Monthly Archives: April 2021

Strategies for Single or Lone Ketonians

Low-carb and live alone? Or are you the only one living Atkins in your house? It’s hard to do elaborate cooking multiple times every single day. Sometimes we don’t feel like it. We need to find strategies to let us eat without fuss.

The first strategy I use is bulletproof coffee. I add a good fat— butter or coconut oil— and sometimes heavy whipping cream or coconut milk (from cans.) The fat makes you feel full and helps with weight loss (think of the Kekwick and Pawan study.) If you don’t like coffee, you can bulletproof up some tea or bone broth— or plain broth from cans.

Frozen beef patties are good to keep on hand. Check labels when you buy already frozen beef patties. Cheap ones may be Soy-and-beef patties and contain carbs. I usually cook up two patties, with whatever allowed toppings and seasonings I’m in the mood for. No buns, of course. I fry them up either in a frying pan or my George Foreman contact grill.

Atkins drinks are a processed food, and the Atkins corporation is free to change the formula at any time. But when I had a health crisis, and my pipes froze and needed replacement, I ended up in an anti-Catholic homeless shelter which fed a mostly-carb diet. I managed to walk with my walker to a nearby CVS and buy some Atkins drinks so I didn’t have to get hungry enough to eat crappy carbage.

Eggs. You can get cheap eggs at a grocery store, or keep chickens/ducks and get eggs that way. Hard-boiled eggs are easy to fix, especially if you have a Cuisinart egg cooker like I do— it makes hard-boiled or soft boiled eggs or poached eggs. You can eat hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with salt, Vege-Sal or spices, or make them into devilled eggs.

Cheese. You can have many kinds of cheese on our eating plan. Check the carb count. Add to foods, or use as dessert or snack.

Low-carb bread. My rural grocery in Stephenson MI now carries some low-carb bread. Small loaves, and $5, but easier than making it myself when I’m not feeling like running the bread machine. You can put on nut butter, cheese slices, scliced meat and whatever you like that’s on our eating plan.

I’m sure that once you’ve been doing our eating plan for a while, you will find some more easy foods that you like. Also, if you have a favorite low-carb recipe and make it often, it will seem easy to make even if objectively it’s a bit complex.

Do you have a low-carb easy food solution? Share it with us!

You Really Do Have To Eat Low-Carb

One of the constant temptations of the low-carbohydrate, ketogenic way of life is deciding that there is some sort of gimmick out there that will let you eat ‘normal’ high carb junk food and still have the health benefits of low-carb and ketosis.

If you don’t come up with this bad idea on your own, merchants are willing to sell it to you. I’ve seen an ad for powdered MCT oil which claims that if you buy and use their product, you can continue to eat high-carb bread, pasta and fruit and magically somehow still have the same benefits as if you had eaten a healthy low-carb diet.

This is the sad and sorry truth. You cannot outrun a bad diet. You cannot buy a product that will magically undo the effects of a bad diet. You will have to eat healthy for your whole life if you want health benefits for your whole life.

On the bright side, knowing the science about the low-carbohydrate way of life means you don’t have to be trapped in the miserable ‘Hunger Games’ of the unscientific calorie-counting method which fails 90% of the time. We can eat actual tasty food— three meals a day if we like— and not have to suffer through hunger pangs.

But we have to limit our carbs. That means there are foods we just may not eat any more. Maybe because we’d have to eat such a tiny portion of them it’s not worth bothering to do it. Or because it will just cause more carb cravings than you want to deal with. Or you were only eating those nasty bananas because someone told you they were healthy, and it’s and actual relief not to have to eat them any more.

When you have beaten any carb addictions you have, you may decide you like the way you feel on low-carb a lot better than you like the momentary pleasure of having a high-carb food in your mouth. But you have to break those addictions first, by following your low-carb plan until it is your way of life.

NOTE: to learn about the low-carb keto way of life, don’t rely on strangers on the internet who may not have good knowledge. Get a good book, by an author whose name is well known in the low-carb keto community. Since a lot of the current crop of keto influencers started off doing Atkins, and Atkins is ketogenic and low-carb, ‘Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution’ is the book I recommend that you start with. Read it all the way through. Read the chapter with the instructions on how to do the actual diet every day for at least two weeks. Get the rules into your head.