Low Carb Diet – Plan you Low Carb Diet

What is a Low Carb Diet?

Low Carb Diets are dietary programs that restrict carbohydrate intake. Low carb diets are usually followed for weight control or for the treatment of obesity. Foods high in digestible carbohydrates such as bread and pasta (or things made from white flour)) are limited or replaced with foods containing a higher percentage of proteins and fats like meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs, cheese, nuts, seeds and peanuts, salads and vegetables. The amount of carbohydrate allowed varies with different low carb diets.

Low Carb Diet Plan

Low-Carb cooking used to be mostly a matter of deprivation and restrictions. That was its main impact on the low-carb kitchen. You could not eat this; you could not eat that. It made cooking and eating boring but also fairly simple. Foods with high-carbohydrate concentrations were largely out. It is one thing to understand that you do not really need to eat much, if any, carbohydrate laden foods to be healthy and quite another to live by that rule. No hearty sandwiches, no dinner rolls, no hamburger buns, no muffins, not to mention pasta, pizza, and tortillas. Well, now you are released from these restrictions. With the recipes you will find here, you can eat almost anything you have been missing (at least within reasonable quantity) and still control your weight and maintain a great lipid profile.

How do we do it? By eliminating the worst offenders, which are the starchy, high-carb grain (and all products made from them) along with that pure carbohydrate, sugar. Both must be exiled, except for small amounts. And that is all there is to it. Less simple, of course, is what to do about it. It has taken years to find substitutes for flour and sugar to create these workable recipes. Of the two, the sugar problem has been the easier one to deal with. Today, some acceptable artificial sweeteners that can also be used in baking are available and generally work fine. On occasion— when texture truly demands it— limited amounts of real sugar can be added to a recipe as well.

The chief difficulty is finding a replacement for flour. What breads, cookies, rolls, crackers, cereal, pancakes, muffins, pizza, or pasta can you make without it? None, obviously. Flour supplies the bulk in all of these beloved foods. But at 92.0 grams of carb in a single cup of white flour and only slightly fewer in a cup of whole wheat flour, flour is the number one enemy of the low Carb dieter. So the principal change in your new low Carb kitchen will revolve around what can be used in its place. Everything else remains pretty much the same.

Flour— that powdery tasteless, valuable stuff— has no perfect match for baking. Impostors are hard to find. There are, however, substances that collectively can do a pretty good job of imitating the texture that comes from flour, and that’s what we are after. So instead of using flour, you will be using one or more of these different ingredients. Piling these items into to mixing bowl to make a batch of bread, muffins, or rolls will quickly become routine.

Some of these new flour substitutes may already be familiar to you. The main ones are:

(1) almonds— usually ground into a meal or flour;

(2) vital wheat gluten flour—-a flour with most of the starch removed;

(3) wheat bran—known to most of us as a good sources of fiber, a flaky meal made from the outer layer or husk of the wheat kernel;

(4) whey protein powder— a powdery substance made from the watery part of milk;

(5) soy protein powder—a powdery substance like whey protein but extracted from the soybean. (use organic soy )

These ingredients will help to make you believe that you are eating flour. You can usually find them in the health food section of your supermarket or in most health food stores.

(Mary Dan Eades, Michael R. Eades, Ursula Solom; The Low-Carb Comfort Food Cookbook; 06)

LOW-CARB SUBSTITUTES

Keeping carbs in check doesn’t mean eliminating your favorite food groups. A simple switch within the same group may be all it takes. You can dodge nearly 40 grams of carbohydrate by snacking on a cup of popcorn instead of a handful of pretzels. Or skip 25 grams by opting for whole wheat bread instead of bagel. Try these substitutions in the kitchen and when you eat out.

(Bettina Newman, David; Lose Weight the Smart Low Carb Way: 200 High-favor Recipes and a 7 step; 62 -63)

Please remember that Low carb diets that severely restrict carbohydrate consumption can prove ketogenic and can have several negative effects on your health. Please consult a physician or dietecian before starting any low carb diet plan.