Skip to main content

What Can I Eat on a Low Carb Diet? A Pictoral Guide

When someone considers going on a low carb diet, they tend to ask, "If I'm not eating bread, potatoes and cereal, what's left to eat?" It's shocking that starch and sugar makes up so much of a typical diet that people ask this.

Naughty foods are bread and potatoes and Kool-Aid. These are nice foods:

Left to right: bacon, baking cocoa, butter, oxtail, broth (note they've kindly provided a low-fat and low-sodium warning), chocolate (note the very high cacao, and therefore low-sugar, content), red wine (go easy on this), and diet soda (full disclosure: I'm a shareholder in the company that makes Hansen's).

Don't even think about trimming the fat--fat, not carbs, is your fuel on a low carb diet.

Some staples at my house:


Left to right: sardines, hamburger, beef liver, pork rinds, frozen vegetables, free-range eggs, Splenda, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Who says Atkins is an all-meat diet? I've read that low-carbers eat more vegetables than most people.

Back row, left to right: fennel, baby greens, almonds. Front row: bell pepper, sweet potato, garlic, avocado, ginger.

Not all white food is bad.



Left to right: homemade mayonnaise, white wine, salt, coconut oil, tea, pastured lard (not the hydrogenated stuff from the supermarket), full-fat coconut milk and mushrooms. The 1930s coffee maker on the right is still in use: no need to give up coffee on a low-carb diet.

A lot of this can be eaten straight out of the package, but cooking these good ingredients is dead easy, too. I usually broil the hamburger and cook chicken or oxtail in a pressure cooker with some broth and wine. I steam the vegetables in the microwave and add butter, or cut them up and dip them in mayonnaise (recipes are out there online--it only takes five minutes to make in a blender). I use the coconut milk to make ice cream (recipes here and here) and eggnog. Sometimes I make something more complicated, like pate, but this is my daily fare on a low carb way of eating.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Objective Book about Other Childhood Vaccines

Today's decision by the CDC to add COVID shots to the schedule of childhood vaccines has some people concerned about the rest of the vaccines on the schedule. Contrary to fact-checker claims, adding COVID shots to the schedule means children will be required in about a dozen states to get a COVID shot to attend public school. Indiana isn't one of them--our childhood vaccination law doesn't mention the CDC and such a requirement could run afoul of our ban on COVID vaccine passports. But even freewheeling Indiana has some vaccine requirements and this kerfuffle has people wondering how safe those vaccines are.  There's a book called Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy  by Peter C. Gotzsche, DrMedSci and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, about the safety and efficacy of all those vaccines, including COVID and others. Cochrane was founded to "to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving healt

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and