The Temptations of Christmas

A diet around christmas time usually ends in disaster! With keto and the right planning this doesn’t have to be the case. What you need to do is think back to christmases past and what types of foods you have encountered that may not be keto friendly. Once you got that list, think about which ones you can live without eating Now I’m sure you are left with a list one one or two non keto friendly things. I personally was left with many, but they are all in the same “family”. Cookies and sweets! In my family we will be having a few holiday get togethers and without a doubt sweets will play a big role. Some will get placed out as pre dinner snacks and make an appearance again at the end of the meal as a sweet way to end it all. I know for me personally seeing my father enjoying a plate full of goodies will have me saying “just one won’t hurt’ and before long that one multiples and the guilt comes in and the whole eating healthy plan gets derailed.

I don’t want it to be that way this year, so I started researching alternatives to some of my favourite Christmas cookies…….Short Bread! I found many different keto friendly recipes on line. All of them were similar but varied slightly when it came to extra ingredients such as nuts, lemon flavour, maple flavour and such. I didn’t want anything fancy. I just wanted that buttery cookie with just a hint of sweet.  So I took all the various ideas I read and came up with my own recipe. It was quite simple and easy to make. I’ll post it here if you wish to try.

Chuck’s Keto Shortbread Cookies

2 cups Almond Flour

1/3 Xylitol or Any substitute you wish(may need to vary quantity depending on sweetness)

6 tsp melted butter

1 egg

Instructions

In large bowl mix together all ingredients until the dough is formed. (will be crumbly)

Place on a piece of plastic wrap and form into a tube. Wrap the plastic wrap tightly around the tube and place in the freezer for 30 to 45 minutes

remove from freezer and cut with a knife to about 30 even pieces

Bake @350 for 15 minutes or until golden brown on parchment lined baking sheet

Allow to cool and enjoy!

Nutritional Information

per 1 cookie

Calories: 49kcal

Protein: 0.7g

Carbs: 5g (Fibre 0.2g, Sugar 0.08g)

Fat: 3.6g (saturated 1.69g, unsaturated 0.8g)

Update

I wrote this post before I tasted and would suggest a few changes.  Use 1/4 cup sweetener and maybe cut the almond flour to 1 1/2 cups with 1/2 cups of coconut flour. The cookies are great but these tweaks will make them awesome!

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Keto My Way

 

My last post Keto Basics I gave a brief outline of the Ketogenics diet and how I understand it works. If you haven’t read this please read before reading this post. Today  I want to outline how I am currently doing keto. I say currently because I know eventually as I loose more and more weight my body will start to adapt and change how it uses the fats, carbs and proteins I put in it, so I will need to change up things once again.

To follow true keto you are told you need to restrict your carbs to under 20 grams per day in order to get your self into ketosis. Well this may be true fro some people its not always the case. I have done some research and found examples where you get into ketosis with limiting to less that 100 grams of carbs. This variation has a lot to do with your eating habits (diet) prior to making the cut in carbs.  For this reason I am allowing my self up to 50 grams per day.

I break down the 50 grams per day as 15g for Breakfast, lunch & dinner each. With 5 left for snacks. For most days I am hitting on average 35g per day. Even though I am at about 35g on average per day it’s quite difficult at times. Many foods that we look at as “healthy” tend to have a lot of carbs because of sugar content. For example carrots have 6.5 grams of carbs for a 2.5 ounce serving. This is because of the natural sugar content is 2.17g. This does not mean carrots are unhealthy and should not be eaten in ketogenics. What it does mean is the amount of carrots you are eating needs to be lowered to ensure you are staying under your carb limits for the day.

Another aspect of keto is keeping your fat content high. This is a big change for other diets I have been on and one I’m still working on getting higher each day. I do this by adding some MCT oil into my coffee each morning. The MCT oil has 14g of fat from 1tbs serving. I pair this with 1/4 cup of unsweetened coconut milk which has 1.7g of carbs and 1.2g of fat. In keto sites they refer to this as a variant of  bullet proof coffee.  BPC is technically a brand name so lets call this version keto coffee. Some people put mutter in the keto coffee instead of the milk/coconut milk. This would give more fat but also adds to the oily texture. Speaking of the oily texture what you need to do to get this mixed together I use a smoothie blender. Its makes a nice frothy coffee which I truly enjoy.  To get fats for other meals i try to add some olive oil when I can and eat red meat and salmon.

The last major piece of Ketogenics is protein. I’m still struggling to stay under the 96g per day I have allowed my self. On average I’m about 120g per day. This isn’t isn’t a crazy number but need to work on this. I get most of my protein from cheese and poultry.

 

No matter what diet you are follwing it’s highly recomeded you use some sort of food diary. I personally use a phone app called Lifesum, other people perfer a spreadsheet but its harder to track becuase you need to do more math and work on your own. I like the lifesum app becuase it gives me an a breakdown of all foods I eat. There are a few times the item is not in the data base, but I am able to add it on my own so it’s not in the data base. I also joined as a premium mmebership to unlock other features I like to use.  There are many apps so do a search and find one you like best.   

If you noticed I haven’t mentioned anything about calories that is because at this point I find no reason to limit these. Limiting calories would add another layer of things I’d need to “stress” about and at this point I’ve been loosing weight and inches quickly so no need to make that change.

This brings us to the end of this post. Next time I hope to discuss the positives and negatives I have noticed from being on keto for nearly 1 month.

Ketogenics Basics

Hey! Howdy! Hello!

In my last post I announced I lost about 20 pounds in 3 weeks doing something I called Keto. I guess I better explain more to you what keto is. There are many blogs and websites dedicated to Keto (aka Ketogenics) but  I will explain it to you how I see and understand it. I’m by no means an expert but have done quite a bit of research. I’ll try to explain how it’s done, why its done and how I’m adapting it to fit me over the next few posts. As you will see there are a few variations and you can change how strict you want to be depending on your needs, motivation or goals.  Lets get started……

I’m sure you all know that food is your bodies fuel that keeps it going. More accurately the sugar in the food is the fuel. I’m sure you also know that most foods contain protein, Carbohydrates (carbs) and fats (theres many others but they are unimportant to know at this point in time). Sure  we know those things, but what does it mean? Well, Proteins are used by the cells in the body to essentially create new cells and replace old ones. Carbs turn into sugar in your body which becomes the fuel to energize all your body functions.  Lastly you have fat, which really doesn’t have a job provided you are eating a large amount of carbs and sugar so a few things happen with it. It is often stored in your body for reserve energy if they body is ever starved and it needs the fat to keep operating.  So in essence this is the fat your see on an obese person. The second thing fat does is turns into complex lipid molecules which enter your blood stream and lead to blocked arteries and such (nothing good).

This is the process for the Standard diet, AKA The Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) that most people follow or at least told to follow. Keto and other low carb diets change this process up to have the fat (keytones) become the fuel by starving the body of carbs.

To better understand keytones we need to think back to the diets of our ancestors, I’m not talking grand parents here, we need to go back way back to the hunter and gather days. Back then food sources were not always available to them and they were not doing a lot of preparing meals or baking. Their diet consisted of meats and vegetables for the most part. They also were not eating every day, often they would be going a day or two without meals. At the same time even though they were without food they still needed the energy to keep their body running because they were hunting, gathering and trying not to become food themselves! Since they were not eating, the body started in to starvation mode and adapted from burning the carbs to having the liver convert the fat from the food in the body and the bits already stored in the body from previous meals. The production of keytones in the liver is called Ketosis and the act of getting your bodies into ketosis through dietary manipulation is called Ketogenics.

Getting into ketosis through ketogenics is generally easy to do but of course results vary person to person. Simply put Ketogenics is keeping your carb intake low, Protein consumption moderate and fats high. Ideally you want to break up your daily intake values to 5% carbs, 25% protein & 70% fats. Of course I believe this should be the ultimate goal however when starting out I have found it is not necessary needed to hit levels of carbs that low, but it all depends on your previous eating habits. For me I was eating a lot of   carbs from bagels, pizza french fries and sugary foods. So for me just cutting those foods out and still eating foods that contain moderate amounts of carbs has allowed me to get into ketosis easily.

I’m not going to get into full details of how I’m doing keto. In my next post I’ll give more information about that. I just wanted to give you at bit of information of how it works. Please keep in mind that I am not a doctor or nutritionists and I recommend you do your own research if you are thinking about starting Keto on your own. With that being said please feel free to message me through my facebook page  or email me at chunktochuck@gmail.com should you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks for reading.!

Chuck

 

Can is Being Kicked Again

Back for attempt number……….Er…….. too many to count. Just like those other times this time is different and its going to work this time.  The reality this time is those words are actually true. In the past when deciding to make changes in my life, loose weight and be the best me I could be I made vague statements like “I’m gonna eat healthier” or I’m gonna eat smaller portions”. The difference this time I’m actually following a a diet. A real diet, not just one I made up in my head with those “healthy foods” I’ve been told I’ve needed to eat for ages, AKA the food pyramid.

Starting November 26th I began eating what they call the keto lifestyle. I’ll get into more details on keto in future posts but I will say since the 1st day I have lost about 20 lbs and really feeling great. Energy is up, appetite is down and overall health is improving.

Today’s post is just going to be short and to the point. I wanted to let you know I’m back on the healthy living train and back to the blog (I know someone of you actually missed it). So please look for my future posts and possibly videos. So you don’t miss any posts please join my Facebook page From Chunk to Chuck

Thanks for reading

Chuck!

“Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today?” -Tim Fargo