Make Easter Eggs the Center of Your Low-Carb Holiday

When we choose to live a low-carb lifestyle, we give up many holiday traditions that focus on food. While Easter Dinner can always be adapted to fit your carbohydrate tolerance, if you ask any child what the most important aspect of the Easter holiday is, they’ll probably tell you…CANDY!

An Easter basket full of goodies often plays the center role in Easter festivities. Jelly beans, chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks, and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs are popular basket fillers. But there’s one strong holiday tradition attached to Easter that the low carber doesn’t have to give up.

                                             The Incredible, Edible Egg!

Make Easter Eggs the Center of Your Low-Carb Easter Holiday!
(Photo by Praktyczny Przewodnik)

Dr. Westman’s Thought of the Day

I was browsing through the low-carb videos over at YouTube the other day, looking for an Atkins Success Story. I wanted a video with distinct “before” and “after” pictures that I could display at the bottom of an article I’d written for Info Barrel about Atkins Induction. While doing that, I ran into a short video that spotlighted Dr. Westman and his take on low-carb foods.

Although most of what he said was already familiar to me, he did say something that caught my attention:

In order for a low-carb diet to be successful, we have to find foods to eat that are more tasty than the foods we were eating before…

That seemed to rock my world a little bit, as it fine-tuned something that I’ve been coming to realize for a while now.

The sense of taste, and the pleasure that eating gives us, plays a large role in whether a low-carb diet is sustainable – or not.

If you don’t like low-carb foods, or primal foods, or paleo foods, or whatever you’re doing, you won’t stick with the program for the rest of your life. You have to enjoy what you’re eating. You have to enjoy what you’re doing, or you’ll reach a point where you don’t care if you’re inside or outside of the carbohydrate-restriction wagon.

So with that thought in mind, I decided to look at Easter from a different perspective.

Yesterday’s Easter Eggs

Easter Egg Hunt in the Park
(Photo by Keith Laverack)

When I was growing up, we always went to the park for their Easter Egg hunt on the Saturday morning before Easter. I never found any eggs. The park divided us up into age groups, and the eggs for my group were too difficult to find, but we always went and participated anyway. We tried.

However, our personal Easter Egg hunt at home was fun and exciting. We spent most of Saturday afternoon coloring the eggs, and then my dad would hide them around the yard. After church, my siblings and I would have a contest to see who could find the most eggs.

Dying Easter Eggs
(Photo by vmiramontes)

Back then, before the Internet Age, we didn’t do anything spectacular with the eggs. We simply used an Easter Egg Coloring Kit, which offered us little colored pellets we dropped in water. That’s it. When I was a little bit older, the kits started offering special crayons and stickers, but nothing even remotely like you can find on the Internet today.

Today, the Internet has the capacity to spark quite a bit of creativity. We don’t have to settle for simple, colored eggs. We can get into the holiday and really let our personality and imagination come to life.

How to Make Adorable Easter Eggs for a Low-Carb Easter 

Beads Can Really Zazz Up Your Easter Eggs!
(Photo by MariyaZ)

Even if you're not particularly creative, take a stroll down the aisles of your local Walmart, crafts store, or material outlet to see what types of sewing notions and supplies might spark your interest. Buttons, rick rack, braid, ribbons, tiny bows, yarn, or even iron-on appliques can offer a wide variety of resources to turn a plain colored Easter Egg into a masterpiece. Even a set of movable eyes would look fantastic on a low-carb Easter Egg.

Alternatively, you could raid your old jewelry box, or take a visit to your local thrift store to see what old treasures might be available. The idea is to make your eggs something special. Something different. Something fun. But you don't have to turn the eggs into an exotic character. You can simply glue a piece of braid or ribbon to the egg, around the middle to divide it in half, and then dot it with other interesting trinkets, stickers, or paint.

Create an Adorable Easter Egg Display
(Photo by Laura)

When you look at what others have done, don't say, "That's too complicated for me," and then turn away. The idea isn't to copy what others have done. Sit back, look at the display for a while, and check out the principles they used to spark your own imagination and creativity. We tend to place so much emphasis on food when it comes to holidays, that we often give little time or thought to what makes Easter exciting!

I was drawn to this particular picture because I'd never thought about turning Easter Eggs into a nice holiday display before. They used a piece of cardboard for the base. Painted it to represent the ground. But look closely at the egg's faces. They're simply drawn with a marking pen. Yarn is glued on for hair, and the eggs themselves are either wrapped in foil, painted, or left their natural brown color.

So what could you do with colored markers? Foil? Tissue paper? Sticky shelf paper? Material scraps? How about patchwork eggs sitting on a decorative pillow? Or a face with a fabric flower arranged for the hair? In my own neck of the woods, the weather forecast for this weekend is snow. Cotton balls could be attractively stretched a bit, and arranged around the decorated Easter Eggs for the base of the display, rather than cardboard. Even decorated eggs sitting inside a fancy bowl would look nice for an Easter Dinner Centerpiece.

Use a Unique Covering for Your Easter Eggs
(Photo by Yana Sedlak)

From a distance, these creative Easter Eggs looked like they had been covered with a stretchy net of some type, but when I blew the picture up, I discovered it's actually a wire net. The eggs were left their natural brown color, and simply covered in something that allowed that brown color to show through. My thought was how pretty a little bit of stretch lace would look done this way. Stretch lace comes in a variety of patterns. If you know how to crochet, that would look nice too.

Paint Your Easter Eggs to Resemble Your Favorite Sport's Ball
(Photo by Daniel Spiess)

But Easter Eggs don't have to be pretty. They can be turned into anything that has a similar shape. In fact, decorating Easter Eggs isn't much different than decorating a pumpkin. All it takes is the ability to see relationships, such as turning them into a bouquet of balloons. However, an egg's irregular shape can be used to advantage as well.

In addition to painting an egg to look like a football, and having some type of character crossing the goal line with it, you can also set your eggs up to look like they were once round, and are now being squashed. Place a child's 4-wheel truck on top of one, or have an action figure put their foot on it in triumph.

You could also flip the whole egg idea completely on its head, and use the eggs for the foundation of your display instead.

Give Your Easter Eggs a Bit of Character
(Photo by Yana Sedlak)

Okay. Not everyone is creative, but look how this simple display of Easter Eggs is absolutely unique. It reminds me of Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall built of sugar cubes that I placed on a sheet cake once.

Granted, you wouldn't want the cracked egg to be sitting around for longer than Easter Dinner, and probably wouldn't want to imitate last year's Halloween fad of having a carved pumpkin throw up its insides, but it certainly makes the point that you don't have to have a special flair of creativity to be able to have a little bit of low-carb fun for Easter.

In fact, since we're trying to remove food from the center of our lives, getting into Easter Egg Decorating is a great way to do that.