Shannon Epstein - The Healthy Low-Carb Slow Cooker Cookbook: 100 Easy Recipes to Kickstart Weight Loss

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The Fit part of my blog is a reference to how I try to live a healthy lifestylemainly by cooking healthy food. Thats right, food. You cant out-exercise a bad diet! While I dont follow a particular diet, I tend to naturally eat low-carb foods because of personal preferencemostly lean meats, vegetables, and cheese. I first started paying attention to what I ate after I noticed that, as I was aging, my metabolism started slowing down. It became more difficult to maintain control over my weight. With my 40th birthday officially on the horizon, I found that the things that had always worked for me just didnt work any longer.

In the past I could eat moderate amounts of starches, like potatoes or sweet potatoes, at each meal and still easily maintain a healthy weight. Unfortunately, those days were over. I knew I had to make a change, so I started looking for another way to keep my weight down while still eating the foods I loved. Enter low-carb eating. Im the first to admit that transitioning to low-carb can be tricky. Carbs are found in more foods than just pasta and rice; theyre also in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and more, so its important to educate yourself.

Start reading labels and learn what you can and cannot eat. But, believe me, it is worth it when you realize how much great food is actually low-carb. And you can eat it and still watch the weight drop off. Once I figured out how I wanted to eat, I had to think about how I was going to cook it. This is where the good old slow cooker comes in handy (or perhaps the Slow Cook function on your brand-new Instant Pot). Most people live busy lives and its hard to slow down and make a home-cooked meal.

The slow cooker lets you fit that into your life. Since I started using a slow cooker to make my meals, Ive discovered that eating healthy is not only easy, but it sure tastes good, too, and thats what I show you in this book. Many of the foods you can eat on a low-carb diet are those that a slow cooker cooks particularly well, like beef, egg casseroles, and hearty soups. The recipes Ive created are easy to make, and they use ingredients that are easy to find at the grocery store. You probably already have a lot of them in your pantry. Im willing to bet there arent any ingredients in here that are unknown to you.

The recipes are a mixture of new and classic dishes, many that youve heard of and some that youd never guess could be low-carb. Soups, casseroles, seafood, vegetarian entres, dessertstheyre all here, and youll find making and eating them to be a pleasure. What you wont find are high-carb meals built around ingredients that often find their way into slow cooker recipes, such as legumes and grains. Sure, diets can be hard to stick to, but think of low-carb eating as a lifestyle adjustment made easier by your slow cooker. With this cookbook, youre one step closer to attaining (and maintaining) your health goals. Slow cookers are all about convenience.

And eating foods with fewer carbohydrates, for many, paves a clear path to weight loss. So, Im pretty excited to combine the two for you here. Slow cookers give you more control over what youre making because you control the ingredients going in, and frankly, natural ingredients cook better in the slow cooker than processed foods. Fresh or even frozen vegetables cook well in a slow cooker and are, in many cases, low in carbs, so youll see a lot of vegetables in the recipes in this book. Pretty much any cut of meat will work, too; in fact, the tougher the cut, the better it cooks using this method (and tougher cuts are less expensive, so its a win-win). Low-Carb Love Eating a low-carb diet might be the rage these days, but it isnt anything new.

People have been eating low-carb foods in an effort to lose weight for years. But over the past few years, other plans, like the paleo diet and the keto diet, have gotten a lot of fanfare online and on social media and have distracted people from a basic low-carb diet plana method of eating that has quietly and consistently continued to help people lose weight. When you follow a low-carb diet, youre mainly reducing the amount of starches and sugars that you consume, which are stored as fat in the body. When you avoid foods that contain them, your body stops storing fat and starts using it as fuel. As long as the amount of carbs and calories you eat is kept in check, you will start to shed the weight. Remember, even if you cut back on the carbs, you wont lose weight if you keep consuming the same inflated number of calories.