Dana Carpender - The Best Low Carb Sides and Salads: Hundreds of Delicious Recipes from Dinner to Dessert That Let You Live Your Low-Carb Lifestyle and Never Look Back

Youre going to need variety, flavor, color, and interest. Youre going to need festive dishes, easy dishes, and comfort foodsa whole world of things to eat. Because of this, Ive included everything from very low-carb dishes, suitable for folks in the early, very low-carb induction stage of their diet, to splurge dishes, which would probably make most of us gain weight if we ate them every day but which still have far fewer carbs than their normal counterparts. Theres another reason for the range of carb counts: Carbohydrate intolerance comes in degrees, and different people can tolerate different daily carbohydrate intakes. Some of you, no doubt, need to stay in that 20-grams-a-day-or-less range, whereas many otherslucky soulscan have as much as 90 to 100 grams a day and stay slim. This cookbook is meant to serve you all.

Only you can know, through trial and error, how many grams of carbs you can eat in a day and still lose weight. It is up to you to pick and choose among the recipes in this book while keeping an eye on the carbohydrate counts provided. That way, you can put together menus that will please your palate and your family while staying below that critical carb level. However, I do have this to say: Always, always, always the heart and soul of your low-carbohydrate diet should be meat, fish, poultry, eggs, healthy fats, and low-carb vegetables. This book will teach you a boggling number of ways to combine these things, and you should try them all. Dont just find one or two recipes that you like and make them over and over.

Try at least one new recipe every week; that way, within a few months youll have a whole new repertoire of familiar low-carb favorites! You will, as I just mentioned, find recipes in this book for what are best considered low-carb treats. Do not take the presence of a recipe in this book to mean that it is something that you can eat every day, in unlimited quantities, and still lose weight. I can tell you from experience that even low-carb treats, if eaten frequently, will put weight on you. Recipes for breads, cookies, muffins, cakes, and the like are here to give you a satisfying, varied diet that you can live with for life, but they should not become the new staples of your diet. Do not try to make your low-carbohydrate diet resemble your former Standard American Diet. Thats the diet that got you in trouble in the first place, remember? One other thought: It is entirely possible to have a bad reaction to a food that has nothing to do with its carbohydrate count.

Gluten, a protein from wheat that is essential for baking low-carb bread, causes bad reactions in a fair number of people. Soy products are problematic for many folks, as are nuts. Whey protein, used extensively in these recipes, contains lactose, which some people cannot tolerate. And surely youve heard of people who react badly to artificial sweeteners of one kind or another. Ive also heard from diabetics who get bad blood-sugar spikes from eating even small quantities of onions or tomatoes. Yet all of these foods are just fine for many, many low-carb dieters, and there is no way I can know which foods may cause a problem for which people.

All I can tell you is to pay attention to your body. If you add a new food to your diet and you gain weight (and youre pretty certain its not tied to something else, like a new medication), or you find yourself unreasonably hungry, tired, or off despite having stayed within your bodys carbohydrate tolerance, you may want to consider avoiding that food. One mans meat is another mans poison, and all that.