Eating well deliciously!
A warm chocolate cake fresh from the oven, the microwave oven that is. This quick keto chocolate mug cake really hits the spot when you’re craving something sweet but don’t want to do all the work to make an entire cake. Just whip this recipe up and you’ll be enjoying a decadent chocolate cake with no added sugar! You can customize this recipe even more to lower the total number of carbs per serving.
These keto chocolate fat bombs are sweet, creamy, crunchy and delicious! Best of all they’re sugar-free and full of healthy fats and antioxidants. To make this confection even more chocolatey you can substitute the coconut oil with edible cocoa butter. Enjoy!
It’s been a while since I’ve done a meal post, so I decided to do a write-up of my latest way of eating – intermittent fasting combined with the keto diet. Up until the beginning of this month, I’ve been following what I call a keto-ish diet, meaning that I followed a moderate keto diet where I allowed myself up to 50 grams of carbs per day.
Doing a moderate keto diet was definitely working to help me lose inches, but the scale was barely budging. You can imagine how disheartening it is when you strictly follow a diet for very little weight loss seen on the scale. My weight loss journey is ongoing, so I decided to once again tweak my way of eating to boost weight loss beyond losing just inches.
Enter Intermittent Fasting or IF. It turns out that when coupled with the keto diet intermittent fasting (IF) is even more effective for fat loss than keto alone. Since I’ve started doing both, I’ve noticed a steady weight loss of between 1 to 1.5 pounds every week. This may not seem to be a lot to some, but to me, it was a giant leap forward.
For this post, I will show an example of a Keto IF meal plan for a typical day. I’ll first discuss a brief primer on the various schedules a person can follow while doing IF then move on to some of the foods I enjoy on a Keto-IF diet.
My post on Intermittent Fasting and Keto takes a more in-depth look at combining IF with keto so I won’t get into too much detail here. I’ll just give a brief overview of the types of IF fasting schedules that you can follow. The main idea is to choose a fasting time slot that works best with your lifestyle.
When doing IF you can choose to eat during a four, six or eight-hour window and fast for the rest of the time. The window you choose depends on your own personal daily schedule and goals. I do IF on an 8-hour eating window, meaning that I have my first meal at noon and my last meal by 8 pm. The rest of the 16 hours of my day are spent fasting.
I find this schedule very easy to manage because much of my fast time is spent asleep. I wake up at around 7:00 a.m. so I only spend 5 hours awake during my fast. You would think that I’d experience a bit of discomfort, but that is rare, and if I do feel a hunger pang or two, I just have a glass of seltzer water and I’m good to go.
The main point is if you decide to try IF, you get to choose the eating window that works best for you. Next up, I focus on describing examples of keto-friendly meals that I have within my 8-hour eating window including breakfast, snacks, and dinner.
I am a creature of habit so I can basically eat the same thing every day without getting bored. I know that others may like to change things up so feel free to check out my recipe page for some ideas. Following are some of the foods and beverages I use for my noon breakfast:
This breakfast usually totals between 500 and 600 calories depending on the low carb flour I use for my low carb bread or tortilla. This is perfect because it sets me up for successfully eating enough calories during my 8-hour eating window.
Since I started IF this month, one of the side effects I noticed is that I rarely, if ever, feel hungry. This means that by my three o’clock lunchtime, I often forget to eat. This causes me a bit of anxiety because I know I need to get my calories in before the close of my eating window.
Eating when you’re not very hungry is no fun, so I’ve devised a few snack ideas and small lunches to keep me on track. A typical day’s IF lunch or snack may include:
These light snack lunches are just enough to keep me sated without that uncomfortable feeling of being too full. Of course, the sky is the limit with great fresh ingredients anyone can put together for a light meal. Just use your favorite healthy foods to make a satisfying meal that will hold you until dinner.
I have dinner between 6:30 and 7:30 pm and it usually consists of a protein with a side of vegetables. This keeps life very simple for me and dinner is definitely the easiest meal for me to prepare. I make liberal use of frozen vegetables that are quick and easy to prepare after a long day of work. Here are some examples of a typical Keto-IF dinner:
You get the main idea. I pair my favorite proteins with healthy vegetable sides. There are literally thousands of recipes available on the internet that anyone can use to create their own Keto-IF dinner combinations.
After having dinner, I usually still have between 100 to 300 calories and about 20 grams of carbs remaining for my daily requirement. I use these calories to give myself occasional treats that remain with the confines of being Keto and low carb. I use these calories in the form of simple snacks like:
Again, the sky’s the limit when it comes to delicious and satisfying keto snacks. Use your imagination to come up with your own combinations, just make sure that all snacks are within your daily caloric and/or carb range.
Just when I think I’ve found the perfect weight loss plan, up comes another one to tempt me away from my current plan. This would normally hold true to my past pattern, however, I truly believe that my advancement from Keto to Keto-IF is an evolution rather than a switch to the latest fad.
The more I learn about IF, the more I am convinced that autophagy is the ideal way to safely lose excess fat. Autophagy is not concerned with weight loss, it’s concerned with using the time off from digestion to repair the body and “clean up” cellular debris. When we IF we naturally create a deficit of calories that forces our bodies to rely on stored fat for energy.
It never ceases to amaze me just how wonderful our bodies are. When we start feeding ourselves well and when we IF, we form the perfect environment for several health benefits including but not limited to:
The best part for me is that I find IF to be the easiest weight-loss plan by far! I love and need structure and IF provides that structure by telling me when to eat and when to fast. Add in knowing how much of a calorie deficit I need to lose weight and I eat accordingly. Viola! Automatic weight loss!
I’ll continue this experiment for the rest of the month to see how much I can lose compared to when I was only doing the Keto diet. I have a sneaking feeling though that this will be one lifestyle change I’ll keep. The results are too great to do otherwise.
Do you want to try or have you tried IF and or Keto? Let’s discuss in the comments. Until next time: Happy Eating!
I recently reviewed the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix, so this review will be specific to Low Karb’s low-carb Keto flour. As you may know by now, I follow a keto-ish lifestyle and, I am always on the lookout for keto-friendly, low-carb flour. I Read more
When it comes to weight loss, many of us, myself included, look for a magic bullet that will help us to quickly lose a lot of fat in the shortest period possible. Alas! That’s not how it works because losing weight will take as Read more
I have been baking low-carb bread ever since I started living the low-carb lifestyle. As described in my article on low-carb flour substitutes, there are a variety of options when it comes to low-carb baking. However, as pointed out in that post, these substitutes don’t work in the same way as regular wheat flour and may need a lot of manipulation to get results that come close to the real thing.
Because I am always on the lookout to make my low-carb lifestyle easier, I always keep an eye out for the latest low-carb flour or mixes that can yield good baked goods without sacrificing flavor or texture. Enter Low Karb Keto Bread Mix. No, I didn’t misspell “carb” It’s really spelled as “karb” on the package. I guess the name is all part of the new way of naming things for maximum cool factor.
In any event, I decided to try out the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix because it promised that you can enjoy fresh baked low-carb bread by simply adding water! So, was it worth it? Read along for my review of the new Low Karb Keto Bread Mix.
Low Karb Keto Bread Mix is made by Low Karb – a company specializing in creating keto-friendly, low-carb cereals, scones, and bread & biscuit flour mixes. I’d never heard of them before and they appear to be a fairly new company. I set about reading up on their low carb keto bread mix and discovered that it contained a few familiar ingredients including:
On its face, this ingredient list is not too bad, but Carbalose flour is a highly processed product and should only be used in moderation. Palm oil is another no-no because the cultivation of palm trees has a great negative impact on the environment, especially deforestation and its concomitant loss of animal habitat. Learn more about this here.
These facts notwithstanding, the folks over at Low Karb promise to make your keto or low-carb lifestyle easier by allowing you to make a quick and easy-to-make low-carb bread in about an hour and a half. According to the package, you get 10 slices of low-carb bread with only 90 calories per serving and 2 grams of net carbs. Pretty impressive!
So, how do we use this low-carb bread mix? Here is where the beauty and simplicity of this product come in. To make a low-carb loaf of bread using this bread mix, all you need to do is add 9 ounces of warm water. Easy right? It takes a few more steps to make the bread as shown on the package. To make the low-carb bread using this mix you need to do the following steps:
That’s it! That’s all it takes to easily bake a fresh loaf of keto-friendly low-carb bread that is reminiscent of regular high-carb wheat bread. Is it really this easy? What are the actual results of using this bread mix and following the directions as stated on the package?
I followed the instructions as written on the package and made some observations along the way. The first thing I noticed is that after kneading the dough and letting it proof for an hour, there was very little rise to the dough. The dough seemed to spread out more than actually rising so the result was a disc-shaped bread.
I baked the loaf at 350 degrees for 22 minutes as instructed, but that was not enough time for the bread to develop any color. I decided to leave it in the oven for an additional 10 minutes and that was just the right amount of time. See the final results to the left.
As you can see, the outcome is golden colored a flat disc of a loaf. I let it cool and cut out a slice to see what the crumb looked like. I took a bite and was pleased to find a nice texture, not too soft, crumbly or, dense. There is also a hint of sweetness to the bread due to the sucralose (Splenda) contained in the Carbalose flour.
At the end of the day, the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix produced a decent, low-carb loaf of bread that has a great texture and good taste. But is this enough?
Making a loaf a decent low-carb bread is no easy feat, but the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix promises otherwise. The question though is the convenience worth the price you pay? Let’s take a look at the price breakdowns and the pros and cons of this product.
I paid $12.99 with Prime on Amazon for a pack of Low Karb Keto Bread Mix which makes one loaf of low-carb bread with about 10 servings or slices per container. You’re essentially paying $12.99 for a small loaf of low-carb bread.
Conversely, you can purchase a 3 lb bag of Carbalose flour for $16.98 ($9.99 + $6.99 for shipping) and make nearly 5 loaves of low-carb bread for about $6.30 per loaf. Making a great-tasting low-carb bread using a simple recipe is far cheaper than the $12.99 you’d pay for one loaf of the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix.
Sure you’d have to do a little more than add water to make your own low carb bread but by following this simple recipe, you can have results that look a lot more substantial than the flat disc produced by Low Karb Keto Bread Mix, with fewer calories and just 3 net carbs per serving.
If you have a lot of money to spend and you want the convenience of baking fresh low-carb bread quickly, then, by all means, go ahead and get a pack of Low Karb Keto Bread Mix. I recommend you use a baking pan if you want to have anything resembling a loaf of bread as opposed to a flattened dough discus. You can try to shape it all you want, but without a pan, all you’ll get is a flattened loaf.
Keep in mind that even though it’s convenient, the Low Karb Keto Bread Mix produces a rather small loaf of bread that may leave you unsatisfied and your wallet a lot lighter!
Have you tried this baking mix yet? Do you have a favorite low-carb flour? Let us know in the comments and until next time: Happy Eating!
