How Simple Is Your Diet?

(KM) #1

Are you of the “less is more” philosophy, or the “variety is the spice of life” camp?

I whip up rather complicated coffee with cream and supplements in the morning, a total of five ingredients. I make homemade seltzer with a splash of lemon during the day, or ‘sun tea’ with mint from my garden. I throw some high quality butter or tallow in a pan with a couple of mushrooms, then when that’s half done salt and pepper a steak or some ground beef in a patty and throw that in. There’s usually a bottle of dry red wine on the counter that lasts a week. Many times that’s my day, from a dietary standpoint.

I am still growing a modified garden, so there might be a pickle or some sliced tomatoes on the side. I make jerky once a week or so, so if I’m hungry sooner than expected I have something to nosh on. I do occasionally branch out and make other things, I’m not averse to trying different and new things, and I keep some other stuff like cheese and eggs on hand, but I’m pretty lazy and I love having a super simple auto-pilot protocol to fall back on. On a typical day, this is the extent of my dietary effort.

You?

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #2

I do like to mix it up a bit. You can get bogged down repeating the same stuff. For exaple I love Beef Stew but sometimes I will throw in some anchovies, sometimes chilli, sometimes garlic… but I never throw a pizza in the pot :grinning:

(Robin) #3

Simple. Simple. Simple.
My only prep is heating if necessary.
Nothing fancy.
I am extremely lucky that I don’t get bored with the same food all the time.

(Geoffrey) #4

I’m creative so I like variety. I’m carnivore and I’m amazed when people tell me that it’s just too restrictive or that there just isn’t enough variety to sustain a diet like that…well they’ve never met me and if they could only spend a week with me I could show them how much variety there is on carnivore. It’s totally sustainable. Especially when you reach the stage where you no longer eat for pleasure but for energy and nutrition. I still enjoy my food and I fix good meals but they are all centered around nutrition.
So my diet is simple in reference to what I eat, animal fats, animal protein, salt and water. But I come up with a wide variety of ways to eat all of that.

(Alec) #5

Simpler the better for me:

Breakfast: nothing
Lunch: fatty steak
Dinner: fatty lamb

That’s it!
A

#6

Simple is nowt always easy.

The staples are: eggs, butter, bacon, red meat, biltong, bone broth and coffee.

The safety nets are the key essentials, like you mention the jerky = boiled eggs, tinned fish, biltong.

#7

For a standard Keto dieter that allows high fiber fruit and veggies, I’m probably fairly simple. Most days it’s quick and easy and my preparation efforts go solely to the meats for the day. I love those days.

But occasionally once a week I’ll do something spectacular with a vegetable side, and once a month I make some sort of freezable but heavenly dessert. I think I get the best of both worlds between easy and elaborate by keeping the elaborate to a few days a month.

Last night I had a gorgeous flank steak with a wonderful cilantro lime marinade made in the morning to marinate all day. I sautéed mushrooms and vidalia onions in a ton of butter and a splash of sherry with S&P. Super easy. Plate looked like something out of heaven as 7/8 of it was full of gorgeous, medium rare meat.

Today I whipped up a sliced cherry tomato cilantro lime green onion like salsa to serve on top of the leftovers. It’s a small amount of veggies for a huge flavor-packed punch to compliment the steak. The better I get at Keto the easier it all is to make the visual just as appetizing as the bite.

(John Bradshaw) #8

My wife does just beef, salt and water. Easy. :smile:

I like a tiny bit of cream and strawberries once a day as well.

#9

I am a hedonist, I never will reach that stage :smiley:
But it doesn’t mean I don’t have days when joy isn’t my concern, I just want some good food inside me. Good for my body even if I don’t enjoy it as much as on other days.

Hmmm… I LOVE simple. The idea of it, at least. I can’t do it but I desire to be able to do it. And I suppose I have simple dishes… 1-2 ingredients already provides a nice variety as we can vary those ingredients :smiley:

Some of my staple foods:

  • fried pork (pork, salt. extra lard if the pork is too lean but I don’t fry too lean pork if possible)
  • roasted pork (pork, salt)
  • sponge cake buns (egg, nothing else. it has enough sodium so it’s not super unsalty to begin with but I eat it with rich, salty things)

My soup is usually meat, water and salt but I do tend to use chicken AND pork at the same time so there are 4 ingredients :wink: But it can be 5 when I only use pork but add cream and tarragon.

I can’t eat very much of the same dish (definitely not enough for an OMAD meal and my normal other meals often are similarly big, I can’t get satiated by a tiny meal, almost no matter what) so I have multi-course meals. It’s nice when I can get away without it for a small meal but that dish must be a tad complicated. I make a rich scrambled eggs then :slight_smile: A modified version of peasant’s breakfast, a dish Mom talked about. It has all my staples: pork, processed pork, egg and dairy (both cheese and sour cream). Good stuff and as it’s already varied, I can eat a decent amount of it. But as I never use more than 3 eggs, it’s still little food, even with all the sausage or whatever. But good for a major part of a bigger meal or as a whole small one. Lovely stuff. The original had potatoes but as its main role is to add another flavor and dilute the very rich and fatty thing, leftover fried green ham works wonderfully in its place :wink: And it’s better nutrition and satiation wise too! A fine improvement, I say. (And I do love the unique flavor of potatoes. But it doesn’t mean I need to eat it to be happy with my food. And I do love pork better, even the lean kind. I can’t easily get bored of it.)

I have a very long history of variations. I made zillion recipes and I hardly could do them the same twice - except when I reached perfection (or my SO was happy with it and it was for him). But carnivore restricts my choices nicely so I don’t feel overwhelmed by the possibilities when in an experimenting, new recipe making phase… There are still plenty of possibilities.

And there are my no work foods… I can eat almost anything (when it’s ready to eat, I mean) alone. I grab it and eat it. Cheese. Boiled egg. Pork. Even the fattiest sausage (45% fat, that is quite common still) though I usually pair it up with something. I can’t make a meal like this but a course of a meal or a tiny snack before a meal? (Just because I can wait some time more, it doesn’t mean I want to.) Easily. I can eat butter and even lard alone, often do on fat fast days. (I prefer butter alone, I rather cook with lard but can eat it in a pinch. In moderation.)
I had/have that with vegs too. It’s zero work. I grab it and eat it. Of course it’s for the “edible and enjoyable in raw version” kind only. I eat very little vegs nowadays but a tiny tomato from my garden, I won’t say no to that all the time… Or some crunchy pepper, that’s nice. My SO eats them every day, I don’t but sometimes I join for a bite or two and enjoy the hell out of it.

I don’t want blur, IDK where to put it anyway. There will be carby things mentions in the next paragraph, beware.

Time in the kitchen wise… I am probably the worst on this forum. I spend extremely much time with making food (or checking fruits, picking fruits, cutting fruits and canning fruits, we just had Williams pear season and finally it’s over… I love my only such tree but it was a bit too enthusiastic this year… Still nothing like the 2019 apricot season - ONE tree, I had 3 before - when I canned 120 jars after gifting some… and we ate it too, mostly my SO but he is good at it… and it was one fruit of the… 8-10 I need to put into jars. but I love having a nice fruit garden, I just complain about it sometimes :smiley: especially about the blackberries and their thorns and lots of work involving them) and doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. Oh well, at least I like most of it. Baking is special for me, I like that too as long as it doesn’t happen too often. I like cooking but I like when it’s simple - only complicated when I want it to be (but apart from making sourdough bread, I never want that).

I probably will evolve into something simpler. I do wish to skip lunch for reasons… If I have too many meals, my day tends to get more complicated. I don’t always want the same food for lunch and dinner too. Sometimes I do.
My meals are still simpler than the ones in the past… Meat helps, it’s a rare item I can eat a bigger amount. Never enough for a whole meal but still.

I think I dislike meals with zillion ingredients. So I more like have more cources but usually simple ones. If the dish has many ingredients, like 8 (spice mixes don’t count), it better is as good as peasant’s breakfast so I can eat it and call it a meal (or almost. I probably add a little bit else)!

And if an item isn’t a protein source, I tend to find it unnecessary work to add. With some exceptions, eggs in purgatory is great and it has tomato. That mostly my SO eats up in the end and I am happy 12 minutes are enough for making a main dish for lunch… But I do love the little tomato sticking to my not soft eggs. It’s my single fav veg nowadays. Even my onions practically disappeared though they are needed for stews. But they are too sweet so if I can skip them, I do, if I can’t, I use a minuscule amount. But tomatoes are nice. Not strictly needed but nice. So I don’t skip eggs in purgatory when I make that wonderful dish. I will be forever grateful for this forum to introduce me to it some years ago. It was an instant hit and I regularly cook it since. Almost every week but then twice or thrice in row.

(Bob M) #10

I’m more of a mix it upper, though I tend to cheaper cuts of beef for lunches. Today, lunch/breakfast was a cheap cut of beef (10 ounces), some raw milk, collagen peptides, two small tomatoes from our “garden”. Dinner will be whatever meat my wife makes, plus cucumbers and/or tomatoes from the garden. I might have some yogurt afterwards.

This week, the “lunches” will be quite a bit alike. The dinners will be whatever my wife makes. I normally try to make 1-2 dinners in advance, something we just have to heat up at night or maybe sous vide during the day and have at night. But we were on vacation last week, so I couldn’t make anything.

(KM) #12

Me to a T!