Tuna and egg salad

This is very simple to make, but satisfying enough for dinner for 2. It is a variant on a Nicoise salad, but does not have any potatoes in it.

Ingredients

For the salad

4 hard boiled eggs, sliced
1 Tin of tuna in oil, drained
Half a jar of black olives, pitted
Lots of rocket, enough to make a thick layer in the bowls before you put the other ingredients in
4 tomatoes, sliced

Optional ingredients for the salad: 

Capers, green olives, anchovies, toasted pine nuts

For the dressing

Olive or cold pressed rapeseed oil
Balsamic vinegar, good stuff is better as its flavour dominates this dressing. You don't need much
1 tsp english mustard
Salt and pepper

Instructions

Get a jar with a screw top lid on it. A clean jam jar is fine, but a screw top plastic food storage container is better. Pour in about 1 cm deep of oil. Add the mustard and salt and pepper. Pour in some balsamic vinegar. Less than half the quantity of oil should do the trick. Close the lid and give it a good hard shake.
Line the serving bowls with rocket. Arrange the other ingredients on top. Drizzle the dressing over.

Low Carb Hospitality

I attended an event at Google in Dublin a couple of days ago. The catering was very impressive, but as you can see from the picture, not very low carb. This was afternoon tea for those feeling peckish after lunch. There was something similar in the morning and lots of options for lunch - low and high carb.

The point here is that it can be very difficult to stick to a low carb diet (or indeed any diet) when someone else is feeding you. To be fair to Google, they asked me twice by email if I had special dietary needs and I thought, 'I'll be fine'. I presumed they were asking if I was a vegetarian. Maybe I should have told them I was gluten intolerant. Might have gotten me somewhere.

If lunch had not had as many options as Google customarily offers I would have been in trouble. Even a visit to the local Spar is unlikely to produce much low carb joy.

So the message is to bring your own lunch if you don't think you will be able to eat what they give you. Thanks to the reduced appetite that comes with a low carb diet the sugary treat tables did not bother me. And they had very nice coffee to give me something to do during the breaks.

Why sweeteners are bad for you - Dr. Kimber Stanhope

There is a growing body of evidence that supports the health benefits of a low carbohydrate diet. Dr. Kimber Stanhope is one of the leading researchers in this area. In this video she talks about the huge range of sweeteners that exist and discusses responses of test subjects to variations in these sweetener levels in their diets. 

Green lentils with smoked coley and cabbage

This is a good filling main meal. It requires some chopping to get it started, but cooks away on its own without requiring any of your attention.
This serves 2 adults and takes about 50 minutes in total.

Ingredients

200g Green lentils - I got mine in Dunnes Stores
1 litre of vegetable stock - Marigold is good, but any that is not full of rubbish will do
3 Carrots, finely chopped
1 Onion, finely chopped
3 Sticks of celery, finely chopped
1 Tbsp of Olive oil
2 smoked back rashers, chopped
4 bay leaves
200g approx of smoked Coley
About 5 leaves of green cabbage, stalk trimmed out and discarded

Instructions

Heat the oil in a thick bottom pot. Add the bacon and vegetables and cook for about 20 minutes on medium. Stir occasionally to stop it sticking. Add the lentils, stock and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer and cook covered for about 25 minutes until the lentils are almost done. Cut the cabbage into strips and cut these cross ways - this just makes it easier to eat without scalding your chin. Add the cabbage and fish to the pot and push them down beneath the surface of the liquid. Cover again for about 10 minutes. Ladle into bowls and serve with a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on top.

A video illustrating the many benefits of a low carbohydrate diet

People sometimes wonder 'where will I get my energy when I am not eating carbs?' - at least not in any significant amount. This video explains the processes that lead the body to use ketones as its primary energy supply instead of glucose. There are a wide range of benefits to this and Dr. Volek even talks about record breaking distance runners who eat very low carb diets. It looks like carbo loading before a race may have been another dietary myth. 

This is an hour well spent.

Stuff to grow in your garden to help with a low carb diet

It goes without saying that growing lots of different types of vegetables will help you keep a varied low carb diet interesting, but some stuff is better to grow than others.

Herbs should be top of your list. They take little effort and can make a dish. Many of them are just not available in the shops. They don't have the shelf life, or consumer demand to justify stocking them. Dried versions are not much like the fresh ones. Growing your own herbs can also save you quite a bit of money.

I have these and am planning on adding some more:

• Thyme
• Rosemary - I am not having much success, but am going to try again as this is delicious in stews and roasts
• Mint - plant it in a large bucket with the bottom cut off which you sink in the soil. Prevents it taking over your garden
• Chives - nice substitute for spring onions and they go to see and make nice flowers in your garden
• Marjoram - very hardy
• Sage - grows all year round. Needs to be controlled, but rarely becomes a problem plant
• Parsley - you will need to replace this every few years. Flat leaf tastes best, but is not as tough as curly parsley

• Leaves in a little plastic bag from the supermarket are a very expensive way to make salad. This is fine for infrequent salad eaters, but at least during the summer months you will be eating a lot of salads, both side and main. A good source of salad leaves from your garden can save you a lot of money. I used to plant rocket every year, but a couple of years ago I didn't bother digging it up at the end of the season. It came on stronger than ever the next year. Its on its third season now and is showing no sign of slowing down. 
• Garlic from supermarkets is often pretty bland. Fancy ones are available in smaller markets, but they can be very expensive. The best bet is to grow some of your own. If you use as much garlic as I do, it is unrealistic to expect to grow enough to meet all your needs. But is is nice to supplement the supermarket with some better flavoured stuff of your own. I buy a range of varieties and plant then in the autumn for summer early summer harvest.
• Chard. This is hardy, delicious and good for you. It is very resilient to pests and like like the rocket I am still on last years stuff. It produces a lot of leaves and can keep you substantially in greens for about half the year from a square meter or 2 in your garden. It can be steamed, stir fried (a bit of sesame oil is great on this) or just added to saucy dishes like curry or the provencal sauce that I use a lot.
• Beetroot. A close relative of chard, but grown for the roots rather than the leaves, although thinnings and young leaves are very good salad leaves to supplement your chard. Beetroot is also very hardy and can be used in some delicious recipes. I will post some of these over the coming months as we get into beetroot season.

Tips to convert a normal recipe to low carb

While there are plenty of resources on the web for low carb eating there will be times when you want to make something you are used to, but without the carbs. Like spaghettiless bolognaise. Also there may be high carbers in your house or maybe you are not happy forcing a weird diet on your kids! Whatever the reason 

• Pick a recipe that does not rely entirely on carbs - potatoes boulangere for example are pretty much out
• Make sure there is enough protein and fat in the recipe to fill you up in the absence of carbs
• Add extra vegetables - both on the side and chopped small and cooked into sauces. This is both for fibre and nutrient reasons and to help fill you up
• Add a side salad as often as you can. Growing some leaves for this purpose yourself makes sense if you are going to be using a lot of them
• Make a note of what changes you made and whether they worked - you can fine tune this way

Some normal dishes that work well with this are

• Bolognaise sauce with vegetables and a side salad
• Veg curry without the rice - add a few handfuls of red lentils to increase the protein level
• Roast dinner on Sunday - without the roast potatoes and with extra vegetables

There are some brutal low carb recipes out there. Hopefully you can avoid the worst of them. They make the low carb lifestyle a tough sell. There is really no reason to suffer on this diet if you take some time to get used to what you can and can't cook.

Puy lentil casserole with balsamic vinegar

We have been making variations of this for years. Lentils are low GI, so less impact on insulin levels than other more processed foods.

Eating low carb can lead to more meat consumption. Just because meat is good for you does not mean that it has stopped damaging the environment. This meal is a tasty and satisfying meat free one.

Ingredients

200g Puy lentils
1 litre vegetable stock - Marigold powder is good
3 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
4 sticks of celery, finely chopped
1 tbsp of balsamic vinegar
Oil for cooking

Method

Cook the vegetables for about 30 minutes in some oil over a medium heat. Stir it now and then to make sure it does not stick and leave the lid on to keep the steam in.
Next add the lentils and stock. Bring to the boil and cook until the lentils are tender - this varies by the exact type of lentil, but expect about 30 minutes.
Using a stick blender blend about half of the lentils in the pot. Add the balsamic vinegar and give everything a good stir.
I serve this with a rocket salad with tomatoes, toasted pine nuts and a balsamic and mustard vinaigrette. Grate plenty of parmesan on top of the lentils.

How to avoid Wheat Belly

Not eating wheat is a side effect of being on a low carb diet. Dr. William Davis makes a serious case for eliminating wheat even on a non low carb diet. The details of what has been done to wheat in the name of productivity and profit at the expense of people's health is shocking. We are used to wheat being part of our diet, so this stuff is as hard to believe as the low carb regime in general, but it is a message worth listening to. Dr. Davis is an engaging speaker and the quality of the presentation is very high.

Mid Week Lunch

After porridge for breakfast I don't need to eat anything else until lunchtime. The feeling of hunger on a low carb diet is not nearly as intense as when you are eating carbs.

For mid week lunch I choose from only a few options.

• A tin of mackerel in oil 
• 3 eggs scrambled with butter
• Cheese and olives

I will also usually have something like a raw carrot or an apple along with one of the above. Then a cup of tea. None of these sounds like very much, but they are more than enough for me. Coupled with the healthy breakfast I find that I am not too hungry up as far as dinner.

An important Low Carb Video

This video has been watched almost 5 million times. And it does not have any cats in it. It is 90 minutes long and is well worth the time. We watched it over a few consecutive evenings. There is a lot to take in and the message varies from straight forward advice for everyone to rigorous science - that's for everyone too. It's worth persisting with it though.

We all know that alcohol is bad for your liver, but as Dr. Lustig explains carbohydrate has almost exactly the same impact on your liver. This leads to non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Up to 25% of Americans have NAFLD.

Meatballs in a Provençal Sauce

Another variation on the provençal recipe. The quantities here are for 2 people.

Ingredients

For the meatballs

500g of minced beef
Handful of fresh sage and marjoram, chopped finely
Salt and pepper
Rapeseed oil for frying

The sauce

3 Carrots, finely chopped
1 Onion, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
Handful of pitted black olives, cut in half
2 tbsp of capers
A small tin of anchovies in oil
2 Tins of tomatoes
4 bay leaves, dried are fine
Black pepper
Butter, about the size of 2 walnuts
1 tbsp of olive oil for cooking
A handful of french beans cut into bite sized pieces

Method

Place the mince in a bowl and add the herbs and salt and pepper. Mix it well with your hands. Add the oil to a pan and get it nice and hot. Remove a golf ball sized piece of mince and shape it into a ball. Drop it into the pan. Do this for the whole lot. Keeping the heat quite high, keep the balls turning to that they don't burn. Do this until they are firm when squeezed. This means they are cooked through. Next for the sauce

Heat the oil and butter in a thick based pot over a high heat. Once the butter is bubbling add the onions, carrots and garlic. Give everything a good mix to coat in oil and butter and put the lid on. Lower the heat right down. Give this about 40 minutes stirring occasionally to allow the vegetables to soften. Then add the olives, anchovies in their oil and capers and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Then add the rest of the ingredients except the meat balls. Give everything a good stir and put the lid back on. Once the carrots are soft add the cooked meat balls. Cover them with the sauce and continue to cook with the lid on for about 10 minutes. Ladle into bowls to serve.

What's for Breakfast?

There are some brutal possibilities for low carb breakfasts. Sardines or a half a block of brie anyone? Not for me. There are only so many eggs that I can eat and to be honest cooking rashers and eggs first thing on a work day is not on.

So I stick with porridge. Well it's not really low carb is it? Not that low, but I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. There are some details here about the different types of porridge and their carb content along with some of the good things that porridge gives you. Stuff like soluble fibre. Also if you eat a big enough portion you can get away with not having anything else till lunchtime. The instant oatmeal mentioned is the equivalent of something like Ready Brek. A nice memory from childhood, but too processed to fit into a low carb diet.


I eat rolled oats - just normal porridge. I buy Jumbo Organic Oats in Aldi. I cook them with semi skimmed milk in the microwave and then add more milk to cool them down a bit. I don't add any sweetener - sugar or honey and I make sure I eat plenty of them. A half of a large cup of dry oatmeal and twice that of milk. If you are microwaving, make sure you use a very large bowl as it will boil over very easily. About 4 minutes does it.

It is a delicious start to the day - followed of course by a cup of tea. I thought I would get bored of this, but have been enjoying it for over 6 months now. I am converted.

Hot Smoked Mackerel Pate

This is really simple and only has a few ingredients. These packets of hot smoked mackerel are very versatile. It's not really a pate as the fish is just mashed with a fork. You can blend it for a smoother paste if you prefer, but it is not necessary. Delicious as part of a weekend lunch.

Ingredients

1 Packet of Hot Smoked Mackerel - Aldi
1 tbsp of horseradish sauce
1 tbsp of crème fraiche

Instructions

Peel the skin from the mackerel and remove any small bones. Flake it into a bowl. Add the horseradish sauce and crème fraiche and mix the whole lot thoroughly.

Serve with some tomatoes on a bed of rocket.

Hummus with Cashews

We have been making our own hummus for quite a while now and thought we had it about right. But this post last week from Seth Godin adds cashew nuts. They are great in it and lower the proportion of carbs in the dish. As for the carb content, well chickpeas are not top of the list of low carb foods, but we think there are more advantages than disadvantages. Sometimes the snacks available to low carb eaters can be less than inspiring, so hummus is a nice addition. More on the carb content and some other technical details here. This site suggests that a higher proportion of tahini lowers the carb proportion too, so we might try upping that next time.

Our recipe is not exactly the same as Seth's, so here goes. We don't bother with all that cooking nonsense. Used to, but not any more.

Ingredients

1 Tin of Chickpeas
1 Tbsp of Tahini paste
A handful of roasted cashew nuts
Juice of 1 lime
Olive oil - a good glug
Salt and pepper - to taste
Pinch of cumin

Method

Place all of the ingredients in a food processor along with a good splash of water and blend until smooth. This takes longer than you might think. A minute being about the minimum to get a nice consistency. Add more water if you think the mix is too dry.

We eat this with thin slices of carrot. It is much better before you put it in the fridge.

Other ingredients that we have added before are raw garlic (lots, crushed) and dried chillies. This depends on whether or not you expect the kids to eat it too.

Sources of ingredients

Everything is from Aldi except the tahini which is from SuperValue.

A Latte A Day or Why Appetite Matters

4 kg of extra body fat

Lets say that you are eating exactly the right amount of calories that you burn in a day. Unlikely, but just imagine. Now you decide to have a latte on your way to work. A nice treat and what harm could it do? (This is not Starbucks bashing - the choice of treat was pretty random). A latte in Starbucks contains 180 calories. If you have one of those every work day, that's about 200 of them a year. Which gives 36000 calories. There are 9 calories in a gram of fat. This means that your daily latte translates into 4 kg of fat added per year. This type of conversion is very rough, but it illustrates. You would know if you had 4 kg extra fat on your body and after a few years..

Quit the latte?

Not necessarily. The point of this exercise is to show that trying to control what you eat is virtually impossible without the aid of your inbuilt appetite. If your body does not tell you when to stop eating then telling yourself to ease up is just not going to work in anything but the shortest of time frames. You need to choose foods that work with your body so that you feel full and don't experience a blood sugar crash following the consumption of high carb food. There is a bit more about this here.

A Big List of Low Carb Recipes

There are lots of low carb recipes available on the web (and in books), but I think it is useful to get an overview of a bunch of them so that you can see common themes and make up your own. This list is useful in conjunction with yesterday's shopping list. Knowing how fill and empty your presses is crucial. 

Some of these are more filling than others. When I am still hungry after dinner I just fill up on healthy snacks. That's not ideal though. Your main meal of the day should leave you feeling satisfied. To that end I will adjust these recipes with experience to make sure they are filling enough for 2 adults. 

Some of these are not very low carb, but I have noted where that is the case. Not too much of those. I will post fuller instructions for some of the items in the list, but for a lot of them they are just a single item (how do you make 'Tin of Sardines'?) or they are very obvious and you can use your imagination.

Breakfast

• Porridge - every day. No sugar now. Just milk.

Lunch

• (I usually have a raw carrot or 2 with my lunch. Any opportunity to get some veg in is good)
• Tin of mackerel - my most common mid week lunch
• Smoked Mackerel - vacuum packed stuff from Aldi is very good. About half a packet is enough for 1 person.
• Tin of Sardines - in oil, which should be drained
• 3 scrambled eggs with a large knob of butter, salt and pepper. Don't have this too often as eggs can be difficult to digest. 
• Cold meats - no too many of these as they have lots of preservatives
• Hummus and thinly sliced carrot - only a snack really and not that low in carbs. So have a small amount of this with something else for lunch.

Weekend lunches

• Butternut squash and nut butter soup. This is from River Cottage. You can find it here, but the book is well worth buying. They have a great collection of recipes that fit or can be made to fit a low carb diet.
• Red lentil, red pepper and coconut soup. A nice recipe from Catherine Fulvio. You can find it here.
• Bean salad - tin of mixed beans from aldi, dressing made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, English mustard and salt and pepper. Serve with lots of rocket and tomatoes.

Dinner

Beef

• Beef stew without parsnips or potatoes
• Braised Beef curry with coconut
• Meatballs Provençal
• Goulash
• Ricotta beef burgers - from Nigel Slater's eat

Chicken

• Roast chicken with vegetables
• Chicken, Chorizo and butter bean casserole
• Roasted chicken portions rubbed in jerk seasoning. I just use some stuff I bought, but you can make your own if you like.

Vegetable

• Veg curry
• Chickpea chard and porcini soup - River Cottage Veg
• Hearty Green lentil stew - Gillian McKeith
• Mediterranean black eye pea casserole - Gillian McKeith
• Red lentil casserole - Domini Kemp
• Dhal - River cottage veg

Lamb

Slow cooked lamb shoulder with white wine black olives and anchovies. Theo Randall on Saturday Kitchen. 

Fish

• Provençal style Salmon with (optional) chard
• Fish stew
• Roasted salmon with vegetables

Others

• Mushroom omelette with smoked mackerel
• Butternut squash and sweetcorn soup with smoked mackerel

Snacks

• Nuts
• Olives
• Cheese
• Carrots
• Hummus - there's that carb alarm again. Use in moderation.

A Low Carb Shopping List

One of the things you notice when you first try to do a low carb shop is how much of the supermarket is no use to you. It makes shopping a whole lot quicker. But what do you buy? I have built the list below up over the last 6 months of low carb eating. I will add more items to it as I think of them. I normally pull this up on my phone before I leave the shop to make sure I have everything I need.

I get all of this in Aldi and my local butchers.

Meat

Stewing beef - very good in normal beef stew without potatoes and also this
Minced beef
Minced lamb
Minced pork
Steak - sirloin or striploin
Whole chicken - free range. This is a lot cheaper than buying portions and you can use the whole lot. There is a nice video here courtesy of Tesco which explains how to portion the chicken.
Venison Steaks - frozen
Lamb Chops
Lamb chunks, for stewing
Shoulder of lamb, bone out - from butchers
Rashers, dont over do these. They have a lot of chemicals in them

Dairy

Butter
Eggs
Milk - full fat is best, but this depends on what you will be using in it. No tea with whole milk for me
Cheese - Parmesan, Cheddar, Maasdam (like edam) and Brie de meaux
Full fat natural yoghurt - unsweetened
Creme fraiche

Vegetables

All kinds except starchy ones like spuds and sweet potatoes:
Carrots
Celery
Onions
Garlic

Sugar snap peas

Mange tout
Baby corn
Fine beans

Tomatoes

Peppers - all colours

Broccoli - stalks can be used too. Just pare off any tough outer bits
Turnip - the yellow ones. The white ones are harder to find in Ireland and a bit pointless
Cabbage
Frozen corn
Frozen peas

Fish

Fresh for freezing

Salmon - works well in this

Smoked coley
Mackerel
Smoked haddock
Hake for weekends - bit pricey for mid week
Kippers

Stuff in tins

Tomatoes - lots
Fish (Mackerel, Salmon, Sardines and Anchovies)
Chickpeas - not too many of these. This is a good snack
Mixed beans

Everything else

Olives - green and black
Capers
Tomato paste
Olive oil - cold pressed
Rapeseed oil - cold pressed
Nuts (Sliced almonds, pistachios, whole almonds unblanched, pecans. Cashews are quite high in carbs, so not too many of these)
Seeds (Sunflower, pumpkin, sesame)
Spices as required
Salt and pepper

Things to leave out

People tend to focus on this section when they are talking about starting a low carb/no sugar diet. I think this can just make it sound scary and if this stuff is very bad for you, giving it up should not be that big a deal. The worst thing to eat on this diet is sugar. It is absorbed very fast and spikes your insulin. The best thing is something with very low carbs - something like meat for example. But you can't live on meat on its own and you need a wide variety of foods anyway to make sure you are getting the right micronutrients.  How far you choose to deviate from perfect along this continuum by for example having a small amount of potato with your dinner is up to you. The less carbohydrate the better though is always the guideline.

Bread - including wholemeal
Normal breakfast cereals - I make an exception for unsweetened porridge
Flour
Potatoes
Rice
Pasta - including wholemeal
Sugar, biscuits, cakes and sweets - This is obvious though
Alcohol - I must admit I have not cut this out, but am always trying to keep my consumption at reasonable levels. The less the better with this.

Low Carb Goulash

One of the things I try to do with low carb versions of dishes is to incorporate as many additional vegetables as I can. A classic Hungarian goulash contains far fewer ingredients than this, but this version works well. Also Hungarian Goulash is usually served with rice and I leave that out here to keep the carbs down.

Ingredients

500g Stewing beef pieces
2 Onions, chopped roughly
2 Carrots, chopped roughly
1 red and one green pepper, chopped roughly
3 Sticks of celery, chopped roughly
1 heaped desert spoon of smoked paprika
Salt
Olive oil for cooking
1 Tin of tomatoes
Creme Fraiche to serve

Method

Brown the beef in a pressure cooker with the lid off. Use plenty of heat to thoroughly brown the outside of the meat. Remove the meat from the pot and put aside. Fry the onions, carrot and celery in the same pot until they are beginning to brown. Return the meat to the pot. Add the tomatoes and paprika and put the lid on. Cook at pressure for about 45 minutes. Add the peppers. Bring the pot back to cooking pressure and turn the heat off immediately. Let it come to normal pressure in its own time. This is sufficient to cook the peppers.
Ladle the goulash into bowls and add a dessert spoon of creme fraiche and stir in.

Where Does Insulin Fit In To All This?

Insulin control is one of the key benefits of a low carb diet. Why would you want that? Here is a brief explanation of one of the functions of insulin does in the human body. I'll write about some of the other effects in subsequent posts.

How It Works

When you eat sugar or simple carbohydrates your blood glucose level goes up. Glucose floating around in your blood stream is useful for getting energy to cells. However this blood glucose needs to be absorbed through the cell walls in your body before it has a chance to damage the structures that it comes into contact with. Once it is inside it can be used to produce energy, or converted to fat as necessary. This absorption results in a drop in blood glucose and all is safe.

Your cells need to be told to absorb the blood glucose. This message is given by insulin.

In Summary

• eat sugar or simple carbohydrate
• blood glucose goes up
• excess blood glucose is toxic, so needs to be lowered
• insulin released by the pancreas
• cells can now absorb glucose from the blood
• blood glucose level lowers
• all is safe

The Problem

The process by which insulin tells the cells to absorb glucose is not perfect and causes some damage to the receptors on the cell surface. The receptors are the locks to insulin's key. With normal levels of blood glucose this damage is limited and should not become an issue. However in the presence of large quantities of simple carbohydrate (cavemen did not have Monster Energy Drink) the damage becomes a problem. The result is that the cells' response to insulin becomes dulled. They don't get the message to absorb glucose from a given amount of insulin. The response of the body is to produce more insulin to make the cells listen. This sort of works and blood glucose is lowered. However the higher level of insulin required to get the message across results in increased damage to the receptors. This compounds the problem of the cells not listening to the insulin signal.

The Outcome

Given time and a sugary diet the result is insulin resistance. This can lead to excess blood glucose not being dealt with by the normal mechanism. This glucose can then do damage to the body. This results in the all too familiar effects of type 2 diabetes - blindness, limb loss and wounds that won't heal.

Reducing your intake of carbohydrates is the best way to avoid this nightmare scenario.

The Steam Engine Theory of Metabolism

Calories in minus calories out, right? Well yes, but this view is a bit simplistic and likens people to steam engines. Coal in = energy out. The difference between us and a steam engine is that in our case we are holding the coal shovel. So appetite control is the key to managing your calorie intake and therefore your bodyweight.

Humans have evolved very complex appetite control mechanisms. This prevents us from starving, or gorging under normal circumstances. The problem we currently face is that the foods we are eating are not those we have evolved with. Our appetite control does not work as it should in the presence of large quantities of simple carbohydrates and in particular sugar.

Reducing the quantity of carbohydrate you consume leaves you less prone to the blood sugar drops and associated hunger. To appreciate this you really need to try it out for yourself. It is like the hunger messages are dulled slightly and our appetite is evened out.

Having strong will power only gets you so far. We need to use our in built appetite control to manage our weight and that control does not work well with carbohydrate.

Provençal Style Salmon with Chard

There are lot of different protein sources that you can add to this basic sauce to make a delicious low carb dinner. It works great with meat balls for example. The quantities here are for 2 people.

Ingredients

3 Carrots, finely chopped
1 Onion, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
Handful of baby sweetcorn, cut into 1 cm pieces
Handful of pitted black olives, cut in half
2 tbsp of capers
A small tin of anchovies in oil
2 Tins of tomatoes
1 Red pepper chopped small
2 Salmon darnes
4 bay leaves, dried are fine
Black pepper
Oregano, I used dried
Butter, about the size of 2 walnuts
1 tbsp of olive oil for cooking
Small bunch of chard, central rib trimmed out an shred the leaves

Method

Heat the oil and butter in a thick based pot over a high heat. Once the butter is bubbling add the onions, carrots, baby sweetcorn, red peppers and garlic. Give everything a good mix to coat in oil and butter and put the lid on. Lower the heat right down. This is basically a type of mirepoix, but with extra vegetables. Give this about 40 minutes stirring occasionally to allow the vegetables to soften. Then add the olives, anchovies in their oil and capers and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Then add the rest of the ingredients except the salmon. Give everything a good stir and put the lid back on. Once the carrots are soft it is ready for you to add the salmon and chard. Mix the chard in first and then place the darnes on the surface of the sauce and spoon the sauce over them so that they are covered. Put the lid back on for about 10 minutes. Check that the salmon is done and ladle into bowls to serve.

Ingredient Sources

I got the salmon darnes in Aldi for € 3.99 for a pack of 2. We have had these before and they are excellent. Almost everything else if from Aldi too.
The chard is from the garden.

Why Exercise Is Ineffective For Weight Loss

The message of this blog is that high fat, reduced carbohydrate diets are the key to long term health and weight loss. But what about exercise? We have been told to get off the couch for years to reduce our waist lines. The reality is that exercise based weight loss is a lot more difficult than it seems. Exercise is extremely important for a huge array of reasons, but weight loss is not one of them.

Running

I used to run quite a bit. Even did a marathon at one point. I was at a healthy weight when I was doing that, but it involved a huge amount of training. I had a sports watch which counted calories and I also looked up some estimates of calories burned based on my weight and speed of running. When I ran at a reasonable pace for one hour I would burn about 700 calories.

Whopper

There are 660 calories in a Whopper. So if I run for an hour a day I can eat a whopper. No chips or drink, just the whopper. The rest of my day's intake better add up to the same amount of calories I am burning in my other daily activities. Too many calories and I will get fat. Too few and I will waste away.

What is a calorie?

I think one of the problems with the calorie as a unit of measurement is that people don't know how big one is. i.e. 'What do I have to do to burn this?' Well now you know. No need for you to run for an hour to find out. Just keep in mind when you are looking at calorie numbers that burning 700 of these will take an hour of running. Tot up the total calories in your day and you will realise that exercise without dietary modification is not going to make much of a dent in all that processed high carb food.

The good news is that you won't be reading calorie numbers from the side of packets for long. The content of your food is important, but it's the carbohydrate content rather than the calories that you will be interested in.

So get plenty of varied exercise, but don't wear your knees out. And cut way down on carbohydrates.

Instructions to follow.

Why Low Carb Ireland?

About a year ago a friend of my wife was having health problems. Overweight, high blood pressure and the like. Not a happy person. He went to his doctor who was not very helpful - eat less fat and exercise more. But he had taken this advice before and just ended up see sawing between unhealthy and healthy weight. So the patient decided to research the problem himself. He was recommended to go to a doctor who could help. He got some blood tests which indicated that he was not well at all and needed to make some radical changes to his diet. So this is where the low carbohydrate diet comes in. It worked and the patient is now an extremely healthy advocate of all things low carb.

My Experience

I weighed about 12 stone. I wanted to be about 11 stone. I am five feet nine inches tall so 12 was way too heavy. I had tried over a number of years to lose the weight. I had gotten to 11 and a half and then slid back up. 11 was looking impossible.

I did reasonable amounts of exercise and didn't eat a lot of junk, so something was wrong. The last time I had been at my ideal weight was when I was training for a marathon - over 10 years ago. I didn't have the time to do that sort of exercise at this stage of my life. And my knees would just say no anyway.

When I heard about the success that our friend had with low carb I decided to give it a try. We did some research online, read blogs, watched videos and the like over a period of a few weeks before we started. Needed to convince myself that we would know what to eat and would have shopped appropriately before jumping in. We didn't want to have to abandon the experiment because all we had in the press was potatoes.

Once we got started my weight dropped quite rapidly. I went from 12 to 11 and a half in a couple of weeks and hit my target of 11 stone in about 6 weeks. Then the weight loss slowed. Christmas intervened at that point and being Irish this is an extended holiday indeed. Carbs were consumed and the weight went back up. After Christmas I reverted to the low carb regime and got back to a healthy weight very quickly.

So I was starving myself right? Well no. Starving yourself will work if you are a toughy, and have will power in endless supply, but we all run out of will power eventually. Low carb helps control your appetite. More on that in the coming weeks.

What type of posts can you expect to see?

There are lots of reasons why this diet works and a bunch of solid research, both done and ongoing. I am going to give details of some of the science, links to videos that are worth watching, book reviews and links to other web sites and blogs about low carb living.

I am a keen cook. So one of the questions I had was what will I eat? An important concern. So I will write about some of the recipes and give shopping tips. You will be surprised by how much of the supermarket you just get to skip. Liberating once you get used to the idea that you won't be hungry.

I will also post information about exercise. There are a vast range of benefits to exercise. Realistically weight loss is not one of them, but the other reasons matter. More about why exercise is ineffective for weight loss in a post in the next few days.

In this blog over the coming weeks  I hope to be able to convince you that this is a worthwhile lifestyle choice. Comments are welcome.

Anthony