Meal planning on keto, the 'Steak and Salad' diet

I’ve seen ketoblogs that offer ‘meal planning’ services. I guess if you need that help and you can afford it, it wouldn’t hurt to support the keto community by buying ‘meal planning’ services. But it’s better to eventually learn to plan keto meals by yourself, based on what you and your family eat, and on any extra diet restrictions you or your family members need to cope with food allergies and such.

To learn keto meal planning, think back. How did you learn about meal planning for a conventional diet (if you did?) In my family, a typical supper had a meat item, one or two starchy-food items (potatoes, bread, buns, rice, baked beans) and a cooked vegetable. Plus a sugar-based dessert, of course.

In keto diets, we can go back to the ‘Steak and Salad’ menu plan of the original Atkins Induction. Dieters were allowed just about any meat or seafood that didn’t contain carbohydrates, or have carbohydrate breading or buns or have bread or potatoes mixed in (like meatloaf from some recipes.) And for lunch and supper every day, you could have a cup of salad, made from the vegetables on a list in the Atkins diet book of 1972. (Later versions of Atkins added more veggies because of ‘net carbs’, a concept many modern ketonians are rejecting.)

For the ‘Steak’ item: the easiest way is to buy a likely piece of meat— a steak, a pork chop, a couple of chicken thighs, fish— and cook it in a simple way, like cooking a steak in a frying pan. If you don’t know how to cook, this is the easiest way at first. I’ve learned that if I happen to buy a cut of meat I haven’t often cooked before, I can find simple ways to cook it by searching online. I also look at an old, rather basic cookbook I inherited from my mother, which usually has at least one recipe for even odd food items like venison or salsify (a root crop.) As you go on in the keto life, you can purchase a number of fine cookbooks that feature low-carb, keto or paleo recipes, and find new, more complicated ways to cook your meat.

The ‘Salad’ item: I’ve never liked salads. My mom used to make salads, and I ate them (without dressing, as we never had salad dressing at home and I never liked it once I tried it.) But a salad wasn’t my idea of food, and I certainly never in my life ordered a main-dish salad in a restaurant. I wasn’t that eager to signal my dietary virtue that I’d give up a meal for a salad. Plus, back when I was a calorie-counter I knew many main-dish salads had more calories and fat than a Big Mac. 

But once I tried Atkins and got on Induction, I ate my two salads a day and liked it. Since I live alone and my salad items or bagged salad goes bad quick, I often sprout alfalfa and other seeds to use as my salad. I often eat my sprouts right from the sprouter, without any salt! Though of course I know salt isn’t bad for you, especially good kinds of salt like sea salt or Himalayan pink salt. 

The Atkins diet instructions also give a list of low-carb vegetables that can be cooked, but doesn’t say whether a cooked vegetable can replace a daily salad or how much cooked vegetable is allowed at what level of Atkins. The original Atkins isn’t big on making you count carb grams, but I think Induction is normally about 20 grams of carb a day, and other levels add back about 5g carbs each. A standard keto diet today is also about 20 grams of carb. But then, salad veggies and low-carb cooked veggies don’t use up that many grams.

I would suggest that for a meal with more variety, you might try cutting the raw salad in 1/2, and using about a half-cup of an allowed veggie for cooked vegetables. So in that case, you could have ‘Steak’ and ‘Salad’ and ‘Veggie’ as your menu items for supper. 

For an even fancier supper, you can have soup as a ‘first course.’ Broth is allowed, and home-made bone broth is often highly recommended these days. You can add a bit of veggies, or some cream or cheese, to make your broth into a soup. If you can handle extra carbs, you might even add bean sprouts or pea or lentil sprouts to create an analogue to bean, pea or lentil soups. (The hard part is finding the carb grams for pea or lentil sprouts.)

What about desserts? There are lots of keto dessert recipes. But I would caution against making any of them a major part of your keto life. Keto desserts nearly always use up some of your carb grams for the day. Many also use sugar alcohols, which they tell you that you don’t have to count. The problem is, that your body may not have gotten the message. It may metabolize some or all of the sugar alcohols. So, daily desserts should no longer be a thing for you. Get to enjoy the tastes of your other allowed foods for a while. Don’t work on your dessert-crafting skills until you have learned to cook or craft the more basic keto menu items.

So: your meal plan is: 

‘Steak’, 

‘Salad’, 

optional ‘Veggie’, 

optional ‘Soup,’ 

very rarely ‘Dessert.'

But how does that adapt for other meals besides supper?

For lunch, we often pick a lighter meal. Instead of a big piece of meat for the ‘Steak’ menu item, we may add a little chicken or tuna to our salad, or have ‘Soup’ and ‘Salad.’ For breakfast, if we eat breakfast, we often can eat ‘breakfast-y food items like eggs or omelets with bacon or ham. But we don’t have to eat ‘breakfast food’ for breakfast, and if we like breakfast food but are on the No-Breakfast Plan, we can have our low-carb pancakes or our omelets later in the day. Egg based foods, being a protein source, go under the ‘Steak’ part of our menu plan, and cheese or cheese-and-egg items fall in this category as well. Tofu, too. If you eat tofu and know how to make it taste like food and don’t worry about the soy content. 

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The Original Atkins book has a set of suggested meal plans at the beginning of the recipe section. These might also be of help. And there are many cookbook authors--- Dana Carpender, Maria Emmerich--- who have whole books full of ketogenic/low-carb recipes.