Finding Low Carb Recipes for the Low Carb Diet

So many people are seeking low carb recipes to fit into their low carb diet.  These need to be quick and easy to fit into busy lifestyles as well.  Information is available from a number of different sources, particularly books and websites.  Here are a few ideas to get you started:

First of all, wherever you are doing your research, you need to think seriously about the principles and rules of the low carb diet you have chosen. What is your maximum carb count?  20, 30, or 60 grams per day?  How strict the carb count is will restrict or expand the amount of carb-substitutes you can use.  The carb count will decide on how indulgent you can be with treats such as chocolate or fruit, as well as what veg to eat and which to avoid.

At the same time, a low carb diet is usually for life - as soon as you re-introduce a substantial amount of carbohydrate, any capacity for weight gain will be reactivated.  There is no getting away from that - but take heart in that the low carb diet usually begins strict and then eases off and allows you to eat a few more carbohydrates in the later, maintenance stages.  You should take advantage of the fact that low carb recipes can be really tasty as it is fat and not carbohydrate which imparts taste and texture to food.

Unless you want to live on plain pasta for the rest of your life, much tastier recipes involve low carb foods like meat, seafood, fish and poultry.  Choose the tastier, more succulent cuts such as rib eye steak, trout, duck or goose.  Some low carb diet regimes still insist you use lean cuts of pork or beef, but they miss the point: within reason, you can have fattier cuts of meat, and use olive oil fairly liberally in your salads (in comparison to the usual low fat diets).  You should not be gorging yourself on fat, but don't go out of your way to avoid it, in fact, embrace it as much as possible.

Chefs have always had the advantage over those of us trying to cook allegedly healthy foods for home consumption.  They always say they are cooking for special occasions, so they use butter and cream and goose fat and all the really tasty, yummy things most of us try to avoid in our cooking.  No wonder their recipes taste so great!  Well, take heart those of you who have adopted a low carb diet - all these low carb recipes are now available to you for home cooking.  Rich creamy sauces, succulent fatty meats, lovely unctuous stews.  Just avoid the potatoes or dumplings or pie crusts which might accompany them in their original incarnations.

Fiber is also an important ingredient.  In the US, carb counts also include fiber, so you should look for the split between net carbohydrates and fiber.  For example, flaxseed flour, used in low carb recipes for bread, is almost all fiber - and this is a good thing for bowel health as well as filling you up with "good carbs" which do not have to be avoided on low-carb diets.  It's the starchy, sugary carbs you need to steer clear of, that contribute to your carb count.

In conclusion, look through your cookbooks and use all the meat, poultry, fish and egg recipes but avoid any flour, pastry, potatoes, dumplings, pasta, rice and regular bread.  Explore high-fiber substitutes for carb foods in your low carb recipes - enjoy your food immensely and still stick to your low carb diet.

Do you Always Lose Weight on Low Carb

Some people believe that if you don't eat carbohydrates you must lose weight.  Unfortunately this is not always the case.  Of course, if you are really enormous and have always eaten loads of sugar and starch, the chances are if you go on an Atkins-type diet you will lose weight, and quite a lot of it.

The first time you go on a slimming diet of any sort, you are likely to lose weight really well.  If you have dieted many times in your life, losing and gaining weight through yo-yo dieting, you are likely to have become resistant to losing weight.  You will find it more difficult, even if you do go very low carb.  There are many other reasons you might find it hard to shed the pounds such as hormonal causes, particularly the menopause.  Some versions of HRT can make it difficult to slim.

Some people are metabolically resistant or insulin resistant.  This means that although their pancreas is producing insulin in response to the intake of moderate carbs or even protein foods, the tissues are resistant to the effects of the insulin.  Therefore body fat is still stored, or not released as readily as we might like, from the fat cells. Insulin is the hormone responsible for the storage of fat in the body.

If you go low-carb and stop eating starchy bread, rice, pasta, cake, potatoes and sugars, you should not be able to put on an appreciable amount of weight, because you are not stoking the fire of insulin production and fat storage.  Mind you, some low carb advocates would have you believe that calories don't count and you can eat as much as you like of fat such as cream and butter and fatty meat, and you still cannot gain weight due to the absence of insulin.  Also it is thought that there is a point where you just can't consume any more protein and fat than is good for you because you feel sick.

The fact is, like Jack Sprat, or more specifically his wife, some people have a much larger capacity for eating fat than many people could believe, and they end up with so much dietary fat in their systems that they do not get to the stage where their body starts to scavenge on its own body fat.  In this way, calories sometimes do count on a low-carb diet and some low-carbers find they still have to watch the amounts they eat if they want to shed kilos and not gain.

So, low carb is good for many reasons, not least of which is the lack of insulin response.  It's great to give your poor pancreas a rest from pumping out all that hormone, and to prevent the storage of any more fat on your belly or thighs.  You are probably preventing yourself from Type 2 diabetes in later life!  There are some occasions however when chowing down on pork rinds and heavy cream is no longer appropriate if it is your intention to actually shed a dress size and lose weight. For some people, calories don't count - but for others, they do.  This may be a case of the size of your appetite for fat and protein and whether your satiety switch is broken or not.