Healthy Diet at Home

Don't Have to Give Up Healthy Holiday Treats on Low Carb When you're on a low-carb diet, the holidays can be rough. Everywhere you turn, there is candy, cookies, quick breads, and other carby treats enticing you to go off plan. Whether it's an office party pot luck, hot cocoa and marshmallows, warm cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, or the cookie plate the neighbor sent over on Christmas Eve, holiday traditions offer multiple temptations and opportunities to chuck your keto diet and go face down into those unhealthy treats. As habitual creatures who consistently seek out pleasurable experiences, tradition feels comforting and familiar. In past years, you've understood that the holidays only come around once a year, so there was nothing to feel guilty about if you ate a few too many treats. Moving into your first low-carb Christmas changes all of that. You can feel apprehensive and worried. Many past traditions have been disrupted. A low-carb diet is a massive lifestyl...

How to Roast a  Thanksgiving Turkey with Crispy Skin (Photo credit: Gerry , CC BY 2.0 ) No matter which low-carb diet you're following, the turkey is the center of attention on your Thanksgiving Table. High in protein, turkey meat is a nice source of zinc, iron, potassium, and B vitamins. It also has no carbohydrates, so unless you have a metabolic defect in processing proteins, you don't have to limit your portion size. At least, not for the holidays. Going back for seconds on turkey, or even thirds, won't throw you out of ketosis. For that reason, learning to make the perfect holiday turkey can make the difference between serving up a great holiday meal and one that's just so-so. However, most people have their own ideas about what makes a perfectly roasted bird. Ideas about baking it upside down or right-side up, soaking it in brine or injecting it with an herb-butter solution, sticking to organically grown versus a conventional turkey all fuel debates at turkey ti...

Are the Consequences Worth Going Off Plan? The holidays can be a difficult time to diet. Office parties, family gatherings, and social events, as well as the holiday itself, puts you around food. Lots of food. And usually, the type of food that isn't found on any low-carb plan. If you're new to a low-carb diet, it's hard enough trying to figure out how low carb works without having to add temptation into the mix, but newbies are not the only ones who might not understand the consequences that come when reaching for that Thanksgiving roll or small piece of pumpkin pie. If you're considering going off plan for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year, here's what you need to know in order to make a well-informed decision. Read more »

A Low-Carb Diet is Not Always Gluten Free (Photo Credit: Richard Masoner ,  CC BY-SA 2.0 ) The gluten-free community isn't very happy right now. As those in the entertainment world continue to announce that they are going gluten free, not because they have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, but because they want to shed a few pounds, we have a horde of groupies and those who have heard that gluten-free diets are great for weight loss deciding that ditching the gluten is an important way to gain better health. Typically, a low-carb dieter would have no problem with that, but since a lot of these people don't understand what a gluten-free diet actually is, they have put together a weight-loss plan based on their own ideas and incorporated these distorted dieting habits into that new gluten-free diet. Unfortunately, those habits often tell them it's okay to eat a little gluten once in a while. What has gluten-free folks riled up is that these so-called gluten-f...

How to Use the  Atkins Pre-Maintenance Plan When Times Get Rough Thinking about Atkins pre-maintenance might seem premature for many low-carb dieters, especially since it's usually saved until you've shrunk down to 5 or 10 pounds from goal. However, there are times when this plan can be quite useful, even today. Taking a moment to understand what the pre-maintenance phase of Atkins is, and isn't, as well as when it can be helpful to keep you on plan, will enable you to face important challenges in your life and empower you to make the best decisions when those challenges arise. You don't want to lose all of the hard work you've accomplished so far. And that can certainly happen if life interferes before you've gotten anywhere near your goal. Read more »

Low-Carb Diets Designed to Eliminate Hunger and Cravings In my low-carb travels lately, I've run into quite a few folks who are very frustrated about how slowly they are losing weight on the Atkins Diet. These people expected the Atkins Nutritional Approach to perform in a way it wasn't designed for. Internet myths and rumors, comparing yourself to others, and misunderstanding the science behind why carbohydrate restriction results in weight loss can bring about tons of needless struggle and pain. The more I read, the more I've realized that unrealistic expectations and misconceptions have reached epidemic proportions within the low-carb community. While some people do experience dramatic weight loss, that isn't the norm. Often, the people who find low carb easy are brand new to a low-carb diet and even dieting itself, so their body hasn't adapted to what they're doing yet. The idea behind restricting carbohydrates isn't fast weight loss. Low carb is about f...

Why is the Atkins Diet Not Working this Time? Most of the comments or emails I get come from people not new to low carb. They've previously been on Atkins or some other form of low-carb diet and returned to carbohydrate restriction because it worked so well for them. Perhaps you feel the same way. Your expectations are high. You strongly believe that the diet should work as rapidly and easily as before. However, that isn't happening. You're frustrated because you aren't losing weight. Maybe you're struggling to cope because you have only dropped a pound or two all month. Perhaps, you're exercising, but your weight keeps bouncing rather than going down. You're upset. Didn't Dr. Atkins promise that if you gave up the carbs losing weight would be easy? Didn't he promise you that a low-carb diet would change your life once and for all? Yes, he did. The Atkins Diet claims to be the most effective diet out there, so what's going on? Why is the Atkins D...