A Low Carb Diet Meal Plan and Menu That Can Save Your Life

The low carb, real food based diet involves eating natural, unprocessed foods with a low carbohydrate content. For a detailed overview, subscribe to My Diet Formula

There is a lot of scientific evidence that this type of diet is the best option for people who want to lose weight, optimize health and lower the risk of disease.

A Low Carb Diet Meal Plan

What foods you should eat depends on a few things, including how healthy you are, how much you exercise and how much weight you have to lose.

Consider all of this as a general guideline, not something written in stone.

The Basics

Eat: Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, high-fat dairy, fats, healthy oils and maybe even some tubers and non-gluten grains.

Don’t Eat: Sugar, HFCS, wheat, seed oils, trans fats, artificial sweeteners, “diet” and low-fat products and highly processed foods.

Foods to Avoid

You should avoid these 7 foods, in order of importance:

• Sugar: Soft drinks, fruit juices, agave, candy, ice cream and many others.
• Gluten Grains: Wheat, spelt, barley and rye. Includes breads and pastas.
• Trans Fats: “Hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils.
• High Omega-6 Seed- and Vegetable Oils: Cottonseed-, soybean-, sunflower-, grapeseed-, corn-, safflower and canola oils.
• Artificial Sweeteners: Aspartame, Saccharin, Sucralose, Cyclamates and Acesulfame Potassium. Use Stevia instead.
• “Diet” and “Low-Fat” Products: Many dairy products, cereals, crackers, etc.
• Highly Processed Foods: If it looks like it was made in a factory, don’t eat it.

You MUST read ingredients lists, even on foods labelled as “health foods.”

Low Carb Food List – Foods to Eat

You should base your diet on these real, unprocessed, low-carb foods.

• Meat: Beef, lamb, pork, chicken and others. Grass-fed is best.
• Fish: Salmon, trout, haddock and many others. Wild-caught fish is best.
• Eggs: Omega-3 enriched or pastured eggs are best.
• Vegetables: Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and many others.
• Fruits: Apples, oranges, pears, blueberries, strawberries.
• Nuts and Seeds: Almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, etc.
• High-Fat Dairy: Cheese, butter, heavy cream, yogurt.
• Fats and Oils: Coconut oil, butter, lard, olive oil and cod fish liver oil.

If you need to lose weight, be careful with the cheese and nuts because they’re easy to overeat on. Don’t eat more than one piece of fruit per day.

Maybe Eat

If you’re healthy, active and don’t need to lose weight then you can afford to eat a bit more carbs.

• Tubers: Potatoes, sweet potatoes and some others.
• Non-gluten grains: Rice, oats, quinoa and many others.
• Legumes: Lentils, black beans, pinto beans, etc. (If you can tolerate them).

You can have these in moderation if you want:

• Dark Chocolate: Choose organic brands with 70% cocoa or higher.
• Wine: Choose dry wines with no added sugar or carbs.

Dark chocolate is high in antioxidants and may provide health benefits if you eat it in moderation. However, be aware that both dark chocolate and alcohol will hinder your progress if you eat/drink too much.

Drink

• Coffee
• Tea
• Water
• Carbonated soda without artificial sweeteners.

Monday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Grass-fed yogurt with blueberries and a handful of almonds.
• Dinner: Cheeseburger (no bun), served with vegetables and salsa sauce.

Tuesday

• Breakfast: Bacon and eggs.
• Lunch: Leftover burgers and veggies from the night before.
• Dinner: Salmon with butter and vegetables.

Wednesday

• Breakfast: Eggs and vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Shrimp salad with some olive oil.
• Dinner: Grilled chicken with vegetables.

Thursday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Smoothie with coconut milk, berries, almonds and protein powder.
• Dinner: Steak and veggies.

Friday

• Breakfast: Bacon and Eggs.
• Lunch: Chicken salad with some olive oil.
• Dinner: Pork chops with vegetables.

Saturday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various veggies.
• Lunch: Grass-fed yogurt with berries, coconut flakes and a handful of walnuts.
• Dinner: Meatballs with vegetables.

Sunday

• Breakfast: Bacon and Eggs.
• Lunch: Smoothie with coconut milk, a bit of heavy cream, chocolate-flavoured protein powder and berries.
• Dinner: Grilled chicken wings with some raw spinach on the side.

Include a variety of vegetables in your diet. If your goal is to remain under 50 grams of carbs per day, then there is room for plenty of veggies and one fruit per day.

If you want to see examples of some of my go-to meals,

Subscribe to: My Diet Formula

Again, if you’re healthy, lean and active, you can add some tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes, as well as some healthier grains like rice and oats.

Some Healthy, Low-Carb Snacks

There is no health reason to eat more than 3 meals per day, but if you get hungry between meals then here are some healthy, easy to prepare low-carb snacks that can fill you up:

• A Piece of Fruit
• Full-fat Yogurt
• A Hard-Boiled Egg or Two
• Baby Carrots
• Leftovers From The Night Before
• A Handful of Nuts
• Some Cheese and Meat

Eating at Restaurants

At most restaurants, it is fairly easy to make your meals LCRF-friendly.

1. Ask them to fry your food in real butter.
2. Tell the waiter that you are intolerant/allergic to both sugar and gluten. This avoids annoying questions and weird looks.
3. You can replace bread and potatoes with extra vegetables.

A Simple Low-Carb Shopping List

A good rule is to shop at the perimeter of the store, where the whole foods are likelier to be found.

Organic and grass-fed foods are best, but only if you can easily afford them. Even if you don’t buy organic, your diet will still be a thousand times better than the standard western diet.

Try to choose the least processed option that still fits into your price range.

• Meat (Beef, lamb, pork, chicken, bacon)
• Fish (Fatty fish like salmon is best)
• Eggs (Choose Omega-3 enriched or pastured eggs if you can)
• Butter
• Coconut Oil (Choose Extra Virgin)
• Lard
• Olive Oil
• Cheese
• Heavy Cream
• Sour Cream
• Yogurt (full-fat, unsweetened)
• Blueberries (can be bought frozen)
• Nuts
• Olives
• Fresh vegetables: greens, peppers, onions, etc.
• Frozen vegetables: broccoli, carrots, various mixes.
• Salsa Sauce
• Condiments: sea salt, pepper, garlic, mustard, etc.

I recommend clearing your pantry of all unhealthy temptations if you can: chips, candy, ice cream, sodas, juices, breads, cereals and baking ingredients like wheat flour and sugar.

Where to Find More? Subscribe to MY DIET FORMULA

It’s your body, tell it to burn fat, not carbs to lose weight!

There is a lot of confusion about metabolism and how it works. Did you know that the most important thing is not how fast or slow your metabolism is, but rather, where your body gets its energy?

Remember, your metabolism is basically the rate that your body burns calories to create energy. It is true that the faster your metabolism, the more calories you will burn, and the easier it is to lose weight. The problem is that to some degree your metabolism is inherited but also, as you age your metabolism will naturally slow down. Does this mean that we are all doomed to gain weight as we get older? Well, the key is to get answers to the right questions!

In fact, my friends over at MyDietFormula have dedicated countless research dollars and hours to helping people naturally lose weight. So, no matter how fast or slow your metabolism runs, you can lose weight by understanding the key concept that your body can use your body fat as fuel instead of relying on the daily intake of carbohydrates.

This simple approach translates into turning your body into a fat burning machine. In their latest publication, MyDietFormula details absolutely everything you will need to easily tell your body to start pulling its energy from a different fuel tank – your fat stores that you have been adding to since you left high school. Shed those unnecessary pounds slowly, easily, naturally… and permanently. Here are some examples of what is included:

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Triggering Your Body to Burn Fat

Q. I just read an article of yours, you wrote that, to lose weight, a person needs to do 60-90 minutes of cardio on most days of the week. But I was told by a trainer NOT to do this much. He said to keep it short because the first 15 min of cardio burns fat, and exercising for longer than that burns muscle, not fat. He said that it’s not good to do cardio for too long because you need to preserve, and even build, muscle since having more muscle burns calories and keeps your metabolism revved up, so I have been doing minimal cardio and lifting weights. I’ve reshaped my body but I can’t seem to lose weight or inches. Why?

A. If you’re not seeing weight or fat loss and you’re controlling what you eat, you do need to spend more than 15 minutes doing cardio. To fully explain, I’ll take you step-by-step through the several points you’ve addressed.

Burning Fat

When your body moves (or any cell in your body does any type of ”work”) it needs energy. The amount of energy needed is measured as a unit of heat—or a calorie. The fuel to produce this energy comes from several sources, mostly fat and carbs (glucose), and occasionally amino acids (protein). How and when fat is ‘”burned” (or metabolized to provide energy for the body) and how that affects body fat levels and weight is a very complex area of physiologyresearch. There have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of studies exploring the utilization of fat for energy under a variety of different conditions. There is still much to be understood, but this is how we know it works so far:

Whether you are watching TV or running around a track, the fuel your body uses to give you the calories your cells need for energy comes from burning mostly fat and carbs. Your body nearly always burns a mix of both fat calories and carb calories. So normally, for every calorie burned, the fuels are around a 50/50 split of both fat and carbs. 

How hard you are moving during exercise is one major determinant of which fuel your body will use. Carbs provide a faster energy source. So whenever you need to do something fast or produce force, carbs are the better fuel. Fats are favored during long, low-intensity activities. It’s not that you stop using one or the other fuel, it’s that the ratio of both shifts depending on your activity. In more scientific terms, you alternate between aerobic (more fat-burning) and anaerobic (more carb-burning) metabolism.

Losing Weight by Burning Calories

When it comes to weight loss, it really doesn’t matter whether you are more or less fat burning. It doesn’t matter what your calories are made of, but it does matter how many calories you burn—and the more the better. So when you are sitting—and burning more fat--you are burning only about one calorie per minute. Clearly, even though you’re in a greater fat-burning state, no one ever lost weight by sitting! (How many calories you burn depends on many factors, including how heavy you are—the more you weigh, the more you burn.)

You do burn less fat when you work anaerobically, but it doesn’t matter because you are burning more total calories. You will always burn more calories the longer or harder you exercise, no matter what your intensity is. So doing cardio for only 15 minutes makes no sense unless you are short on time. Burning BOTH fat calories and carb calories can result in fat loss or pounds off the scale.

The Ideal Amount of Cardio

How much exercise you need to do depends on your goal. Even small amounts of exercise are great for your health. Just moving a little every day can improve metabolic functions, such as how sensitive your body is to insulin and how it reacts to excess blood sugar. Exercise can also reduce your risk of heart disease and other chronic conditions. That’s why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicinerecommend that all healthy adults accumulate 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity on most, if not all, days  of the week. Although all types of exercise count, generally the recommendations reflect more cardio activity than lower-calorie-burning moves like strength work or stretching.

The big question is whether you’ll drop weight from this amount of exercise. The answer is that some people can. If you work a little harder in that 30 minutes, you will burn more calories and that will have a bigger effect on weight loss. If you have not been active before, then doing 30 minutes of low-intensity activity would still probably help you lose weight.

The less cardio activity you do (or the fewer calories you burn per workout), the slower the weight loss, and that’s because it’s a numbers game. In 30 minutes of moving around, you might burn 150 to 300 calories. But, theoretically, it takes burning around 3,500 calories to lose one pound of fat. So, you’re going to have to do enough workouts, at say 150 calories burned per session, to add up to 3,500 calories, or 17,500 calories for five pounds of fat, and so on.

The problem is that most people give up if they don’t get concrete results fast. Also, different people have different physiological makeups. So this theoretical caloric equation may not work perfectly in every body. That’s why more realistic fitness guidelines for losing weight or maintaining weight loss have been established. The Institute of Medicine and the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines recommend that a person do 60 to 90 minutes a day of accumulated moderate-intensity physical activity at least five days per week.

Can Exercise ‘Burn Muscle’?

This claim is slightly misleading. You certainly do not burn muscle after only 15 minutes of exercise. You start using protein (perhaps from muscle, as well as other amino-acid-containing components in the body) for energy under extreme conditions such as starvation and at the tail end of long, hard endurance events where carb stores are in short supply. The average person who works out does not need to worry about this.

Will More Muscle Rev Up Your Metabolism?

In short, probably not. The average person won’t lose muscle from doing cardio and won’t burn more fat by building more muscle, mostly because one has to eat more than usual (not diet) and lift seriously heavy weights to build more muscle. And even then that person probably won’t build enough muscle to make a difference. Dr. Joseph Donnelly and other leading exercise physiologists conducted a comprehensive review of all the research on exercise and weight loss for the American College of Sports Medicine. While resistance training was recommended for its beneficial role in potentially improving muscle strength and power, the physiologists found no evidence that increasing muscle mass enhanced weight loss, especially when combined with dieting.