One of the biggest challenges when working with a low carb diet is finding no carb snacks to take the edge off your hunger between meals. In the US, most snack foods are loaded with carbohydrates because of the sugar and high fructose corn syrup they add. This makes finding no carb snacks off the shelf very difficult. As I have said before, foods with no carbs are predominately found in the meat and oil sections of the USDA food pyramid. So this is where we will look for our snack foods.
Ham, bacon , and other pork products are all listed as zero carb foods. A little creativity can allow you to make different snacks every day. For example, fry up a few pieces of bacon in the morning and put them in a zip lock bag. When you start getting the need to feed, munch on a back strip. The meat and fat will help curb your appetite and the crunchiness will give your mouth something to do. Often times it is the physical action of eating that is more satisfying than the actual food. You can also take pre-cooked ham and dice it up into cubes. Ham seems to be a good filler for me even though I don’t get the crunch like from bacon.
Low Carb Chips
When looking for foods without carbs be sure to stay away from potato chips. According to the package 15 chips equal 22 grams of carbohydrates. That is more than one carb for every chip. If you are serious about losing weight with a no carb diet or a low carb diet these are definitely not to be on the menu.
Beef can be on the menu though and there are a number of ways it can be prepared. I like to cook up some steaks or filets or a roast and then slice it into little fingers. These are easy to carry around and eat and they will stay in the refrigerator for several days. In the morning make up a baggie with some beef strips and a few one cubes of cheddar cheese or muenster cheese and you have a great no carb snack that is very portable. If you want a dip to go along with this take a container of yellow prepared mustard or some real mayonnaise. Do not use ketchup. Ketchup has sugar added to the already fairly high carb count tomatoes.
No Carb Snacks
The key to developing your no carb recipes for snacks is to stay away from what we usually find in fast food restaurants. If you notice most fast food menus are big on bread and grain products. We need to stay away from these as they are always high carb foods. For example, one slice of white bread is about 12 grams of carbs. If you are realistically trying to limit your diet to 40 grams of carbs a day you can only eat about three and a half slices of cheap white bread and you are at your limit. This is not a very effective snack food for weight loss.
Some ethnic foods can also be very high in carbohydrates and you need to be careful. Mexican food for example is loaded with grams in alost every bite. A corn tortilla contains about 13 grams of carbs before you add any filler. One half cup of black beans is about 21 grams. So if you have one tortilla with a half a cup of beans your almost at your 40 gram limit if you are doing a maximum of 40 grams of carbohydrates for your low carb diet. About the only thing you can have in a Mexican restaurant is the sour cream and the steak or chicken in the fajitas. Stay away from the chips, beans, and anything wrapped in tortillas either corn or wheat.
No Carb Breakfast Foods
Eggs are zero carbs and are the best no carb breakfast foods. Cereals are high in grams along with the bread you would have for toast. I usually scramble a few eggs and add some diced ham or chunks of bacon. I find this very filling and this way I can stay away form the starch. For our purposes we can interchange no starch foods and no carb foods when we talking about a no carb diet. When I was younger and in school they always talked about starches as one of the food groups. You can use that term mean high carbs if you want. So low carb recipes will be low starch recipes. We can also talk about a low carb diabetic diet. A diet for diabetics does not have to be any different than our diet for losing weight. As we have said before, the problem with type II diabetes is that the pancreas starts to wear out because it has been so overworked. It gets harder and harder to manufacture insulin to convert the sugars and carbs in the blood and diabetes is developed. A diabetic food list is just a low carb diet food list.
As we have said before, meats make a good snack for our weight loss or diabetic diet. But again be careful if you are not preparing the snacks or meals yourself. Chicken is a great no carb food which can be prepared in meals or for snacks but if you buy it at a fast food restaurant every thing changes. A chicken breast has zero carbs. But a battered chicken breast comes in at 13 grams of carbohydrates. Why is that? It is high in carbs because the breading is made of some type of grain. It is either bread crumbs, read high carb bread, or it may be corn meal, read high carb corn sugar. It also usually has some high fructose corn syrup added for flavor. So we go from having a great nutritious no carb snack to one loaded with carbs. Be very carful if you are not doing the preparation of your food.
No carb snacks are possible to make and enjoy you just have to plan ahead and watch what you do. There are very few snacks on the market that would fit into our diet so you are going to be forced to create you own. Have fun with this and experiment with creating no carb snacks you enjoy.
I find a good low carb snack is sugar free jello and whipped cream, very tasty and no carbs.
Thank you Vickie, that is a great idea especially for the hot summer days coming.
I like to snack at night so either the s.f. jello for me with whipped cream or hot pork skins in the bag. They give you the feeling of chips with the crunch. You can get HOT, BARBQ, or PLAIN.
I am fairly new to this low carb lifestyle, however, my husband is very creative.(and supportive). We use cauliflower and turnips as substitutes for potatoes. I made clam chowder with them and he couldn’t tell the difference!
That is a great trick Sue, I am going to try that.