“Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
-Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)
LCHF is not a diet. It’s a philosophy and a lifestyle, so everyone will have a slightly different take on how to do it. I’ll be explaining here how it works out for me personally, but there are also some general features.
The most notable one is that LCHF meals celebrate the enjoyment of food. Most diets, it seems, are designed to punish the dieter: he has sinned and he must pay penance, with small portions and tasteless ingredients. But as long as you give your body real food to work with, it will tell you all by itself when you’ve had enough: you’ll get an “I’m full” signal at the correct point. The LCHF kitchen, then, is always full of real food. LCHF as a philosophy overlaps somewhat with the slow-food/back-to-the-land movement, and you’ll find a lot of adherents with a foot in both camps.
As explained in the first article, there are at least two stages of an LCHF-based diet plan: induction and maintenance. For those with a weight-loss goal, as opposed to general heath concerns, there’s a weight-loss phase in the middle. What you have in your kitchen will vary depending on which phase you’re in, but there are several things you will never have:
-Sugar
-Sodas and fruit juices
-White sliced bread and frozen pizzas
-Bags of dried pasta and white rice
-Prepared pasta sauces and packet sauces
-Microwave meals (typically rice- or pasta-based)
-Cookies, cakes, sweets, crisps, and other plastic-wrapped detritus that advertisers tell us we can’t live without
-Oblong breaded objects that may or may not contain chicken meat
-Margarine, faux spreads (“0% fat!”) and cheese with a “Z”
-Low-fat milk and low-fat yoghurt
Don’t feel bad if your cupboards are full of this stuff. We’ve been told from our earliest years that they’re good for us, or at least harmless. Our parents and schools gave them to us. Food conglomerates tell us that we have ‘busy lifestyles’ and that we have no choice but to buy their products. I’ve thoughtlessly eaten these things and even fed them to my kids. But now it’s time to take back control.
You may be starting to panic at this point. If you can’t eat a pasta meal when you get home from work or the gym, what are you going to do? You’re tired and you’re grumpy. You want to eat and you want to eat now. Now now now.
There are workarounds for this – we’ll get to that later – but LCHF is a radical lifestyle change. It involves a lot more cooking than you might be used to. The good news is that, like any skill, cooking becomes much easier and quicker the more you practice, and most cultures would be appalled by the British habit of outsourcing an important bodily function – eating – to corporations that really don’t care if we live or die, as long as we live long enough to make some profits for them. Cooking, and eating what you’ve cooked, is not just a way of ensuring you get the right sustenance, it’s a source of pride in a job well done and a way of bonding with your nearest and dearest. It’s a deeply emotional act, and eliminating it from your life eliminates a great wellspring of enjoyment.
Therefore, the LCHF kitchen is full of ingredients, not meals. Vegetables, mostly. You’ll have a basket of onions, garlic, shallots and carrots, and maybe some celery and leeks (the ingredients of a mirepoix or soffritto). In the fridge you’ll have sweet peppers, chilis, tomatoes. Definitely a cauliflower, some broccoli/calabrese, and a piece of pumpkin or squash. And you’ll be buying salad vegetables regularly, or preferably growing them in your vegetable patch, along with a few herbs. Milk and yoghurt will be the full-fat kind, and you’ll have proper butter and cheese (for cooking, not for sandwiches). In your freezer you’ll have meat: not just chicken breast and lean pork, but full-of-flavour cuts like beef shin and pork belly roasting joints. Eggs will be a dietary staple, so you’ll have at least a dozen on hand at all times.
You may be panicking again: I can’t afford to eat like Gordon Ramsay. Surprisingly, you almost certainly can, even if you’re in dire financial straits. Eating like this is often cheaper – or at least no more expensive – than eating beige objects of dubious provenance from plastic packets. In another article I’ll explain how to obtain good-value ingredients and offer some recipes for family favourites like chicken nuggets, burgers, and fruit yoghurt: I guarantee you can make gourmet versions of these for roughly the same price as the supermarket version.
Wait … didn’t I just tell you those things are unhealthy? The point here is that the packaged version isn’t even food. Supermarket nuggets are made with bone-scrapings, soy filler, and water (phosphates are used to increase water-holding capacity). A mechanically-extruded patty in a preservative-laced bun is not the same as a burger patty made from pasture-raised beef eaten with a salad. Low-fat yoghurt isn’t even yoghurt: it’s made with modified starches, sugar, and milk powder. We’re going to start eating the real thing. So let’s get a little less abstract and examine some meal plans. Here’s what I usually eat for breakfast:
Homemade sausage patty
Home-cured maple syrup bacon
Fried mushrooms and half a tomato
Scrambled eggs or an omelette (2 eggs)
Side salad, which varies depending on season
Small (1tbsp) serving of sugar-free muesli with milk
Small serving of homemade Greek yoghurt with a dash of honey
Moka pot coffee with cream
Yes, that’s one meal. It takes about 15 minutes from staggering into the kitchen to putting plates onto the table.
For many years my habit was to skip breakfast and to eat sandwiches mid-morning. I thought I “didn’t feel like breakfast” first thing in the morning, but as with most habits, that was just me justifying my behaviour to myself. I now enjoy getting up slightly earlier to make and eat breakfast, and to drink a leisurely coffee. Give it a try: the office will seem a slightly nicer place afterwards.
I’m lucky in that I spend very little time in an actual office. When I do, lunch is always the same thing: two tortillas filled with salad, meat, and a fatty dressing (typically mayonnaise-or cream-based, or guacamole). These are easily constructed in the office kitchen, so as long as you have some prepped filler they’re simpler than sandwiches. However, as you can imagine, a big breakfast actually gets you through most of the day, and often I skip lunch altogether, with a pre-workout snack (usually an omelette) at about 4pm.
Yes, tortillas are bread, and if you’re in weight-loss mode or induction, your best option for lunch would be to omit them, ie., eat some meat and vegetables with a fat-based sauce/dressing. However a flour tortilla doesn’t weigh much (about 20g net carbs) and has a low glycemic index. It therefore presents a low glycemic load, which means that it elicits a fairly small insulin response.
Dinner, for me, is something that may not be an option for you: a 火鍋 (pronounced ‘huo guo’) is basically a meat-and-vegetable soup; Google it. It’s a very popular meal in my part of the world, and it really hits the spot after a workout. If you have a large family, it’s an excellent way of getting everyone around the dinner table – and it takes almost no time to prepare. The pot sits in the middle, and everyone dips in and takes what they like. Remember though: no rice or noodles!
Chinese food in general is very LCHF-friendly, and I would encourage some research. A typical Chinese meal for four has five dishes on the table: something with meat, something with eggs and/or dofu (often in a meat-based sauce), and three types of vegetable. While Chinese people will usually eat with a small serving of rice, not everyone does, and a rice-less meal simply requires that you include more fat in the dishes you prepare … and make them a bit bigger. Upmarket restaurants don't serve rice unless you ask for it: rice is "poor people food" and is therefore not part of a special occasion.
Eating from a smallish repertoire of favourites is the best way to save time. You can prep ahead, you can keep things in the fridge or freezer, and you can cook in bulk. In a future article I hope to expand on this idea. However, there’s no getting around the fact that cooking takes time, and that means you’ll have to free up time from somewhere else in your life. By far the simplest way to do this is to switch off the TV: or even better, throw it in the attic and see how you get along without it. You’ll be surprised how little you miss it after a couple of weeks, and you’ll have a couple of extra hours a day to spend on food preparation.
An interesting feature of LCHF-based meals is that you are less likely to experience gnawing hunger. Your body has a lot of stored bodyfat that it can use when your stomach is empty, and although you will still experience a vague drive to eat, the horrible energy 'crash' that occurs with a carb-based lifestyle doesn't really happen. You're less likely to need feeding NOW the moment you arrive home from work, and if you do, some crackers and cheese will take the edge off while you prepare a proper meal.
Everyone has their own tastes and preferences, and LCHF encourages creativity and personalisation. I’ll conclude with a few bullet points:
-Try new vegetables and cuts of meat. Ever tried scorzonera, yacon, or celeriac? How about chevon (goat meat) or duck? If not, now is a good time.
-Wherever possible, make your own. Most of the so-called ‘healthy’ products on display in supermarkets are just … not. That includes the ones touted as LCHF-friendly. In any case, they’re always very poor value for money.
-Lose the big five from your diet – sugar, rice, pasta, bread, and potatoes – and replace them with vegetables and meat. Play any riff on that theme, and you’re doing LCHF.
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