A few asking for low carb food lists....

Brilliant help!! Think this should be passed to all medics!! Lol!!
Great info....

 

Lower carb options for traditional high carb foods:

mashed potatoes: mashed cauliflower or mashed celeriac work very well, add butter or splash of cream if doing LCHF. I like to add garlic and herbs.

Chips: celeriac works well instead of oven chips, or cut courgette into a fat chip shape and coat in egg and almond flour ‘batter’ and bake into a courgette fritter/chip

Dauphinoise potatoes: Celeriac works really well in place of potatoes, add plenty of cream, butter and garlic for a LCHF version.

Pasta: "pasta" quills - use courgettes slices into sort of chunks instead, steam or cook briefly in boiling water – don’t overcook or like pasta it will go mushy, serve with low carb sauce.
Small patty pan squash cut into quarters also work well, cook until just tender.
for fettuccini or tagliatelle – can use courgettes cut into thicker strips
for spaghetti - spaghetti squash is great when I can find it or can use courgette ( I use a julienne peeler much cheaper than a spiraliser ) but needs to be cooked gently or it will fall apart, I normally add to sauce to be warmed up
for cannelloni pasta tubes - I use aubergine slices rolled around the filling or leeks carefully sliced to open them into a sheet and then rolled around the filling .
for lasagne sheets - aubergine or courgette sliced lengthways or leeks folded all work well, don’t need precooking.

Bread - use nut flours instead of wheat flour, lots of recipes on forums such as oopsie bread or almond flour breads, I add a spoonful of ground flaxseeds to add fibre to the ‘bread’

Wraps – large lettuce leaves make great sandwich filling or burger holders

Crisps - melted cheese blobs is yummy

Nachos – use thick strips of raw pepper to serve guacamole or chilli beef etc

Gratin/breadcrumb topping - Almond or coconut flour instead of bread works great, add savoury seasoning such as herbs or garlic for gratin toppings etc as the nut flours can be a little sweet.

Crumble topping – use ground almonds instead of wheat flour for sweet crumble topping, fruits don’t need any extra sweeteners or sugar, add cinnamon and mixed spice for added sweet taste without needing sugar, serve with double cream for extra sweet taste.

 

Some new ideas fore there and I've been a lower carber for years... Seeing celeriac though... We love it but it causes me and my hubby (non diabetic and fit as a butchers dog!!) stomach problems..

 

There is a carbs and Cals app for your phone ,too which I find invaluable!

 

Um... Loved that list, printed it out, now then... I was just wondering if there's a list of things NOT to buy? That would be really handy, might save a lot of money too!

 

Hi @FranOnTheEdge

In very general terms I use a 5% or less rule of thumb for working out if things are low carb or not. If its below 5% I can eat it in reasonable portions, if its between 5 and 10% I will try and test, above 10% I proceed with caution depending on how many carbs would be in a portion.
BUT everyone is different so I test regularly before and after foods and I know roughly how many carbs I can eat without spiking - don't worry after a few months of testing you will start to get the hang of it.

So I can't tolerate porridge in a 'normal' portion (some people can though) but I can eat 1 small square of very dark chocolate without raising my BG levels everyone is different so its just a matter of testing

 

Er... 5% what? (sorry but I'm very new to all this)
I like the bit about the chocolate, I find that helps me sleep better and sometimes through the night.

 

5% = 5g carbs per 100g of foodstuff
10% = 10g carbs per 100g foodstuff etc etc

 

Yes, I saw that on Amazon, but I already got another app called "MyFitnessPal" supposed to scan barcodes of food packaging in supermarkets but I can't figure out how to use it... sigh.

 

Oh carbs, right. A recently bought "Madeira Chicken" from Asda was 5.9g per 100g carbs, so that would be a test and see one, right?
But what about food you make yourself, how do you know what that is? Like I made Turkey bolognaise, with - obviously - turkey mince, and a carton of chopped toms, an onion, a couple of carrots, a tin of red kidney beans, freeze dried tomato powder, baobab powder (said to be good for diabetics) an oxo cube, salt pepper and sweetener. What about something like that?

 

5.9g/100g is low. As for that turkey bolognese you will need to work out the carbs in each ingredient, add them all up and that will give you the total carbs in that meal. Sounds like really hard work but it soon becomes 2nd nature

 

And then decide how many portions are in that meal...

Its hugely important for Insulin Dependent Persons to have correctly calculated carbs per meal but not quite so necessary to be for persons on tablets or diet... Still good to be accurate as possible but it won't put you in dire straits to have a one off miscalculation !!!

 

This is going to be so difficult, I'm practically number blind... And I thought Slimming World was hard to figure out. (I'm just on tablets, doing the diet part myself and have been since before diagnoses.) This is another darned good reason not to wait for the health service to sort out their 'education' courses. I don't feel I can wait that long.

 

It will NEVER become 2nd nature for me, numbers have always been like a foreign language to me, my brain simply cannot retain them. I'm in big trouble aren't I?

 

Hello franOnTheEdge, your doing well, you can use my fitness pal app to work out carbs in a home prepared meal, and it will also tell you the total cals too.....what we all need to keep in mind is as diabetic our bodies have stored and are finding it hard to deal with excess glucose...so it's important to understand what foods and HOW much we need to eat to bring down our excess levels, so all the best on your journey to getting your bs's under control. Clive

 

I am rubbish with numbers which is why I use the MyFitnessPal app all the time. The more you use it the easier it gets. A huge amount of carb info is already in its database - I think I've only had to manually input one food item in the last month. I have found it easier to use on my Kindle rather than my phone because of the bigger screen but the scanner bit works better on my phone.

You can copy meals from one day to another (great if you regularly have - say - the same thing for breakfast) and plan and store recipes it's just a case of playing with it until you feel happier using it.

 

Oh no..you won't be in trouble. To start with..if you want to make post about particular recipe..write what ingredients you use and their weights...I'm sure one of us will be able to tell you about the carb content of finished meal. Then you just need to tell us how many portions you get out if all...and we can tell you how many carbs per portion.

As for the 2nd nature...it will come. You are bound to repeat some recipes/ foods..so then you already have good idea what carb levels will be without calculating them each and every time....

See...there is always way around these things if you feel like you are struggling!

 

Use the recipe builder on myfitnesspal. If you have a link for the recipe, you can just add the link and it will import the ingredients and (try to) pull the ingredients and find nutrition information. You may have to tweak the ingredient list and fix some of the nutrient information by altering quantities or doing a new ingredient search.

Once my recipe is built and the food cooked, I weigh it and enter the number of total grams as the number of servings. That way each "serving:" is one gram. (If the weight is over 1000 grams, I typically have to divide the number of grams by 100 so each serving is 100 grams, rather than 1.

Once I build a recipe, I typically update the quantities and number of servings each time I make it so the numbers are precise.

Just play with it - it doesn't bite

 

Dietdoctor http://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/vegetables has some great images on what is low carb and quantity

 

thanks v helpful