In our second installment of low carb diet tips we are going to continue to explore the lessons learned over many years of experience. Today, we are going to look at the following tips:
- Low Carb Friendly Substitutions
- Refrigerator Lifesavers
- Chocolate - Am I Kidding?
- Eat! Eat! Eat!
Low Carb Friendly Substitutions: Cravings are part of any diet. We seem to desire the foods that we just can't have. It really doesn't matter what diet you are on, really. In fact, well after you have lost the weight and embarked on a new lifestyle, you will still miss some foods. That's why developing substitutions for these foods you crave is so important. By doing this you are able to satisfy your desire for a particular, undesirable food. In addition, you ensure that these foods do not creep back into your eating routine, which ultimately will lead to weight gain. Let me give you a few examples:
Potatoes - Who doesn't love potatoes? But they are bad news during the initial stages of low carb diets. So, substitute them with Cauliflower with butter and cream, salt and pepper, mashed as you would the potatoes. Trust me, they are delicious and a great alternative to mashed potatoes.
Spaghetti/Pasta - Definitely a casualty of this type of diet but the desire for it lives on! One way to deal with this is with spaghetti squash. We oven bake the squash. Once done, take a fork and slow pull the fibrous cooked squash apart into strands and there you go. Add a little butter and cheese and it's pasta night.
Breaded Anything - As you know, bread crumbs are out but does that mean that all your favorite breaded meal are gone as well? Nope. Just follow the same process you would if you were breaded veal for example but just replace the bread crumbs with Parmesan or Romano (or both) grated cheese. Frankly, we have found that our classic breaded dishes taste better with the substitution.
Refrigerator Lifesavers: Many dieters immediately miss their habit of reaching for treats and snacks. Much of this is, of course, is habit but there is no question that the salt, and fats in them taste great. Trying to simply move away from them, "cold turkey" may work for some but not for most of us. In fact, we believe that yearning for snacks is often the most frequent reason for breaking your diet.
One way to effectively deal with this is to create entirely new habits with new, acceptable snacks. We call this our Refrigerator Lifesavers. Each week, take four bowls and fill them, in our case, with Olives, Radishes, Celery Sticks and Hard Boiled Eggs. Figure out how many of each is acceptable to eat for the week and only have that many in each bowl. As the bowl slowly empties, you can pace yourself so that they last until the next week and then start all over again.
When you are feeling the urge to snack, reach for one or a combination of your R. S.'s and you will find that you will fill up quickly and miss your unacceptable snack less and less.
Chocolate - Am I Kidding?: Nope! We have found that having a small bowl of dark chocolate wafers available when the "sweet tooth" hits can immediately satisfy the need for sweets. One or two wafers have very few carbs and each wafer allows you to easily control the amount you eat as compared to a chocolate bar, etc. Just make sure that you closely watch the total carb count over the course of the week.
Eat! Eat! Eat!: I know, when you see this as it relates to diet it seems to be the equivalent to the get rich quick schemes you see in the back of most magazines. What we are driving at here is that you should eat when you are hungry, as often as that may be. Think about it for a minute. If you each only 3-4 times a day, while you are making a major dietary change, you are going to become hungry. I know that when that happens to many of us, we tend to over eat, when the time comes, because we are so famished. On the contrary, eating when hungry, never allows you to reach that point, thereby giving you more control over intake volumes. Now keep in mind, that you must continue to monitor your total carb intake and maintaining your daily goal is still imperative.
We hope these tips are useful for you. Sometimes tips seem so obvious when you see them in writing but once read, can help to make a difference.
Stay tuned, we will be back with another installment of Low Carb Diets Tips.
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