My ketogenic shopping list

What can you eat on the ketogenic diet? From my point of view, it’s a lot. Others, like the bear, would say it’s very restrictive. After a week of ketogenic eating, he lost the will to live, and an endless stream of complaints followed. As he put it, the keto diet is great for weight loss because there’s nothing left to eat.

Safe to say, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It helps if you like meat and vegetables. Simply put, you take out the carb-rich side dish of rice, bread or pasta, and replace it with a bowl of leafy greens. For some people, like the bear, this destroys the meal. “What is a curry without the naan bread and rice?” he complained on day five of the keto diet. On day seven, he dropped out altogether. The bear is not a quitter. He stuck with the 5:2 diet and then the one meal a day diet for ages. Keto just wasn’t his thing, but he did acknowledge that if he had diabetes it would be a different story. For medical reasons sure, but he couldn’t see why a non-diabetic would deprive themselves of all those delicious carbs. Fair enough.

So, what’s left to eat when you ditch the carbs? On my shopping list, you find all types of meats, sausages, cheese, cream, butter, eggs, nuts, and vegetables. Recently, I added coconut oil as part of my staple diet. I eat a lot of stir-frys, salads, and stews, with the side-dish replaced by a low-carb alternative like roasted pumpkin or zoodles. You can make low-carb bakery with nut-flour instead of wheat. I get my muffin-fix from this excellent recipe. Cauliflower works great for a pizza base or a low-carb rice substitute. Lidl sells protein bread, which is remarkably close to the real thing, and crispbread is low enough in carbs to stay on the menu. The internet is your friend for new ideas.

For dessert, you can still have small amounts of berries with cream or 85% dark chocolate. As you can tell, there’s a lot of things to eat on the keto diet. It also really helps if salad for dinner is your thing.