Me and my girlfriend are attempting a keto-style diet, but I am a terrible chef and don’t have much energy to cook generally. Previously I’d mostly eat soups and stews since I could make a huge pot, freeze some of the extra and eat it with rice, but most of the recipies I know aren’t keto friendly (or at least the one suitable for a full meal). It also doesn’t help that I’m a pretty terrible cook and my girlfriend is used to well-seasoned African cuisine.
I’m hoping to find some keto or keto-adjacent meals that can be prepared in bulk easily, and ideally (but not necessarily), frozen.
I cannot encourage you to harm yourself with this hair-brained diet.
Consider changing your dietary intake to be more in line with your body’s nutritional needs. Eat less food, eat more vegetables.
Please, as someone who went down the keto rabbit hole 10 years ago, please don’t do it unless you have a medical reason, aka diabetes.
Keto is not sustainable for you and in fact for the vast majority of people, it’s not inherently healthier, the reason it works as with any other elimination diet, is that you remove a bunch of highly palatable calorie dense foods.
The hard truth that no one wants to hear is that the only way to lose weight long term is to change your lifestyle to one that you can stick to for the rest of your life, that means learning to eat nice balanced meals of veggies, carbs and proteins for 80-90% of your food.
Here is a video by RP on Keto https://youtu.be/yTSJuzE0XsA
Here is a great channel encouraging sustainable weightloss practices
https://youtube.com/@adamwrightfitness
Here is one with more use of the word cunt
https://youtube.com/shorts/A2VAufxYTuc
If you want recipes there is this guy for example
https://youtube.com/shorts/_iRKBfG5fdM
Keto is a fucking cult, get out while you can, unless you want to have diarrhea anytime you have pasta, or a beer, or anything with higher amount of carbs, your gut biome changes and you will not be able to properly digest it for a while, so no living your life and having a fun date night with your girl, it won’t be fun in the evening.
I also encourage you to read Atomic Habits, it’s not about weightloss, but it is really good about teaching you that small changes over a long period have big results, and that is what weight loss is, you can’t rush it, it’s a long process.
Also you want to consider picking up weight lifting as building and most importantly retaining muscle mass will do much more for your health than whatever keto cultist claim.
I used ruled.me and cavemanketo.com for most of my keto recipes. Ruled me is good for fancier dishes if you want something a little different, some can also be made for a week or frozen. Caveman has lots of simple casseroles that are great for portioning out and freezing or eating over a week.
Since others have shared a lot of recipes, I’m just popping in to say that drinking a lot of water and adding electrolytes is extremely important on this diet. For real, it’s not something you wanna FAFO about, because you’ll feel like absolute shit.
There are online calculators you can use to input your age, height, weight, etc, and determine how much water you need to drink. Just don’t forget the electrolytes!
If it helps, this is what I use (it’s a bit cheaper on Amazon but I really like the company so I order direct).
Also, if you want to track your calories/carb intake, I recommend an app called Cronometer (google play link here).
Best of luck! I’ve been on keto for years now (hopping off now and then around the holidays) and can’t recommend it enough.
With respect to electrolyte options:
I use LITE SALT (low salt salt, like a 50/50 sodium/potassium mix), but any brand works. Super cheap per serving, I just mix with hot water and drink it like a shot. Some people use bullion cubes too!
example: https://www.mortonsalt.com/home-product/morton-lite-salt-mixture-2/
Typically I will Instapot just the meat in large batches:
- Beef: Carne Picada or Stew Meat
- Pork: Shoulder/Butt
- Chicken: Thighs
Add a can of salsa, chipotle adobe, or seasoning if desired. I usually just keep the beef bland with maybe some soy sauce.
Cook - refrigerate - put into ziplock bag and freeze.
Over the week I’ll break off 100-200g portions and add to things like eggs, salads or curry dishes.
So – while not a ready to eat meal – the dishes that I do cook daily only take 5-10 minutes with this method.
Chicken chicken chicken. Grill up tons of it. You can add things like a red sauce (go easy on the tomatoes because of the natural sugars), pesto, Alfredo sauce, Italian dressing, etc…
Grilled/baked chicken will likely be a main protein.
I also really love pot roast (there are great keto recipes out there that taste phenomenal). Grilling a steak is always a delightful treat.
Make sure you eat plenty of greens with each meal and take a multivitamin to keep your body from being deficient.
Sugar-free Gatorade is really helpful for fighting the “low carb flu” in the early days of switching to ketosis (as it’s the low electrolytes that make you feel those flu symptoms).
Best of luck! Not everyone can do keto, so I hope it works for you (my SO ended up getting a rash on their back that scarred because of the acetone produced by their body from migrating over to ketosis; never happened to me, though).
Thanks for the advice.
For the time being, we’re trying to transition very gently into keto. It’ll probably be multiple months before we’re trying to maintain a “real” keto diet, so hopefully that will help the side effects or at last provide time to intervene before they become too serious. Worst case, we can stop at whatever point is healthy for us, but we’ll still need recipies to maintain even that compared to our current “rice or potatoes with every meal” diet.
In the meantime it’d be good to make sure you’re having whole proteins mixing in beans when you’re cooking your rice instead of having rice alone is significantly healthier and more filling.
I personally made a rule to avoid “naked carbs” or carb centric dishes so I’ll never eat table bread at a restaurant but I will, sparingly, have sandwiches. Additionally if you’re having pasta don’t be conservative with the meat in your sauce. For me a big part of healthy eating was to train myself not to stretch vegetables and meat with fillers. I focus a meal on the veg and meat and use carbs sparingly for their flavor.
Why are you interested in the keto diet? Are there specific goals you’re trying to accomplish? It’s a tricky diet that is best done with medical supervision.
I highly recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition information. They use accessible language and have recipes too!
https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-weight/diet-reviews/ketogenic-diet/
It’s a pretty good over-view of a ketogenic diet actually. Though its written from a very skeptical perspective and uses weasel language like
Some negative side effects of a long-term ketogenic diet have been suggested…
Thanks for sharing the resource!
Choose any meat and then choose a vegetable from the keto list. Add extra butter.
Ground beef can be prepared in bulk and frozen, just needing to microwave when your ready, it tastes better fresh but it’s still ok frozen and heated.
You can make beef jerky and store that in bulk .canned tuna/sardines makes for good keto meals on the go.
I already do that for pastas and stews, but haven’t found any good keto recipies using it (yet).
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/recipes
You can just eat ground beef by itself, it’s delicious. I just add onions on top for some zesty crunch.
If you want to get fancy, cook a big batch put portions into daily meal boxes, add some olives, and maybe sour cream… And easy eating all week
Also having hard boiled eggs (still in shell) is a great snack that lasts about a week in the fridge
I’m sorry for offering up the wrong kind of advice, but I would really urge you to reconsider keto. Its horrible for you. I’ve lost a lot of weight successfully and many things have worked.
I’m not saying its life threatening or you won’t achieve your health goals. But keto is just plain bad.
My doctor said something similar.
But after years of me being on keto, losing 167lbs, having an “absolutely fantastic health record” and the “healthiest bloodwork” he’s ever seen (his words), plus significant improvement in mood, memory, and mobility, and a significant reduction/elimination of pain and inflammation, he changed his mind.
He even admitted that most of the content he had heard or read when saying it was “a bad diet” all those years ago was “completely biased” and “worded very slyly” (also his words). After revisiting those sources, he realized they “weren’t actually describing real keto, just people eating a ton of fat” (which is not what keto is), “and crying about how bad fat is” (again, his words… which made me LOL). Also, mega bonus points for him - he actually checked into the sources and found that most of them were funded by the sugar industry.
It takes nothing to realize you’re wrong; for some people, it takes a lot to admit it. He had no problem doing so, and even recommends the diet to other patients now.
Some nits to pick:
Ketosis is a metabolic state where the body burns fat for fuel (lots of handwaving, but more or less)
ANY diet where weight is lost MUST have states of ketosis to metabolize fat (by definition). This includes the old classic ‘eat less, move more’, ‘count calories CICO’, ‘low fat diet’ etc.
A ketogenic diet, keto for short as people use it, is a diet that keeps people in the metabolic state of ketosis for extended periods of time. There are food groups that do not introduce glycemic load (fat and protein), and therefore keep the metabolic state of ketosis.
I must respectfully disagree with the statement that keto isn’t safe - if that statement were true, then losing any weight ever, would not be safe - including sleeping (you run out of glucose and burn fat while you sleep… break-fast is called that for a reason). The flip side of the ‘keto isn’t safe’ statement is the implicit statement that carbohydrates are a essential macronutrient - which is an difficult position to defend.
Hmm…
The ketogenic diet is not considered a benign, holistic, or all-natural treatment. As with any serious medical therapy, it may result in complications, although these are generally less severe and less frequent than with anticonvulsant medication or surgery. […] Supplements are necessary to counter the dietary deficiency of many micronutrients. […] Like many anticonvulsant drugs, the ketogenic diet has an adverse effect on bone health. […] In adolescents and adults, common side effects reported include weight loss, constipation, dyslipidemia, and in women, dysmenorrhea.
Sounds like you’re right, this diet is something that should be done for specific medical reasons, with professional guidance and with specific goals in mind:
The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary therapy that in conventional medicine is used mainly to treat hard-to-control (refractory) epilepsy in children.
Yes and since op didn’t specify any medical condition I didn’t think it was a wise idea. Idk why my comment is quite so controversial.
You’re right, but didn’t offer any sources. So it came off more like cluttering up OPs thread with opinion where they’re asking for specific help.
I have no idea - counting calories is the safest diet by far and if you’re going to undertake a diet that specifically shifts your metabolism you should be aware of the potential health effects. It’d be really nice if we could snap our fingers and lose 150 lbs over a weekend but fast diets put immense stress on our system.
Yep.
Keto seems less dangerous than the old Atkins diet. I had a coworker who rapidly shed about 30 lbs on Atkins and then had a stroke - he was 32.
I used to have a medical manual called Anecdotal Medicine. You’d flip to whatever opinion you wanted to have and there’d be a story right there to back it up! Very handy
That’s cool - if you prefer impersonal articles or papers to anecdotes here’s one of each for you:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6074441/
To me that’s a lot less meaningful than watching a healthy coworker suffer a stroke out of the blue - but to each their own.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/skeptical-doctors
For example, a 2013 review of 17 studies claimed there was a higher risk of death for those who ate less carbohydrate.
…
Generally speaking, the lowest intake of carbohydrate in these studies averaged around 40% of calories.For a 2,000 calorie diet, 40% is 200 grams of carbs. While that is less than the standard American diet containing anywhere from 250-400 grams of carbs, it is far more than the 20 to 50 grams of daily carbs in low-carb and ketogenic diets used as interventions for obesity and chronic disease.
Diet doctor is a excellent resource, and they cite sources (hover over the numbers)
Bonus reading: https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/science
