturing just trying to understand how you way of eating is healthy - sure eating only meat is easy to stay in Keto but your body needs vegetables if you want to go to the lo and I see not healthy fats in there what so ever


(Susan) #18

We have a large Carnivore community on the forum; they have their own section, and if you read the threads over there, you will see that they only eat meats and are doing great =).


(Sky) #19

wow you are doing amazing lol yep no lectures from me - I was hospitalized with bowel impactions - oh so not a pretty sight when the dam broke loose lol - sounds like you are really onto a good thing especially with the diabetes - my hubby is an insulin dependant type two - so hoping once I get my head around Keto for myself I can help him out with his health issues - over the past 18 months I have lost 40kg on a particular 500 cal diet which of course restricted fat but once I went off it and they stuff they suggested the hunger kicked in and this year I have been fighting the weight creep - up 10kg and other diet other stuff lost the 10kg then up 15kg like wtf - so this year it has been nothing but a constant fight to get it right to find the lifestyle that is sustainable for ME - I have been on Keto for only a week so yep lots of probable teething issues to come but I have lost 4.8 kg in just 7 days - I am working on the 16/8 as I am a supportworker doing rotating rosters full time so 7 days at work one day off - its hard to eat normally when your work hours are not normal - intermittent may be the way to go for me -


(Sky) #20

not doubting the poster only trying to understand - but thank you


(PJ) #21

I understand the feeling, it’s a big change.

Learn to love meat. That’s the main thing. MEAT IS FOOD. Everything else is a lovely contribution. Conveniently, nearly all forms of meat from salmon to beef to pork to lamb to poultry, have zero carbs, no matter how much you eat. Processed meat like bacon or pepperoni, and shellfish, have just a tiny few.

If you’re a beginner I strongly recommend skipping foods like noodles and berries and such until you are fairly adapted to the eating plan. Meat and eggs, plenty of butter, some cheese if you like, maybe a salad if you can keep the carby stuff out of it. Maybe a meat and peppers and mushroom stir fry. And everyone loves bacon and eggs I think. I’m not sure what quorn is but it looks like you’re adding carbs every time you eat it for things that if you just ate the meat would be zero.


(Polly) #22

Quorn is an industrially knitted mycoprotein (fungus) which some vegetarians eat instead of real meat. It is not healthy and is probably the most processed food substitute on the planet but some folk choose to eat it and that is their decision. I would not feed it to my worst enemy.