Low-Carb Miracle

Eating foods with flour is the reason I got off track with low carb dieting before. If you think eating Carbquik is risky, then avoid it. I can easily understand how anyone would be a bit afraid to use anything with flour.

The main way I feel confident that eating things made with Carbquik will be fairly easy to resist is that a five pound bag costs $13.99 plus 5 dollars shipping. I bought two bags to save on shipping and put one bag in the freezer. I am planning to use if for a very limited number of recipes. I know Carbquik is very versital and could use it every day and really get carried away. I have to use it like a precious spice, and then I’ll be OK. I figure If I am eating something with flour, then it better be sweet.  that’s why I will be using it for waffles, pancakes, and angel food cakes.

Three recipes on my level one dessert page use only one cup and make quite a few servings. I will be testing an angel food cake recipe this weekend. The recipe uses one cup of Carbquik. The volume of the cake is make up from 12 whipped, fluffy egg whites rather than flour, milk and sugar in the batter. The way I calculate it, one entire cake has 12 Net Carbs. If I cut the cake into 6 big pieces, then I’m only eating 2 net carbs for a big serving.

I made a chart on the Carbquik page to show how many carbs there were in various measurements. The company web site does not have this and I wish they would have done it. I hope my numbers are dead on accurate. I used a gram measuring scale to create it.

I also made a Belgian waffle over the weekend. The recipe made three big waffles, and used 1 cup of Carbquik.

George and I ate one and a half waffles and froze the other half.  Here is how I count the math for waffles: (12 net carbs/4 servings = 3 carbs per diner)  If I use it as Carbquik as an occasional treat, then I am OK. I loved eating the biscuits but won’t make them that often because you use two cups of Carbquik per recipe. I am OK if I remember the price and use the cost to limit my consumption.

Hey Cathy,

Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that it has been a week since I have been back on track with my weight loss and I have dropped 5 lbs in the first week and my entire family is doing the diet and exercise plan with me! I am so excited to have such support from my family and it will make staying on track much easier since the entire family is participating in the journey with me  and I am not having to go down this road alone any more. 

Please continue to pray for me and I will do the same for you! Hope you are having as much success as I am!   I am 5 lbs closer to my goal!  YEAH!!!!!!!!!!P.S. For those of you that don’t believe that 5 lbs is a lot to lose in one week, just go to the grocery store and pick up a 5 lb pack of ground beef and that will tell you real quick just how much you have lost!  1 lb is a great start too!  Learn to encourage one another! And before you know it you will be at your ideal body weight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!GOOD LUCK and keep up the GOOD WORK! Stephanie/Mississippi

CarbQuik Bake Mix

I received my first package of Carbquik and began testing it. I am delighted with the natural great flavor of wheat again. Any time I’ve eaten whole wheat this year, my weight loss had stalled. I was searching for a solution and I think Carbquik is the answer to my craving for wheat. These biscuits and muffins are so good, I have to keep reminding myself, that all good things must be taken in moderation. It will be way too easy to eat too many of these delicious low carb biscuits and waffles. I allow them in level one, with the understanding I need to limit myself to about 4 carbs or 2 one ounce biscuits a day.

Order Carbquik online:

http://www.low-carb.com/cacobibamix.html

  http://www26.netrition.com/tova_carbquik_page.html

More Recipes: http://www.tovaindustries.com/

Carbquik Nutrition Facts Serving Size: 1 Biscuit(1oz) 17g dry mix Servings Per Container: 30 Amount Per Serving % Daily Value* Total Calories 50 Calories From Fat 30 Total Fat 3.5 g 5% Saturated Fat 0 g 0% Cholesterol 0 mg 0% Sodium 110 mg 5% Total Carbohydrates 9 g 3% Dietary Fiber 7 g 29% Soluble Fiber 0 g 0% insoluble Fiber 7 g Sugars 0 g 0% Sugar Alcohols (Polyols) 0 g 0% Protein 3 g 6%

Ingredients: Carbalose flour (enzyme-modified wheat, vital wheat gluten, wheat fiber, unbleached patent wheat flour, vegetable fiber, canola oil, salt, emulsifiers, enzymes, ascorbic acid, sucralose, calcium propionate), palm oil, buttermilk powder, baking powder, egg white powder, lecithin, salt, natural and artificial flavors.

  Escali Primo Digital Multifunctional Scale

  Escali Makes a wonderful food scale that’s useful for making accurate food measurements. It gives weights in grams or ounces. Using the gram measuring scale is more accurate and I will be using it for future recipes.

To measure a dry ingredient or wet ingredient , you place a container on the scale and press the “on” button. This scale automatically subtracts the weight of the container. Then as you add the liquid or dry ingredient, it gives an accurate measurement of the food item.

Carbquik is a very light flour mixture and is sort of finicky to measure because it’s so feathery light. I made this chart to help me make accurate measurements. I wanted to make accurate estimate the net carbs in recipes. Each Tablespoon weights approximately 6 grams, so I used this as a basis for making the chart below.

Carbquik nutritional table

Whole wheat flour nutritional table

I received this email from Stephanie and it was such an encouragement to me. I sometimes struggle with staying on track like everyone else. Stephanie has been a good encourager. Since starting this site in January, I have enjoyed emails from some wonderful people. They give me as much encouragement and inspiration as I am trying to give others with this site.  Stephanie wrote me such a positive letter and I wanted to share it with you.  She wrote to me and shared her strategy for low carb eating and exercise, that I have invited her to write posts to the blog. She has valuable success strategies that will benefit us all. If your are out there and have stories to tell and want to be a part of this web site, please write.

Cathy

Dear Cathy,

My name is Stephanie and I am from Mississippi and I commend you on your weight loss and good luck as you continue to loose your weight.  It is nice to know that there are other individuals out there trying to do the same thing I am doing.  This is a true inspiration to me and this is getting me motivated to get back on track and lose the rest of my weight.  I use to weight 298 lbs and was tired of feeling depressed and short of breath all the time and even fatigue had set in.  I was in a size 24W and that was a TIGHT 24W. So last March I decided to go on a diet and lose weight.  I went on a low carb-low fat diet and went from a size 24W to a ladies 16 and went from 298 lbs down to 205.  I have maintained my weight and I am still in a size 16 but they are getting a little tight and I have been too busy to walk 2 miles each day and the weather has been another factor as well.  Since I have found this webpage it has inspired me to get going once again to lose the remaining weight this summer. So I am 205 in a size 16 and I want to lose down to 160 and get into a size 14 by the end of the summer.  I would love to stay in touch with you and swap recipes and knowledge of what we have learned as we both have experimented with the weight loss diets.    May God Bless You each and every day and give you the strength and guidance that you need to continue your journey.  Thanks so much for your time!

Hi
My name is Jessica and I am very interested in trying your low-carb diet plan…
However, I was wondering how many calories a day to consume in stage one? You mentioned it was also a calorie based diet (or calories count) so I was wondering if you could advise me in that department. By the way congrats on your weight loss! It’s definitely an inspiration to all of us struggling with our weight… I look forward to joining you in your success. Can wait to hear from you!

Thanks,
Jessica.
 

Dear Jessica,

I am honored and thrilled that you have found my web site. I built the web site over the Christmas holidays and your question tells me I have more work to do.  Actually,  I have not regularly measured quantity. In the beginning, I was so adicted to carbohydrates that I was hungry all the time. What I did was try to eat until I did not feel hungry. I made a conscious effort to eat slowly so that I could learn to sense when I was feeling full. If it was not on the list one foods, I did not eat it. I decided to not focus on what I could not eat and focus on what I could eat. After about two weeks, the abnormal hunger I was feeling began to subside. I followed the low carb recipes, and I was not starved all the time.

I still love to eat and tend eat higher portion sizes than I should for the new lower weight that I’ve become.  Calories count when you love to eat the quantities of food I can eat! Now that I am thinner, I may probably need to be measuring food quantities to continue the weight loss. I try to about six times a day. breakfast, mid morning, lunch, mid afternoon, and evening snacks help to spread the food intake across the day. You need to eat somewhere between 2 and four cups of low carb veggies total a day, spread out between lunch and dinner. Throughout the day you can consume up to 4 cups of vegetables. The reason I mentioned that calories count is that I wanted to use a food calculator to determine what was happening. I was losing weight so rapidly in the first month, I was courous to understand what was happening. I was trying to analyze why this diet worked for me. I know that the junk foods and sugary sodas I loved had lots of calories I was now not consuming. Switching to lean meats and lots of vegetables were still consuming fewer calories than the junk foods I was eating.

I’m always questioning why this works and what I need to do to keep it working.  I have not talked on the Low-carb chef web site about a special program I used that runs on my Palm Pilot hand held computer. It’s called the Biometric Weight Manager. The program is a database that helps you keep track of your weight, what you eat and how many calories you burn in exercise and gives you the calories burned needed drop. Losing a pound requires using 3500 calories more than your body needs for basic motabolism. The web site came about because my nature is to look at this weight loss thing as a personal science experiment.

As your weight drops, the calories you can eat drops as well.  Each day you enter the food item from their extensive database. As you enter foods and exercise, it calculates the numbers for you. The program gives you the calorie deficit. This means it shows you how many calories you will be burning more than your basal motabolism would burn. The program gives you a lot of encouragement when you can show you have used 5-600 calories more than you ate. do that for five days and you should lose a pound. The interesting thing was that I seemed to lose about twice the number of pounds as the calculator would indicate. Last summer I decided to try and lose about 140 pounds total and have lost 80 so far. When you weigh as much as I did last summer and fall, your body naturally burns a higher number of calories than normal weight people.

You can do all the calculations manually but having a food diary program helps. Find your your BMI. If you have lots of weight to lose, remember you will lose a low more in the beginning.  Here is what my Palm program told me. When I weighed 290 pounds, the Biometric Weight Manager program told me I should consume 3474 calories a day. Now that I weigh 210 pounds, it tells me I should eat 2167 calories to maintain my weight. Now that I weigh less, I should still be eating less… and exercising more…  

This winter, I stopped monitoring what I eat each day. I discovered that I can eat large quantities of food and not gain the weight back. In that I have more to lose, I realize from answering your question the lessin that I need to follow my own advice, you know measuring foods, and keeping track of food and exercise and see if the pounds start dropping again.

My I post your question on the blog? I will not put your email address there but your question is one that others will have and I’d like to share. I will never put your personal information online because I respect your privacy.

Here are links to the Palm computers and software I used. You can monitor calories manually by keeping a food journal and a pocket calculator. These palm programs make that monitoring process lots easier, but more expensive.  I did a search on Palm’s web site for current diet programs. There are some new ones that look interesting that might work better. There is one for Atkins I may buy to continue my progress….

http://www.low-carbchef.com/Links.html

http://www.palm.com/us/products/handhelds/

http://search.software.palm.com/?hs=&q=diet 

Cathy

May God belss you and sustain you for the diet journey ahead

chef@low-carbchef.com

In the beginning, I Googled weight loss surgery. After reading about the drastic side effects of gastric bypass surgery, I was terrified to use surgery to lose weight. I knew I had to find a better way. We googled diets and found there were low calorie diets, low fat diets and low carb diets. It was hard to find a direction.

We Googled low carb diet and found a link to Jimmy Moore’s Livin’La Vida Low Carb. Jimmy Moore and his wife rea real people who figured it out and are sharing their good news as well. Check them out. Viewing this site daily has been a must for an aspiring low carb chef. You will find loads of information and encouragement from a husband and wife couple who have transformed their health with low carb eating. He is far more expert than I, so I encourage you to check them out. Last week I wrote Jimmy a fan letter and told him how he had inspired me to change our eating habits and build a web site to tell the good news to others,  as he has done. He graciously emailed me with congratulations and decided to retell our story on his blog.  I feel really honored.

If my web site has a goal, it is to tell those suffering with obesity, that there is real hope. I want to honestly confess that Jimmy got one little bit of our story ahead of itself. My weight loss goal is 140 pounds but I’ve “only” lost 80 pounds so far. George hopes to lose 100 pounds but has ”only” lost 65 pounds. We will get to our weight loss goals some day soon but we just could not wait to tell the good news about a healthy way of eating to others. I felt I had to make sure you knew the real numbers.

My real job as webmaster at Mansfield/Richland County Public Library has kept me very busy lately and I have not had time to post blog messages and keep as active with walking and weight lifting. I’ve still cooked healthy but have not had time to walk or be as active. My weight always stalls when I have a big computer project that keeps me glued to the keyboard and staring at a computer screen.   The site redesign is now finished except for edits and updates. I am ready to recommit to the full weight loss program. Winter has also kept us inactive since November. I can’t wait for spring. I’m still trying to use the Airdyne bike and it helps me stay limber. You can’t ever give up working at healthy eating and physical fitness. When I do, I backslide. I am up three pounds since the beginning of February. My driveway is covered with ice and there is a freezing rain. I want spring to come so I can start again…

Sometimes while cooking another meal, I remember longlingly of the days when I could reach in the freezer for some instant, easy to prepare food. Reach in the freezer and grab a frozen lasagnia and put it in the microwave, cook for twenty minutes and eat. This was an easy meal that took no thought or effort, and we have eaten all too frequently. My last couple weeks of work have been really intense and I came home tired. I thought longlingly of those easy cooking days.

Even when you know something is good for you and you feel better, it’s easy to want to be a little lazy. Last night was one of those nights. Then dad brought in the mail…

 George opened the mail, read it and let out a whoop for joy. It brought the most wonderful news. Our family doctor wrote us a personal letter that said the following:

Dear George,

I’m writing about your lab work, and am extremely pleased that the total cholesterol is 112 which is down from 180. the good cholesterol has increased from 39 to 44. The bad cholesterol has dropped from 111 to 58. The fasting glucose was down to 95 which is where it should be.

 We are jumping for joy at this good news. It then felt excited to make balsamic chicken, first baked and then grilled. While the chicken was baking, I sliced zucchini and yellow squash, soaked them in balsamic vinegar salad dressing, then grilled them on the stove top. The vegetables were just done when the timer went off for the chicken. I placed chicken on the hot griddle and got those delicious grill marks. We celebrated with good news and great food.  

Business Cards

Everyone on the Internet seems to be turning information about low carb dieting into a big business. The Low-Carb Chef web site was designed to be different. We don’t plan to charge a membership fee for the information and recipes on this site. We hope to build a community of folks who are learning to be eat healthier. Advertising this web site to drive traffic will always be a challenge because we have a $0.00 budget for advertising. I’m counting on a tennis shoe marketing approach. If you or anyone you know anyone you know is struggling to lose weight and think this site will help them, please print off one set of business cards and pass them out to your friends and family.

We hope that users of this site will share their success stories and recipes with the community so we can all get healthier. Our primary goal is to share an plan for low sugar, low carbohydrate cooking that helped us lose weight and feel better.

Ohio winters are pretty cold and blustery, too cold for outdoor walking. Our weight loss has slowed down this winter and we decided we needed more exercise. I’m still walking about thirty minutes a day at work, but I need more movement.  Spring fever builds during long cold January evenings. Spring could not come soon enough.

To prepare for warmer weather, we took our regular bikes into a local bike sales and repair shop to get them brought up to safe use with new tires and such. While we talked to the bikeshith, we spotted a Schwinn Airdyne Upright Exercise bike. We went home and thought about the pros and cons of buying an a piece of equipment. There is always a risk in buying something we didn’t use. Would we use it excercise faithfully or would it become a clothing rack. After much discussion, we decided that buying one would help us excercise in the winter months. After three days of using it, I find this bike is sufficiently strenuous. My arm muscles are even a little sore after using it for only fifteen minutes. That’s a good sign. I want a little muscle soreness and fatigue, then I know I’m doing some good.

It’s been a long time since I could write about new low numbers. I have not stepped on the scale for a few days, walked vigorously every day and cut back a bit on portions. Finially, the number is 207.6. We also started using our Schwinn Rowing machine. We’d forgotten it up in the barn and took it back down. This weekend we decided to buy a new Schwinn Airedyne. More exercise is the plan to keep the weight loss going. I am really ready to get below 200 pounds. Having more than one exercise machine will let us cross train and stress more different muscles. I don’t want excuses any more for not getting fit and losing weight.