Low carb fast food falls into two categories: first, what you can eat in fast food restaurants, and second, what you can eat at home or on the road when you need a meal or snack and you need it now.

Low Carb Fast Food In Restaurants

It is not always easy to have a low carb meal in a fast food restaurant. Some burgers contain flour, breadcrumbs or other high carb fillers. If you have a salad, it often includes potatoes or corn, and the dressing or mayonnaise may not be low carb. There is also a lot of sugar in many fast foods, even in foods that you would not think of as sweet.

The best way to ensure that you do not inadvertently cheat on your low carb diet when visiting a fast food restaurant is to check out the nutritional information of their menu choices before you go, and plan your meal based on that information. Most restaurant chains offer this information online.

McDonalds burgers are 100% beef in the US, but recipes may vary in other countries. Many other chains will offer a similar low carb fast food choice. Of course, that is without the bun and without ketchup, onions, etc. You should count 4 carbs if you eat the burger with ketchup, onions and a slice of cheese. Don’t eat the bun or fries unless you want to stall your weight loss – they are very high in carbs.

Low Carb Fast Foods To Eat At Home Or Carry

If you are traveling and you want to take food with you, many dishes can be transported in a cooler. Boiled eggs, meat, cheese and salad can all be kept cool that way.

If you are visiting somebody or attending a conference or other event out of town, it’s a great idea to take along some low carbohydrate snacks that you can eat whenever you feel hungry and there are no low carb choices available. Here are some examples:

- canned tuna, salmon and other fish (in salt water or oil, no sauces)
- canned chicken breast
- beef jerky
- pork rinds
- pepperoni
- string cheese
- celery sticks, tomatoes to eat with any other snacks

If you are home, you can also make many low carb fast food recipes, especially if you have the use of a microwave. In many cases you can keep these in the refrigerator ready for any time that you may need a low carb snack. For example:

Eggs and bacon fried with mushrooms, tomatoes or any other low carb vegetable. This just takes a few minutes. Fish also cooks fast – try it fried in olive oil with zucchini and mushrooms.

Onion, cucumber and cream cheese dip is a great standby to keep in the refrigerator. Make a batch of this in the food processor or blender, adjusting quantities of onion and cucumber according to your taste. Don’t forget to count the carbs in the veggies, especially the onion, which can be rather high. Then you can eat this as a low carb fast food with celery sticks and other veggies whenever you have a snack attack.

You can also keep cooked chicken breast in the refrigerator to have with mayonnaise and salad – that will just take a moment to fix when you need it. You can do the same thing with canned tuna for more low carb fast food at home.

The Atkins diet (TM) is the best known form of low carb dieting. First published by Dr Robert Atkins in the 1970s, it is neither the newest nor the first low carb dieting plan, but it is very well established. Because of this, you can find a wide range of recipe books based on the plan as well as plenty of free recipes online. There have also been plenty of studies about the Atkins diet and it is better accepted by health professionals than many newer diets.

If you are thinking of following the Atkins diet you will need a copy of ‘Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution’. This is the revised version of his diet which includes more vegetables and is generally felt to be a healthier diet to follow than his first plan, so be sure to buy the book that includes the word ‘New’ in the title.

Atkins and other low carb dieting plans work by keeping your carbohydrate consumption low enough that you enter ‘ketosis’ or ‘lipolysis’. This is a natural condition of the body designed to deal with times when carbohydrate foods are scarce.

Many body functions require glucose for energy, and normally this is taken from the carbohydrate foods that we consume. But if the body is not getting enough of these, it can switch to using fat for energy. In this state it will use both the fat that we consume and the fat that is stored in the body, so we lose weight.

Unlike some other low carb dieting plans, the Atkins diet does not restrict fat consumption. This is because the switch to lipolysis depends on the body having plenty of fat in the diet as well as using stored fat. Also, fat is a substance that makes us feel full for a long time after eating. In fact, Dr Atkins included a rule that says you must not go more than 6 hours between meals, simply because his first patients found they were not hungry, and were not eating enough.

So what are the rules of the Atkins way of low carb dieting? Well, there are three stages. The first and best known is induction, in which you are restricted to a maximum of 20 grams of carbohydrate.

Some people assume that this means that you can have 20 grams of pasta a day, but that is not the case at all. Almost all foods contain carbohydrate, except for meat, fish and oils. So if you are counting the carbs in your food, you need to do it by using an online diet tracking program such as fitday.com.

For those who do not want to weigh and record everything that they eat, Dr Atkins gives you a list of foods that you can eat freely (e.g. meat, fish, oils) plus foods of which you can eat a certain amount each day (e.g. milk and dairy products, avocado). In addition you get to eat up to 3 cups of vegetables a day, which you take from certain lists. These do not include starchy vegetables like carrots and potatoes, which are not allowed on induction.

If this sounds restrictive, do not worry. You only follow induction for 2 weeks to kick start your weight loss. Then in phase 2 you will gradually increase your carbohydrate intake and at the same time, reintroduce some of the foods that were not allowed during induction. This means more vegetables, including some beans and starchy vegetables in small quantities; more dairy products; nuts, fruits, whole grains and even alcohol.

Phase 3 of the Atkins low carb dieting plan is maintenance for when you have achieved or almost achieved your desired weight loss.

If you are a big cookie fan on a low carb diet, you may find yourself wishing that you could find some low carb cookies. Yes, there may be some brands that produce cookies with what they consider to be a low carbohydrate count, but they are unlikely to be low enough for you!

Anybody who loves cookies does not want to stop at one. Besides, as you will find out from the conversations on any low carb diet forums, using a lot of branded low carb snacks like diet bars, low carb chocolate, cakes and cookies causes a stall in weight loss for a lot of people. It is much better to make your own at home.

And now you can! In this article we will give you some ideas of how to make low carb cookies along with basic recipes that you can expand and alter to fit your own tastes and diet plan.

Please note that low carb diets are not all the same. Some of the ingredients that we use may not be allowed on all diet plans, especially if you are in the first phase of a low carb diet which is usually more restrictive. Just bookmark this page and visit again when you are past the induction phase!

Most low carb cookies use artificial sweetener. We use sucralose which is one of the few that does not lose its sweetness during the cooking process. Other possibilities are sugar alcohols such as erythritol, which are allowed on some plans and taste great.

Low Carb Peanut Butter Cookies (adapted from a recipe at genaw.com)

• 3 Tbsp peanut butter
• 1 Tbsp butter at room temperature
• 3/4 cup almond meal
• 1 egg white
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• Liquid sucralose or other sweetener equivalent to 3 Tbsp sugar

Put almond meal in a bowl. Mix the other ingredients together, then add them to the bowl and mix with the almond meal. Use 1 tsp dough per cookie and bake at 325 degrees F for 15-20 minutes, until golden.

Makes approx 25 cookies at 2g net carbohydrate per cookie (assuming no carbs in your sweetener).

Low Carb Macaroons (adapted from a recipe at about.com)

• 1 cup shredded dried coconut, unsweetened
• 2 egg whites
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• Liquid sucralose or other sweetener equivalent to 1/2 cup sugar

Put the coconut in a mixing bowl and mix in the other ingredients. Add a little water if the mixture is too dry. Form into balls, place on a baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) for about 15 minutes, until just starting to brown.

Makes 8 cookies at 1g net carbohydrate per cookie (assuming no carbs in your sweetener), so even if you eat them all at once it will not be a diet disaster!

You can also substitute flax meal for flour in some recipes. This is a common ingredient in low carb recipes for thickening. It is very healthy, being high in fiber while low in carbs. You can buy ready-ground flax meal, but it has a short shelf life so it is best to grind your own. Buy either dark or golden flax seeds and grind them in a coffee grinder, a little at a time. Keep refrigerated until you are ready to use them in your low carb cookies and other recipes.