Make Easter Eggs the Center of Your Low-Carb Holiday

Make Easter Eggs the Center of Your Low-Carb Holiday

Special Event Diet

When we choose to live a low-carb lifestyle, we give up many holiday traditions that focus on food. While Easter Dinner can always be adapted to fit your carbohydrate tolerance, if you ask any child what the most important aspect of the Easter holiday is, they’ll probably tell you…CANDY!

An Easter basket full of goodies often plays the center role in Easter festivities. Jelly beans, chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks, and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs are popular basket fillers. But there’s one strong holiday tradition attached to Easter that the low carber doesn’t have to give up.

                                             The Incredible, Edible Egg!

Make Easter Eggs the Center of Your Low-Carb Easter Holiday!
(Photo by Praktyczny Przewodnik)

Dr. Westman’s Thought of the Day

I was browsing through the low-carb videos over at YouTube the other day, looking for an Atkins Success Story. I wanted a video with distinct “before” and “after” pictures that I could display at the bottom of an article I’d written for Info Barrel about Atkins Induction. While doing that, I ran into a short video that spotlighted Dr. Westman and his take on low-carb foods.

Although most of what he said was already familiar to me, he did say something that caught my attention:

In order for a low-carb diet to be successful, we have to find foods to eat that are more tasty than the foods we were eating before…

That seemed to rock my world a little bit, as it fine-tuned something that I’ve been coming to realize for a while now.

The sense of taste, and the pleasure that eating gives us, plays a large role in whether a low-carb diet is sustainable – or not.

If you don’t like low-carb foods, or primal foods, or paleo foods, or whatever you’re doing, you won’t stick with the program for the rest of your life. You have to enjoy what you’re eating. You have to enjoy what you’re doing, or you’ll reach a point where you don’t care if you’re inside or outside of the carbohydrate-restriction wagon.

So with that thought in mind, I decided to look at Easter from a different perspective.

Yesterday’s Easter Eggs

Easter Egg Hunt in the Park
(Photo by Keith Laverack)

When I was growing up, we always went to the park for their Easter Egg hunt on the Saturday morning before Easter. I never found any eggs. The park divided us up into age groups, and the eggs for my group were too difficult to find, but we always went and participated anyway. We tried.

However, our personal Easter Egg hunt at home was fun and exciting. We spent most of Saturday afternoon coloring the eggs, and then my dad would hide them around the yard. After church, my siblings and I would have a contest to see who could find the most eggs.

Dying Easter Eggs
(Photo by vmiramontes)

Back then, before the Internet Age, we didn’t do anything spectacular with the eggs. We simply used an Easter Egg Coloring Kit, which offered us little colored pellets we dropped in water. That’s it. When I was a little bit older, the kits started offering special crayons and stickers, but nothing even remotely like you can find on the Internet today.

Today, the Internet has the capacity to spark quite a bit of creativity. We don’t have to settle for simple, colored eggs. We can get into the holiday and really let our personality and imagination come to life.

How to Make Adorable Easter Eggs for a Low-Carb Easter 

Beads Can Really Zazz Up Your Easter Eggs!
(Photo by MariyaZ)

Even if you're not particularly creative, take a stroll down the aisles of your local Walmart, crafts store, or material outlet to see what types of sewing notions and supplies might spark your interest. Buttons, rick rack, braid, ribbons, tiny bows, yarn, or even iron-on appliques can offer a wide variety of resources to turn a plain colored Easter Egg into a masterpiece. Even a set of movable eyes would look fantastic on a low-carb Easter Egg.

Alternatively, you could raid your old jewelry box, or take a visit to your local thrift store to see what old treasures might be available. The idea is to make your eggs something special. Something different. Something fun. But you don't have to turn the eggs into an exotic character. You can simply glue a piece of braid or ribbon to the egg, around the middle to divide it in half, and then dot it with other interesting trinkets, stickers, or paint.

Create an Adorable Easter Egg Display
(Photo by Laura)

When you look at what others have done, don't say, "That's too complicated for me," and then turn away. The idea isn't to copy what others have done. Sit back, look at the display for a while, and check out the principles they used to spark your own imagination and creativity. We tend to place so much emphasis on food when it comes to holidays, that we often give little time or thought to what makes Easter exciting!

I was drawn to this particular picture because I'd never thought about turning Easter Eggs into a nice holiday display before. They used a piece of cardboard for the base. Painted it to represent the ground. But look closely at the egg's faces. They're simply drawn with a marking pen. Yarn is glued on for hair, and the eggs themselves are either wrapped in foil, painted, or left their natural brown color.

So what could you do with colored markers? Foil? Tissue paper? Sticky shelf paper? Material scraps? How about patchwork eggs sitting on a decorative pillow? Or a face with a fabric flower arranged for the hair? In my own neck of the woods, the weather forecast for this weekend is snow. Cotton balls could be attractively stretched a bit, and arranged around the decorated Easter Eggs for the base of the display, rather than cardboard. Even decorated eggs sitting inside a fancy bowl would look nice for an Easter Dinner Centerpiece.

Use a Unique Covering for Your Easter Eggs
(Photo by Yana Sedlak)

From a distance, these creative Easter Eggs looked like they had been covered with a stretchy net of some type, but when I blew the picture up, I discovered it's actually a wire net. The eggs were left their natural brown color, and simply covered in something that allowed that brown color to show through. My thought was how pretty a little bit of stretch lace would look done this way. Stretch lace comes in a variety of patterns. If you know how to crochet, that would look nice too.

Paint Your Easter Eggs to Resemble Your Favorite Sport's Ball
(Photo by Daniel Spiess)

But Easter Eggs don't have to be pretty. They can be turned into anything that has a similar shape. In fact, decorating Easter Eggs isn't much different than decorating a pumpkin. All it takes is the ability to see relationships, such as turning them into a bouquet of balloons. However, an egg's irregular shape can be used to advantage as well.

In addition to painting an egg to look like a football, and having some type of character crossing the goal line with it, you can also set your eggs up to look like they were once round, and are now being squashed. Place a child's 4-wheel truck on top of one, or have an action figure put their foot on it in triumph.

You could also flip the whole egg idea completely on its head, and use the eggs for the foundation of your display instead.

Give Your Easter Eggs a Bit of Character
(Photo by Yana Sedlak)

Okay. Not everyone is creative, but look how this simple display of Easter Eggs is absolutely unique. It reminds me of Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall built of sugar cubes that I placed on a sheet cake once.

Granted, you wouldn't want the cracked egg to be sitting around for longer than Easter Dinner, and probably wouldn't want to imitate last year's Halloween fad of having a carved pumpkin throw up its insides, but it certainly makes the point that you don't have to have a special flair of creativity to be able to have a little bit of low-carb fun for Easter.

In fact, since we're trying to remove food from the center of our lives, getting into Easter Egg Decorating is a great way to do that.      

Sick of Eggs? Real Life Low-Carb Breakfast Ideas!

Sick of Eggs? Real Life Low-Carb Breakfast Ideas!

The Brutal Way

I was reading over at Low Carb Friends yesterday and a new low carber asked for ideas for breakfast that don't include eggs. They said they could no longer stand the sight of them, and the smell was beginning to make them gag.

Since I don't have a problem eating eggs almost every day, myself, I never thought about doing a post about that. But after starting the post last night, it kind of got out of hand. Once I started generating breakfast ideas from my own life, I had trouble stopping.

Most people associate bacon and eggs, or sausage and eggs, with a low-carb breakfast. Part of that is because that's the way that the Atkins Diet is presented in the media or in articles slamming a low-carb diet across the web, but I know very few real-life low-carb dieters who actually eat that way -- eating bacon and eggs every single morning for breakfast.

Most of us use leftovers, protein shakes, One-Minute Muffins, and whatever we have a craving for at the moment. I'm particularly fond of baked chicken legs and used protein shakes when I was working quite a bit, along with hamburger patties, chicken salad, and tuna; but we sometimes forget that newcomers aren't used to dumping traditional breakfast foods and eating whatever they want from the acceptable low-carb foods list. For some reason, they only equate eggs with breakfast once cereal is off the acceptable list.

So if you're stuck for real life low-carb breakfast ideas and want to know what I ate most of the time during my weight loss phase, you can find my latest Infobarrel article at:

http://www.infobarrel.com/Low_Carb_Breakfast_Ideas_for_Those_Sick_of_Eggs

Low-Carb Flour Alternatives

Low-Carb Flour Alternatives

The Brutal Way

Traditional flours, including whole-grain flours, are especially high in carbohydrates.

For example, whole-wheat flour can set you back as much as 22 to 24 grams of carbohydrate per quarter-cup serving. For that reason, many low-carb products take advantage of wheat flours that have had the starch removed or modified:

• resistant wheat starch
• vital wheat gluten
• oat fiber
• whey protein
• modified corn starches

These are common low-carb flour alternatives used in low-carb baking mixes, bread mixes, and other specialty baked goods.

But what can you use at home?

Read more »

6 Reasons Your Weight Loss Might Have Stalled

6 Reasons Your Weight Loss Might Have Stalled

The Brutal Way

What Am I Not Losing Weight On Atkins?

When it comes to weight loss, patience is vital. We all lose body fat at different rates, and each body undergoes different protective processes that we sometimes have to simply wait out. While some people lose weight slow and steady, others lose weight in stages. But if you’ve crossed over that 4-week line where you haven’t lost pounds or inches, what then?

What can you do to encourage your body to let go of some of that excess body fat?

1. You Might Be Eating Too Much Fat

There are many reasons why your weight loss might have stalled, and some of them are extremely contradictory. Eating too much fat is one them. While today’s low-carb mantra claims raising the amount of dietary fat you eat can cure everything from weight loss stalls to the Atkins Flu, before Dr. Atkins passed away, that wasn’t what the Atkins Center was telling folks. In fact, checking out the amount of fat you’re eating was the first thing they always asked you to look at back then.

When you’re in Ketosis, the body predominantly burns fatty acids for fuel, and your brain burns ketones, a by-product of fat mobilization, but if you eat more fat than your body needs, it won’t ever have a chance to pull anything from your fat stores. According to the Atkins Center back in 2003, the body always burns the fat you eat first. It then burns your stored body fat second. You have to eat less fat than your body needs on a daily basis or your weight loss can stall.

2. Are You Drinking Enough Water?

The Atkins Diet has always recommended that you drink at least eight 8-ounce cups of water per day to keep your body working efficiently. That’s about 64 ounces. However, for many overweight individuals, that isn’t enough. A low-carb diet is dehydrating by nature. The liver also needs a good supply of water to filter out and handle any toxins or substances that might have been stored in your fat cells along with the fat. Flushing out ketone fragments also takes extra water.

Therefore, the typical recommendation by health authorities for those attempting to lose weight is to drink one-half of your current weight in ounces. For me, at 180 pounds, that would be 90 ounces of water per day. An alternative way of calculating your water would be to use the 64 ounces of water per day as a baseline, and then drink 8 ounces for each 25 pounds you are overweight. That's how we calculated the water when I was in my own weight-loss phase.

3. Are You Following Your Program Correctly?

You Must Follow Your Low-Carb Diet Plan Correctly

While those who are sensitive to insulin might be able to do a relaxed form of carbohydrate restriction and lose their excess pounds, those with insulin resistance have to be more careful about how they implement a low-carb diet. For that reason, the Atkins Diet, Protein Power, and other low-carb approaches have specific rules about what you can and cannot eat.

If you’re following Atkins, make sure that you’re strictly following the diet’s recommendations for heavy cream, cheese, aspartame, and vegetables. Avoid all forms of sugar in your salad dressings, and don’t eat anything that isn’t on the recommended food list. A low-carb diet is designed to reduce your circulating insulin levels quickly. For that reason, fruits, cottage cheese, peanut butter, and low-carb tortillas or pastas are not used in the beginning stages of the diet.

Once your insulin levels return to normal, most people can enjoy mixed nuts, peanut butter, cottage cheese, blueberries, and other low-carb foods. But if you’re not losing weight, it’s a good idea to check up on yourself, and make sure you’re following your chosen low-carb plan correctly.

4. Watch Your Portion Sizes

Although a low-carb diet offers an easier alternative to counting calories, that doesn’t mean that a calorie deficit isn’t essential for weight loss. It is. The main benefit of a low-carb program over other dietary approaches is the way it reduces your hunger, but that doesn’t mean you can eat all that you want. Although pork rinds are zero carbs, if you eat a whole bag every day, you probably won’t lose much weight unless you’re fairly active.

The Atkins Center recommends about 6 to 8-ounces maximum of protein foods per meal, your allotted number of carbs spent mostly on vegetables, and a few other low-carb goodies such as a dab of sour cream, a spoonful of real whipped cream on your berries, or a little low-sugar catsup (made with Splenda) on your bunless burger.

Also keep in mind that as your weight decreases, your body will need fewer calories to maintain your current weight, so your calorie deficit will drop as the pounds do. If you’re still eating as much as you did when you first went low-carb, that’s probably way too much food. The number of calories you can eat at your goal weight won’t be the number of calories you could eat when you started a low-carb diet.  

5. How Often Are You Eating Out?

Restaurant food can easily contain hidden carbs and sugars you didn’t realize was in there. While avoiding sauces and breaded foods may be a no-brainer, burgers may have breadcrumbs or oatmeal, salad dressings might have sugar or corn syrup, and even the grilled chicken on your salad might be dusted with white flour or cornstarch. While a single meal won’t ruin your low-carb diet, if you’re used to eating out several times a week, especially at fast-food restaurants, those extra carbs and sugars can quickly cause your weight loss to stall.

6. Are You Eating Nutrient-Dense Foods?

Dr. Atkins was always heavy into nutrition and nutrient-dense foods. He believed in saving low-carb goodies and more elaborate, carby meals for special occasions. Today, most low-carbers don’t do that. I see far too many running around looking for recipes that will allow them to imitate the diet that got them fat in the first place. The norm is no longer grilled or baked meat, salad, and veggies. Today, the norm is cheese-heavy casseroles, fake breads, recipes heavy on cream cheese and bacon, and plenty of low-carb desserts.

In general, most low-carb recipes are heavy on wheat, corn, dairy, and/or soy, in addition to the fat. GMO food products are increasing. Our fast-paced lifestyles entice us to turn to fast foods and microwaves. Grains and excessive omega-6 fatty acids as well as trans-fats in the form of fried foods easily find their way into a typical low-carb diet if you aren’t careful. Even food sensitivities and allergies can play a large role in the body’s inflammatory responses, which can then prevent you from shedding the pounds.

So take a careful look at your diet. Are you eating a large amount of processed foods? Many manufacturers add ingredients and chemicals that increase your urge to eat. Are you getting enough protein? Are you eating a wide variety of salads and vegetables? Do whole foods make up the majority of your food choices? Are you reading the ingredient list when you do purchase a processed food? Or are you only looking at how many carbs a food has?

Just because a food is low in carbs, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you.

Low-Carb Superbowl Goodies

Low-Carb Superbowl Goodies

Special Event Diet The Brutal Way

Making a Cheeseball Log
Super Easy for the Superbowl

Okay, I’m not really a Superbowl fan, and neither is my husband. I’m actually addicted to the television series, NCIS, but foodies can never pass up an opportunity to talk about great party food! Plus, NCIS marathons are a regular activity at our house.

To cover my own back, I have a few low-carb munchies that I like to keep the fixings for always on hand. Otherwise, I might be tempted to dive face down into my husband’s gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. I don’t actually know how many carbs are in those cookies. I’ve been too afraid to figure it out. The homemade gluten-free hamburger buns were scary enough.

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