Okay this sounds more doable, because I really started driving myself nuts.
Everything I am picking up has either too much of one or another, and I got to the point where I am just grabbing anything that will fit into my macros.
If I don`t have too worry about the vegetables (above ground), this would be helpful.
One problem that I keep seeing is, a lot of pork related items, but I don`t eat pork, and would love some alternatives.
If anyone can offer up some recipes that are high fat and low carb (without a lot of prep time), I`d love to hear them (NO pork please).
It is not complicated. Limit carbs and increase fat to satiety. Now watch what the scale does over the course of several weeks. If the scale doesn’t respond you may need to tweak something. I limit carbs but guess I get between 20g and 35g. I than add about 15 g of wine to that. I don’t measure or weigh anything other than my weight.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#90
Bok choy. Less than 3 grams of carbs per 100 grams. Nutritionally dense in micros. In terms of bang for the carb it’s the best Keto veggie, leaf like lettuce and stem like celery!
Breakfast (only happens IF I am hungry. If not, I just have coffee.)
2 Eggs (fried or scrambled in butter) with cheese
Coffee with butter/heavy cream/ coconut oil
Lunch
Double patty burger with two slices of cheese, a slice of tomato, spicy ranch dressing or spicy mayo
Side of veggies (asparagus, basic side salad, celery with cream cheese)
Dinner
10 chicken wings with blue cheese
Raw cauliflower also dipped in the blue cheese
This day’s menu had:
Carbs: 18g
Fiber: 6g
Protein: 86g
Fat: 121g
Also…
You need to spend some time looking at photos of what other people eat to get ideas. Check out the Food section here on the boards. It’s great inspiration! Especially this: What did you Keto today?
Everything doesn’t work for everyone. I can eat dairy and be fine. Some can have sweeteners and not have issues. It’s something you need to figure out over time.
I think you’re wanting help with pork-free ideas so off the top of my head…
Shrimp with creamy broccoli slaw
Steak and eggs
Chicken with skin
Salmon and asparagus
Plate of pepperoni, pickles, cheeses, olives
Meatballs with creamy cheese sauce
Pot roast with Brussels sprouts
Steak and more steak (yum!)
Seafood and broccoli baked in foil packet with butter and herbs/spices
Brussels sprouts. These are great if you like them at all. Cut in half, mix with salt, cumin and Aleppo chili powder or similar to taste, sauté cut side down in LOTS of butter until lightly browned. It’s pretty quick and easy, and they can soak up a huge amount of butter to help you get satiating fat. Also they keep pretty well in the fridge so you don’t have to buy them every day or have them go bad if you wait a few days to use them
Don’t over cook (to me, overdone cabbage always tastes like garbage).
Yesterday I went to the supermarket, just browsing for things that make sense for me. I found two dips: Spinach and red pepper, both were low in carbs, and I am wondering are these okay on Keto?
If I am looking for a tide over item, are the Turkey Pepperettes okay to grab?
Sounds OK. As always, the bottom line is net carbs. But most dips are primarily sour cream, which has very few carbs. Both spinach and bell peppers are keto-friendly. But manufacturers can add things that pile on the carbs, which is why net carbs is the absolute measure.
I was heartbroken when I found out artificial crab was full of added carbs.
You’re not going to get anywhere with keto if you fear good fat. As was already mentioned, Ancel Keys and a few other researchers convinced themselves that saturated fat leads to heart disease (the “diet-heart hypothesis”), and then badly cherry-picked the data to try to make the case using epidemiology, which is the weakest form of evidence. When they tried to do actual experiments on the diet, this was never shown to be true!
Note that “hypothesis” technically means “an idea that I need to devise experiments to test.” The best test is always to try to prove yourself wrong, but it’s the test people often don’t want to do.
Keys and others did an experiment in Minnesota (with a captive test group in mental hospitals) in which saturated fat was replaced by unsaturated fat, and not only was there little effect on heart disease, but cancer went UP. They waited many years to actually publish these data! So, they self-suppressed results that didn’t fit their pet hypothesis, rather than consider that the hypothesis might be wrong. BAD SCIENCE.
Similar results have come out of other studies: little or no effect on heart disease, increase in TOTAL MORTALITY on low-fat [edited: I mis-typed “low-carb” here earlier] or polyunsaturated fat (seed oils) due to increased cancer, stroke, etc. I don’t care if I die of heart disease, I care if I DIE full-stop, so only total mortality is interesting (unless dying later is actually worse due to being incapacitated for longer and bad quality of life, but that’s probably not the case).
But, the McGovern diet committee in the Senate in 1977, guided basically by one lawyer and one medical researcher who was a proponent of the saturated fat hypothesis, accepted this story hook, line and sinker. They used the old idea “we have to DO SOMETHING!!!1!!” to justify the fact that they were trying to use science that did not actually have a clear consensus solution to the problem of heart disease (and thus what they were “doing” might be worse than doing nothing), so this muddled science became official US policy, and thus the “conventional wisdom” for pretty much the entire world. (Critically, this all occurred between the execution of the Minnesota experiment and its much-delayed publication.)
There are several ways you can convince yourself of this:
Read the book Lies My Doctor Told Me by Ken Berry MD, which contains the abridged version.
Read either Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, or The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, which is a pretty similar book (plus some more specific criticism of the Mediterranean Diet hype) that came out 6 or 8 years later. GCBC is about 450 pages plus over 50 pages of references, and TBFS is almost as long. (I wish I had databases for the references of both books and could cross index them to see how similar the reference lists are; I’ll bet they’re > 80% similar). So these are a chore to read, but they really contain a damning indictment of the weakness of the “butter causes heart disease and red meat causes cancer” story.
Trust that many people here have read all these books and are not lying to you! Numbers 1 and 2 are “knowledge” and this method is only “belief,” but if it works for you, it will save a lot of time.
I agree with everything in the above post except that The Big Fat Surprise was a chore to read. To me it reads like a well sourced, real world, who-done-it. I relished that read and plan to reread it soon.
I enjoyed reading both books, but they are LONG. I found the first 150 pages of GCBC to be a real page-turner, but my enthusiasm declined in the second half just due to fatigue.
If you read the Amazon 1-star reviews for GCBC, almost all of them are “this book is too long. I just want a diet to follow.” These are scholarly tomes, not diet books!
Oh, agreed. If people want good diet books about keto I don’t think anything beats Phinney’s The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living and A New Atkins for a New You.
Agreed. I bought both of those! “New Atkins” was one of the first things I read, and I recommend it to people as the easiest place to start.
The one thing that confuses me is that in New Atkins, Westman et al recommend increasing carb levels in the maintenance phase (up to, what, about 80 grams? I forget) but in his more recent YouTube talks, Westman always repeats “20 grams total, not net, carbs.” Maybe that’s just to avoid misleading people who are just getting into it, since stricter is probably better to insure that the diet will work, but I wonder if he didn’t really want to say that more was OK, but the Atkins plan wanted to include that?
56 g is very little. I’m not sure where that number came from, but I wouldn’t even consider that enough to be a bare minimum. I wouldn’t worry about going way over this. Some people like to restrict their protein later on, but right now, protein is your friend. Hungry? Eat some protein. Carb craving? Eat some protein.
I think the morning shake is fine with 31g of protein. Two more meals with that much protein and you’ll be doing great! For some reason, lots of people on these forums are anti-shake. You don’t necessarily need them, but if you like them, it makes your life easy, and it makes it easier to stay on plan, great. I think a homemade shake makes a great breakfast, and I think the ones I make are quite yummy. A canned shake works well for some people, too, although they aren’t to my taste. I also worry about how much alternative sweetener there is in them.
I don’t think that fasting is necessary at all for people just starting out. I wouldn’t recommend it, personally. Whether you fast or not, you’re going to go through a period of carb withdrawal and have several days of cravings for sugary and starchy foods. You can either go through this while fasting or you can go through it and feed your body something else, which I think it easier.
I’m not clear at all why you think you need to restrict your protein so much. If you check out a few calculators, like the one @OgreZed linked to, you’ll see that the protein you’re trying to restrict to is a bare minimum.
The key there might be the word “excess.” Also, way up-thread @amwassil linked to an excellent explanation about protein and gluconeogenesis that dispels a lot of the myths around protein and ketosis. Hopefully, you took some time to read that. If not, I suggest you do that now. You might also be interested in this presentation by Dr. Donald Layman on what is sufficient protein and what’s really “excess.”
Fat is quite good for you. If you’re going to restrict carbs to 20g or less and eat an adequate amount of protein, you need to eat something else to fill out your energy requirements for the day and fill you up. That’s fat. If you don’t want to eat fat, you need to eat more protein or more carbs. If you don’t want to eat protein, you need to eat more fat and carbs. If you don’t want to eat carbs, you need to eat more fat and protein. If you don’t want to eat protein AND carbs, you need to eat fat.
A typical quick meal for me is a piece of meat (ribeye, hamburger, chicken thighs, salmon, etc.) either sautéed, baked in high heat, or cooked under the broiler. For a thick ribeye, I eat an empty cast iron pan under the broiler heat for about 8–10 minutes, then toss the steak in (no oil in the pan), and cook it for about 7 minutes. While that’s going, I might microwave some frozen veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, mixed veg, etc. When those are done, I add some butter to them or maybe I’ll serve them with a good amount of ranch or blue cheese dressing. That’s dinner.
I believe that’s because it was Dr. Atkins’ own practice, and they were updating his program. Dr. Westman is quite adamant about having his patients stay under 20 total grams of carbohydrate a day. Dr. Phinney tells the Virta patients to eat under 30 total grams, so that their net will be under 20.
