Learn to Make Keto Foods: Salads

The Wuhan coronavirus has taught us how many people are dependent on others to make their meals— they eat restaurant, including fast-food restaurant, meals not once or twice a month but once or twice a day. And for their other meals they have ready-to-eat or heat-and-eat stuff. 

Being this helpless is no way to do Keto * Low-Carb. It’s like being in a prison where you don’t get to eat what you think is healthy but what a prison dietician thinks is healthy, and what the prison budget can handle. If you want to be a free ketonian rather than a carb-diet prisoner, it’s time to learn to make some food on your own.

Low-Carb eating plans have had a place for salad veggies since the days of the Atkins diet, in which you are allowed 2 cups of salad veg plus 1 cup other low-carb veg even on strict Induction. 

You don’t have to get your salads by ordering them from a restaurant or a grocery with a salad bar. You can put together a salad on your own. You need to make a shopping trip to pick up some salad veg every so often. Or, if you do home-sprouting to get sprout salads, you may have to order your sprouting seeds online. I get mine from Amazon though I’m thinking of looking in to smaller companies that sell sprouting seed.

A salad usually consists of two parts: the base, often lettuce, cabbage or sprouts, and the extras, radish or carrot shreds, bell pepper bits, some green onion, and even bits of bacon or cheese shreds. My sprout salads are often from a salad sprout mix such as Broccoli & Friends, and so has broccoli sprouts and radish sprouts mixed in with the alfalfa and red clover sprouts that are the base.

To prepare a salad, first rinse and dry your base. Cut or tear it into bit-sized bits, or if it is sprouts separate the bits from one another if they are grown together into a clump. Put the base in a clean bowl.

Prepare any extras your salad will include. Rinse and dry veggies, and cut up your radish, bell pepper, green onion or red cabbage. If including, chop up your bacon or hardboiled egg, cooked meat, and shred your cheese. Put the extras in with the base and mix. Each person gets about 1 cup worth of salad for two daily meals, so measure your salad serving accordingly. 

Seasoning: You can use salt, seasoned salt, salt-free Spike, kelp powder and other similar things on your salad. You may also use low-carb salad dressings, especially the home-made kind with good oils like EVOO or avocado oil. Be sure and measure out your portions of salad dressings— just because 1 serving of dressing is OK doesn’t mean you can pour on 4 servings.

Starting on Keto? It doesn't come in a pill

Recently I was exploring the products in the Dollar General store in Stephenson, Michigan (USA.) I noticed, not far from where the few Atkins diet products were kept, there was a bottle of pills labelled ‘Keto.’

‘Keto’ is not the name of a fast-weight-loss gimmick pill! ‘Keto’ is short for ‘ketogenic’ which is the name for an EATING PLAN (or lifestyle) which puts your body into a state of KETOSIS.

Scientific research shows that the state of ketosis can have health benefits of many kinds. It can help with brain conditions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s Disease, it can help diabetics control their blood sugars, it can help in treating cancer and may show promise in reversing diabetic kidney disease. And, oh yeah, it helps people lose weight without feeling hungry or deprived. 

This is the first post in the Starting Keto series. 

The first popular ketogenic eating plan was published by Dr. Robert Atkins in Doctor Atkins Diet Revolution in 1972. It actually advised that people test for ketosis daily! It allowed unlimited amounts of zero-carb foods like meats and fish (and eggs, which aren’t quite zero.) Other allowed foods were limited in quantity, so one could have about 20 grams of carbohydrate per day in the initial phase, called Induction. 

Many ‘keto’ advocates, such as the podcaster Jimmy Moore, started out on Atkins. Many started when the common name of the eating plan was ‘low-carb’ rather than ‘keto.’ 

There are also diets which claim to be low-carb diets but are not. Dr. Atkins warned in his first book about it— there were diets such as the Drinking Man’s Diet which restricted carbs but allowed you 60 grams of carbs a day— enough to keep you OUT of ketosis. Today, there is a diet called the ‘Controlled Carb’ diet, which allows more carbs at ONE MEAL than I can eat in a day. And it expects you to eat three meals a day, plus snacks! If the 60-grams of carb diets are more moderate-carb than low-carb, the ‘Controlled Carb’ is more of a moderate-high carb diet. 

Because ‘keto’ is often seen as a trendy fad diet right now, it’s very important to get your ‘keto’ information from a good source. Don’t pick up stuff from random web sites and blogs (not even this blog.) You need accurate information, or you will end up like the patients of Dr. Jason Fung who were put on low-carb eating plans but in their food diaries had merely replaced their ordinary bread with pita bread. They were still eating plenty of carbs!

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: If you are thinking of staring a keto *low-carb eating plan, or renewing one you tried  before, your first step is to find accurate information. BUY one of the basic Atkins books— either Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution (1972) or Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (1992.) Read it cover-to-cover. Pay special attention to the chapter called ‘The Never-Hungry, No-Limit, Steak-and-Salad-plus Diet’ in original Atkins or Chapter 8, ‘The Rules of the Induction Diet’ in new Atkins— these are the chapters that tell you what to eat and what to restrict on your new eating plan. EXTRA CREDIT: Buy and read both books. After the first read, read about a chapter’s worth of one or the other book every day to help keep you inspired. 

Atkins Diet Creep: Why Atkins may have stopped working for you

The Atkins diet has helped many people, likely saving many lives. But when some people, advocating for a shiny new diet, list their old failed diets, they list Atkins among them.

Of course some of these people probably just ignored the fact that the Atkins diet is not meant to be temporary, but a way of life, and quit. But there are are other reasons why some people think of Atkins as just another diet failure.

The first is what I call ‘diet creep’ and it can happen on any eating plan. If the diet wants you to weigh or measure certain foods, you do it faithfully for a while, and then you eyeball it. You may start eating a little more of that limited food. And then, a month later, your ‘eyeballing’ adds a little more to the amount. So you are ‘cheating’ on the diet without being aware of it. Think of the Atkins restriction of only allowing 4 teaspoons of cream per day. If you stop measuring and start just pouring in a bit of cream, you exceed your total. Or you follow a low-carb recipe that has more cream in it than you are allowed, and perhaps you still put cream in your coffee.

Another source of ‘diet creep’ is built in to the Atkins diet: it’s the levels. You start off in Induction, which is about 10 grams of carbs (which you don’t have to count.) Then, level by level, you add 5 to 8 grams of carbohydrate per level, and you stay on the level a week (or more.) Dr. Atkins wants you to continue to test for ketosis with urine strips (the only ketone testing available at the time.) As long as you remained in ketosis, you would lose weight.

Then, when you hit your goal weight, you would add a little more carbs for your maintenance diet, so you got out of ketosis. And then you went on for years.

Only you would get older, and your body would need to revert to a lower carb level. Or else you went off the diet, went back on, but ate nuts and lower-carb fruits because you remembering eating that on Atkins, and so you were at too high a carb level and you weren’t in ketosis so you were hungry and had strong food cravings and were miserable, and so you either overate carbs and thought you were still doing Atkins, you cheated frequently, or you quit altogether.

A third reason is the fact that your body adapts to any weight loss diet, even a sound low-carb program like Atkins. If you were on Atkins and didn’t lose enough weight, there were things you could have done to make it work better:

1. Go back on strict Induction (of Original Atkins, ideally) with no Atkins bars or products and no ‘Net Carbs.’ Measure your salads. Be sure and eat meat with enough fat in it. Get back to the basic meat-plus-salad meals of the Atkins approach and don’t eat low-carb brownies and cakes, and foods full of almond and coconut flours or more cream or cheese than you are allowed in a day. Only gradually add back more carbs to go on higher levels.
2. Try the Atkins ‘fat fast’ diet. There are two cookbooks for this diet by Dana Carpender, ‘Fat Fast Cookbook’ and ‘Fat Fast Cookbook 2'. It’s only a temporary diet but it helps many. You can even go on and off the ‘fat fast’ diet— each week have a few days on it, and then eat your normal low-carb meals.
3. Try real fasting for longer or shorter periods. Jimmy Moore and Dr. Jason Fung have a book, ‘The Complete Guide to Fasting,’ that will help. Fasting has helped me with my weight and my blood sugars.
4. If you cheat regularly, quit. If you look forward to a weekly cheat every week, find a special low-carb recipe that will help. I like the Coco Cocoa Fat Bombs from the ‘Fat Fast Cookbook.’ You might also try those low-carb brownies and other low-carb goodies as a weekly not-quite-cheat.
5. What about trying the Carnivore diet— a meat only diet— for a while? We know humans can live by meat alone because some did, like the Eskimos of the past, and some Arctic explorers who adopted the Eskimo diet while exploring. Later, experiments were done in a controlled environment on a meat-only diet and the men involved not only survived but thrived. I haven't read any modern books on a Carnivore diet yet, I found 'The Carnivore's Manifesto' on Amazon and might buy it when I have money (after this winter. Home heating is an issue.)

Whether you call it the Atkins diet, or a low-carb diet, or ‘the’ ketogenic diet, these eating lifestyles won’t work for a lifetime of better health unless you actually follow them for a lifetime. Don’t give up the tried and true for a shiny new diet that may not be based on good science. Go back to basics, tweak your diet based on newer research and new knowledge, but stick with it. 

‘Required reading’ for Atkins & low carb dieters:

I used to read a chapter of the original Atkins book every morning to keep me inspired, until I knew the book’s whole contents. It’s what many recovering alcoholics do with their AA Blue Book. I also switch off to other sound low-carb books and listen to Jimmy Moore podcasts.