Low Carb Diet Food Tips

Picking the right low carb diet food is only half the battle when you're on a low carb diet. You also need to develop good eating habits. If you change only the foods you eat, but continue on with the same eating style you had before, you will probably get bored very quickly, or "forget" that you are dieting and will fail to see the results you want. Here are 5 tips that I have found useful in keeping up the momentum :

1. Make it more convenient to snack on low carb diet food than on the alternatives. Obviously the best thing to do is just not buy high carb snacks in the first place, but if that's not an option at least try to keep your crackers, biscuits and sweets somewhere out of the way and out of sight, like at the back of a cupboard or in a separate room in the house. Then, chop up a bunch of carrots and celery sticks, put them into resealable plastic bags, and keep them in the refrigerator at all times. When you're hungry between meals, all you have to do is open the fridge and you have pre-prepared low carb snacks which are much easier to get at than the crackers on the other side of the house.

You don't have to eat plain celery sticks all the time, you can eat them with peanut butter, or cream cheese on the end. If that's still not what you're craving though, just tell yourself to eat the bag of celery sticks first, and if you're still hungry you can go for the high carb version afterwards. At least this way you're less likely to eat a whole packet of biscuits because you'll be partially full from the celery.


2. Before you eat anything, drink one full glass of water. Not only will this keep you hydrated (hardly any of us drink enough fresh water in a day), but it will help you to feel a little fuller and suppress your appetite a little.

3. Chew your food slowly. This is important both for digestion, but also because it will make your meal last longer. It can actually take up to 20 minutes after finishing a meal before our stomach registers that its full and we no longer need any more food. If we gobble our food down quickly we will probably still feel hungry after the first course and help ourselves to a second one. Then we end up feeling terrible because our stomach will have to cope with an extra meal that it doesn't have room for, and we will have consumed a bunch of extra carbs and calories that we didn't even need.

4. Try to bulk up any meal with low carb diet food. My favorite example is a green leafy salad. Make heaps of it for dinner and pack it with things like lettuce, celery, capsicum and cucumber. Then during your meal, take a larger than normal serving of salad and a smaller than normal serving of the other choices. Try to do this with everything you eat. If you're going to eat a banana, chop it up and combine it with a few tablespoons of cottage cheese.

5. Cut out hidden sugar wherever you can find it. The best examples I can think of are drinks. Tea and coffee, juice, fizzy drinks and alcohol. If you have to drink juice, dilute it with water. Try to enjoy coffee and tea without sugar - its hard at the beginning but you will soon get used to the flavor and probably even enjoy the fact that you can now properly taste the coffee. Obviously stick to zero sugar fizzy drinks (though artificial sweetener isn't exactly good for you either), and just keep in mind that every beer or wine you consume is also contributing to your carb count.


These 5 tips have served me well and I hope they help you too. Good luck with your low carb dieting.

Oh, and you're welcome to visit my blog if you're interested in finding out more about low carb diet food.