Chips, Dips, Snacks and Chocolate!

While I've been stuck at work, there hasn't been much time for cooking. So I thought I'd post up some low carb snacks and 'bought' foods that I found really useful on my rush for munchies.

So here's my list of what I found

Atkin's Indulgence Chocolate Bars - Assuming you don't react to polyols, these are a 2g carb chocolate bar that easily replaces the branded ones. I like the Milk Chocolate and Coconut ones because they taste just like a Bounty to me. For buying them, I found the cheapest deal was a box of 15 bars for £12 on Amazon.co.uk. It's about the same price as any chocolate bar these days if you buy them in bulk. If you're willing to pay a bit more for them individually, you can pick them up at Boots and Tesco. They've become my 'grab a snack when I'm out' fix.

Atkin's Milkshakes - Although they aren't the most amazing milkshakes in the world, with only 1.3g carbs and filling enough to be a meal, they do make a great breakfast or snack. I like the Milk Chocolate best, my other half likes the Cafe Royale best and neither of us liked the Strawberry one; it's more like a yoghurt. Again available at Boots and Tesco for a snack on the move.

Atkin's Day Break Bar - These are a great breakfast cereal replacement. They taste like any cereal bar and have only 2g of carbs (check the polyols if you react to them). There is a wide range of flavours from cranberry to chocolate chip.

Hovis Nimble Bread - It comes in white or brown and it tastes and looks just like bread. It's a bit high carb with 8g per slice, but you can still have a sarnie with it as long as you meat n veg all the other meals that day.

Slim Pasta - Looks and tastes like pasta. It's got no carbs and it's easy to cook. All good, and I got mine from Holland and Barrett. It's made from a vegetable, so no chemicals or weird things in it. Great for pasta lovers.

La Tortilla Factory Low Carb Wraps/Nachos - I love these for a quick wrap or to make some nacho chips with them. Lots of excuses for sour cream and guacamole with them too. At 3g carbs per wrap you can eat these quite freely as long as you load them up with something filling. To make them into nachos, just slice them up with a pizza cutter and throw them in a deep fat fryer on high heat until they darken. Don't leave the fat on them (kitchen towel dry them when you get them out) or they lose their crispyness. The darker you cook them, the crispier they get. I usually slice up 2 wraps into 16 nacho chips and add a lot of creamy sauces, cheese, salad and chilli to the meal. Great with dips

Low Carb Nutella! There are a few of these types of spreads. Again, no good if you react to polyols, but I don't, so I found this was heavenly treat for the chocoholic within. The brand I got was called 'Cavalier no Added Sugar Choco Hazelnut Spread'. It tastes just like Nutella to me. Great for glazing low carb cakes or just about anything you want to do with it.

Outside of the snacks range and for the bakers out there, I also found some new flours that were great to work with for pastry and doughnuts (doughnut recipe coming when I get it written down).

Carbalose - a low carb flour that doesn't have the flaxy flavour. Great to work with on anything, but you usually need some wheat gluten with it to make it work like flour.

Atkin's Baking Mix - I made some fab white bread rolls using this. It looks and works like flour, I just need to stick a bit of spelt in next time to make the flavour perfect (it does have a mild soya flavour).

I think that's my main findings so far... Apparently there is a Sarah Lee low carb bread coming out soon called Delightful, but I've yet to find it on sale anywhere in the UK.

Oh, and I tried the low carb pototo mash mix. It sucked, but was okay to use in a cheese and onion pasty as a potato replacement. That being said, using a potato is okay in those too. 1 potato for 6 pasties isn't going to be high carb as long as you don't eat all 6 pasties in one day ^^.

I hope these are helpful

Bluebell13 said:

Thaank you so much Claire for this information - I am quite new to all this and have learnt a lot from your post. I hadn't realised that Boots did the Atkins bars and such.

Looking forward to the Doughnut recipe - sounds good.

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Glad it's helpful.

One thing to be wary of is that it's best to avoid these type snacks for the first two weeks of dieting (the ketosis stage). During the first two weeks on a low carb diet you want as low carb as you can get. 0g of carbs is the best number for the first two weeks, but I found sticking to under 20g of carbs a day worked for me. So for the first couple of weeks, I'd stick to meat, dairy and veg to make your body start using fats for energy instead of carbs. But once you pass that stage of the diet, these snacks are all fine. Just make sure you eat a varied diet, and just have one chocolate bar for a snack etc. A varied diet with lots of proteins and vitamins is the best way forward.

One thing I will say for the Atkins snacks, they're all very filling. You really don't need more than one of them.

I'm three months in on my diet now and 30lbs lighter

I hope yours goes just as well

WhitbyJet said:

It's all low carb that's true but for goodness sake read the ingredients list!! Full of junk and artificial rubbish.
Make your own treats using the best and natural ingredients and freeze your treats. This way you are always prepared for when a snack attack strikes.

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I do agree that making your own is healthier. It always is. But when you work 16 hours a day and are constantly on the move, sometimes you need something easy to find. There are some great low carb fudge recipes that can replace most of these, but it's finding the time to make them. This is just my 'on the move' fix, certainly not a diet plan, but the Atkins bars are useful when you're still finding recipes and starting out. The focus here is low carb, not perfect super foods. These work fine for me once in a while on my low carb diet. So, it's good enough for me, but perhaps not for everyone.

I think it's down to individual choice when it comes to what we consume. I'm losing weight and trying to beat Type2 diabetes. Anything that helps me do that works for me.

Andy12345 said:

hi, I like the atkins bars too, asda and sainsburys do them too next to the slimfast shakes in the medicine isle, but Tesco tends to have a better range, I only eat the chocolate decadence and cocnut and they always have those luckily

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I didn't know they were in Sainsburys. I'll check it out there too. Yeah, I found them near the medicines in Tesco's too.

I've not heard of the Scarsdale diet, but the two weeks on no carbs will put your body into Ketosis (where it looks for carbs for energy, can't find them and starts using fats for energy instead.) This is a good thing, because you want your body using fats for energy. Fats provide proteins and all kinds of good things, so they make a useful energy source. Carbs have nothing nutritional in them that the human body needs.

Ketosis will give you a day or two where you feel tired during the first two weeks. This is when your body is freaking out and looking for an energy source because it can't find a carb. Once your body changes over to using fats for energy instead, which it does pretty quickly, you'll feel great. But just be aware of that 1-2 day tired that will probably hit you in the beginning (in my case, it was 1 day of tired during the whole diet).

Ideally, you want to stay in ketosis for the duration of the diet. Eg: Keep using fats for energy. So, I'd worry that the two weeks on carbs again will knock you out of ketosis, and you'd just bounce back and forth from knackered to not.

Basically if your body uses carbs for energy, your fats sit on your body (usually around your waist). If your body uses fats for energy, it will burn off all the fats you eat and the ones around your middle, therefore you lose weight easily. You can't really eat too many fats they are so filling. And trust me, I tried on my diet lol.

The Scarsdale diet sounds as if it will mess with your energy source, which I can only imagine would send your body into permanently freaked out mode. The carbs and then not thing would confuse it. I don't know, but it sounds as if it would. Really, you only want to go through ketosis once on the diet and stay in it until the weight's gone.

Reduced carbs on the second week could keep you using fats for energy. It might be worth getting the little machine to check if you are still in ketosis (I think they're 20 quid on Amazon) with that diet. If your carb intake is low enough over a fortnight, then you 'should' stay in ketosis and can eat all the fats you want on all weeks. The body doesn't measure by days, so as long as you don't go insane on carbs in week2 it probably would work, but I'd get one of those machines to check Ketosis levels during the second week, so you can make sure you don't start using carbs for energy again.

The Bergstein diet (the one I'm on) is more go into ketosis once, then keep low carbs after it until the weight is gone. But cutting carbs isn't too hard. Replace sugar with Splenda, make some low carb pizza bases and breads, use no carb pasta etc. It depends on what you like to eat, but there usually is a low carb version of everything that tastes the same. It's not a hard diet to do 20g of carbs a day and eat as much fat as you want. I just got remission from doing the Bergstein diet (and dropped 2 stone so far).

I think on the diet you're trying it's a case of finding the right carb intake for that second week and sticking to it.

I hope this helps

Hey Paul

I haven't been checking mine. I just assumed that 20g a day of carbs was working because my weight was coming off at a regular 2lbs a week. I weighed in once a week on the same day at the same time to track my progress and kept count of my carbs every day. That's all I did, and it worked. I think if you are keeping track of your carbs (30g or less a day sounds fine) and you are keeping track of your weight loss (it drops roughly 2lbs a week) then you've got nothing to worry about. At least, that's how it worked for me.

If the weight had stopped coming off me, I would have bought a ketogenic measuring device and got off my **** and done more exercise. But it didn't, so I didn't feel it was neccessary.

With the Scarsdale diet, I think the measure of ketosis would be useful because there won't be any tracking of carbs in that second week of that diet, but if you're on the Bergstein diet, I can't see 30g a day or less of carbs taking you out of ketosis. I think people on here have gone up to 50g of carbs and continued to lose weight. If it helps, I stuck to 20g a day on my diet.

You are eating a lot of fats I hope too? Cheese, meats and protein based flours. You need fats for energy on keto diets. They fuel your body, so make sure there is some protein-based fat in the diet too. If you eat meat, it's nice an easy. Bacon, fish, chicken, beef etc. are all good on the diet. 0 carbs and lots of fats and proteins. If you're a veggie, like me. I went with cheese, cream, avacado, and high protein flours to get my fats and proteins in me.

Andy12345 said:

bought some today in sainsburys



Sent from the Diabetes Forum App

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Ocado just delivered some to me (In fact. I want one now lol)

paul-1976 said:

Hi Claire!

It's certainly great for weight loss and maintenance and I'm at my ideal level of weight now and I'm maintaining nicely and use the regime mainly for BG control and to keep my Insulin requirements as a T1 as low as possible..I do have plenty of natural fats in my diet which stop me from feeling hungry between meals and have swapped 'frankenstein' fats for natural sat fats such as lard,real butter,olive oil for dressings on salads,walnuts,eggs,heavy cream,meats(cooked,cold cuts),stir fries,olives and antipasti for snacks and I must say I really enjoy this way of life and what it has done for my bloodwork and hbA1c and the like...it takes some getting used to in the early days but now I'll never look back. Nice to meet you! :wink:

Best wishes

Paul

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You're further ahead than I am I reckon I've got another month to go before I'm my perfect weight, but as a T2 I've just had the all clear from the doctor. My blood tests now shows me as not diabetic anymore, but I've gotta wait a year before I'm allowed to call it remission. The thing I'm wondering is what do I do when I hit my ideal weight? Like you, I'm really happy on the diet. I can make it a lifestyle change and happily never eat a carb again, but if I continue to lose weight that would be a problem. What level of carbs do you use to maintain? Will my current diet work as a maintaining one too? If it does, then that'll work for me .

I'm the same on my fats. Butter, cream, cheese, eggs, olive oil. I'm a veggie, so no meats. I tend to use flax style flours to pump up my iron count, which prior to all this had always been shockingly low.

It's great to meet you too

Kat100 said:

Thank you Claire for sharing so much....I am going shopping...you kind information was really useful to me. Kx

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I'm glad it helped There are lots of great low carb things out there, but finding them can be a bit of a challenge.