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Hi newbie here...help needed with recipes for my hubby...
- Thread starter Viv53
- Start date
- Status
rebrascora
Well-Known Member
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hi and welcome
It has not been so much about recipes for me as substituting low carb foods for high ones and avoiding putting high carb items on my plate.
So I no longer eat bread or rice or pasta and only very occasionally a few potatoes but if that seems a bit radical, try halving or quartering his portion size of these items and bulk his plate out with other stuff. Cauliflower cooked and mashed with butter, cream cheese and/or mustard makes a great substitute for mashed potato. You can also buy cauliflower chopped very finely sold as cauliflower rice or cauliflower couscous (or chop it yourself in a food processor) which works well with curry etc. There are low carb options available with bread if you check out your local supermarkets but personally I decided to cut it out altogether. Courgettes spiralised can be used to replace pasta and you can get products called Bare Naked Noodles which are pretty much zero carbs instead of Chinese noodles to have with a stir fry.
Low carb foods which he should not have any problems with, diabetes wise, are meat, fish, nuts, eggs, dairy produce including butter and cheese and cream and full fat/creamy Natural Greek yoghurt. Mushrooms are versatile and low carb and he can eat as much as he likes of leafy green veg like cabbage or kale or spinach, all of which taste better if cooked with a knob of butter or a good dollop of cream cheese. Don't forget salad of course. I often have a salad with a mushroom onion ham and cheese omelette for breakfast/lunch. If he likes coleslaw that is fine but avoid potato salad. For snacks I have a chunk of good quality cheese or a few nuts or veggie sticks and sour cream and chive dip or a pot of olives. Try to use mostly berries for fruit as they tend to be lower carb. Kiwi fruit aren't too bad but bananas and oranges and pineapple and mango and grapes are higher carb and avoid fruit juice in all it's varieties, even smoothies because the fruit sugars go straight into the blood stream.
One of my favourite recipes is @Drummer 's cauliflower cheese which involves boiling or steaming the cauli until just underdone and then placing it in a roasting dish and smothering it in cream cheese and then grated cheese and browning it off in the oven. It is tastier than made with a conventional cheese sauce involving flour and milk, both of which contain carbohydrates. Apparently it can be improved further by the addition of herbs or spices like paprika or nutmeg or mustard but I haven't got as far as experimenting with those yet.
Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas. It is quite difficult in the first few weeks/months to figure it out both shopping wise and cooking because we have all spent a lifetime piling up our plates with carbs at every meal but once you break that habit and get into a new routine it is actually quite a pleasant way to eat, especially when you introduce more fat into the diet with cheese, butter, cream, olive oil, nuts, avocados etc.....If you eat low carb then you need to provide more calories from another food group and increasing the fat content is both enjoyable and satisfying as the fat takes longer to digest and therefore keeps you feeling fuller for longer.
The doc may well have recommended a low fat diet because that has been the general health advice of the past 70 years, but there is a growing number of eminent health care professionals globally who are now starting to challenge the validity of the research behind the demonization of fat and believe that it was flawed and in fact it may be the reason why there is now a diabetic epidemic as sugar has replaced the fat in our factory produced food to make it taste appetising.... so all those low fat yoghurts have masses of sugar in them etc because few people would want to buy and eat a low fat, low sugar yoghurt. Obviously, if your husband has cardiovascular issues then seek advice or do your own research before increasing his fat intake.
Many of us here on the forum follow a Low Carb Higher Fat (LCHF) diet and feel much better for it and have regained control of BG levels through this way of eating and most of all, enjoy our new food regime. It also usually leads to weight loss because carbohydrates are the easiest food for the body to break down and store as fat, so in the absence of them, the body has to work harder at breaking down the protein and fats and fibre for energy. Hard to believe after a lifetime of being told that fat is bad, but surprisingly it does not make you fat!
Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas. There are people who will disagree with some of what I have said, particularly about dietary fat so I recommend you do your own research on the subject, but there are quite a few of us here who embrace a LCHF diet and have lost weight and enjoy our food and feel healthier for it and no longer crave sugar and starchy carbs which for me, as someone who could happily eat 4 slices of toast with a can of baked beans for lunch and had a very heavy sugar habit.... is quite liberating. I don't even use sweeteners now that I have cream in my coffee.
It has not been so much about recipes for me as substituting low carb foods for high ones and avoiding putting high carb items on my plate.
So I no longer eat bread or rice or pasta and only very occasionally a few potatoes but if that seems a bit radical, try halving or quartering his portion size of these items and bulk his plate out with other stuff. Cauliflower cooked and mashed with butter, cream cheese and/or mustard makes a great substitute for mashed potato. You can also buy cauliflower chopped very finely sold as cauliflower rice or cauliflower couscous (or chop it yourself in a food processor) which works well with curry etc. There are low carb options available with bread if you check out your local supermarkets but personally I decided to cut it out altogether. Courgettes spiralised can be used to replace pasta and you can get products called Bare Naked Noodles which are pretty much zero carbs instead of Chinese noodles to have with a stir fry.
Low carb foods which he should not have any problems with, diabetes wise, are meat, fish, nuts, eggs, dairy produce including butter and cheese and cream and full fat/creamy Natural Greek yoghurt. Mushrooms are versatile and low carb and he can eat as much as he likes of leafy green veg like cabbage or kale or spinach, all of which taste better if cooked with a knob of butter or a good dollop of cream cheese. Don't forget salad of course. I often have a salad with a mushroom onion ham and cheese omelette for breakfast/lunch. If he likes coleslaw that is fine but avoid potato salad. For snacks I have a chunk of good quality cheese or a few nuts or veggie sticks and sour cream and chive dip or a pot of olives. Try to use mostly berries for fruit as they tend to be lower carb. Kiwi fruit aren't too bad but bananas and oranges and pineapple and mango and grapes are higher carb and avoid fruit juice in all it's varieties, even smoothies because the fruit sugars go straight into the blood stream.
One of my favourite recipes is @Drummer 's cauliflower cheese which involves boiling or steaming the cauli until just underdone and then placing it in a roasting dish and smothering it in cream cheese and then grated cheese and browning it off in the oven. It is tastier than made with a conventional cheese sauce involving flour and milk, both of which contain carbohydrates. Apparently it can be improved further by the addition of herbs or spices like paprika or nutmeg or mustard but I haven't got as far as experimenting with those yet.
Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas. It is quite difficult in the first few weeks/months to figure it out both shopping wise and cooking because we have all spent a lifetime piling up our plates with carbs at every meal but once you break that habit and get into a new routine it is actually quite a pleasant way to eat, especially when you introduce more fat into the diet with cheese, butter, cream, olive oil, nuts, avocados etc.....If you eat low carb then you need to provide more calories from another food group and increasing the fat content is both enjoyable and satisfying as the fat takes longer to digest and therefore keeps you feeling fuller for longer.
The doc may well have recommended a low fat diet because that has been the general health advice of the past 70 years, but there is a growing number of eminent health care professionals globally who are now starting to challenge the validity of the research behind the demonization of fat and believe that it was flawed and in fact it may be the reason why there is now a diabetic epidemic as sugar has replaced the fat in our factory produced food to make it taste appetising.... so all those low fat yoghurts have masses of sugar in them etc because few people would want to buy and eat a low fat, low sugar yoghurt. Obviously, if your husband has cardiovascular issues then seek advice or do your own research before increasing his fat intake.
Many of us here on the forum follow a Low Carb Higher Fat (LCHF) diet and feel much better for it and have regained control of BG levels through this way of eating and most of all, enjoy our new food regime. It also usually leads to weight loss because carbohydrates are the easiest food for the body to break down and store as fat, so in the absence of them, the body has to work harder at breaking down the protein and fats and fibre for energy. Hard to believe after a lifetime of being told that fat is bad, but surprisingly it does not make you fat!
Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas. There are people who will disagree with some of what I have said, particularly about dietary fat so I recommend you do your own research on the subject, but there are quite a few of us here who embrace a LCHF diet and have lost weight and enjoy our food and feel healthier for it and no longer crave sugar and starchy carbs which for me, as someone who could happily eat 4 slices of toast with a can of baked beans for lunch and had a very heavy sugar habit.... is quite liberating. I don't even use sweeteners now that I have cream in my coffee.
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