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Six ways to stay low carb or keto when you don’t want to cook
, medical review by Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD
Below, find our best ideas for how to stay low carb when you don’t feel like cooking at all or don’t have much time to cook.
1. Drink tea or coffee
A soothing cup of tea or coffee may be just enough to curb your appetite, especially if you add some heavy cream or melted butter.1 This may take you to your next planned meal, with no cooking.
2. Eat low-carb snacks
Fill your pantry and fridge with low-carb essentials so you can quickly make a platter with one or more of these low-carb snacks instead of cooking. Be sure to include at least one protein source.
- Canned fish (tuna, salmon, sardines)
- Variety of cheeses
- Deli meat or cold cuts 2
- Avocado
- Nuts (Which are the best? Check out our guide.)
- Frozen berries or other low-carb fruits
- Cream
- Pate
- Beef jerky or pork rinds (with no sugars or wheat)
- Full-fat yoghurt
- Olives
- Mayonnaise
- Healthy fats – like olive oil – to drizzle over snacks such as mozzarella or veggies
3. Reheat leftovers
Get in the habit of making double or even triple meals and vegetables. Freeze the leftovers. A meal is waiting, ready to reheat, when you don’t want to cook. Leftovers are superb for lunches too. Check out our planned leftovers worksheet for ideas.
4. Do minimal cooking
Boil an egg.3 Fry a steak or buy a hot cooked chicken (without bread stuffing or sweet sauces). Add a bag of salad, a selection of cheeses and homemade mayonnaise. Dinner can be ready in 10 minutes. Get creative with salads and use your low-carb pantry essentials.
You can also use our simple keto plates. Here’s some inspiration:
5. Learn to love your slow cooker
If you know you’ll be home late but have time in the morning (or even the night before), use your slow cooker. Slow cookers are a fabulous way to transform cheaper cuts of meat into satisfying comfort meals. This is easy ‘set and forget’ cooking.
What can you prepare in your slow cooker? Here are some great ideas to cook up:
6. Fast intermittently
Are you really hungry? Learn to understand your appetite and eat only when hungry. This may not be an option for a family but is great for individuals. And there is no faster (pun intended!) or simpler option.
Find out everything you need to know in our complete guide, Intermittent fasting for beginners.
Summary
Try to be prepared so you’re not in this position too often: planning meals for the week or even a few days at a time will help a lot. Try to set time aside each evening to cook, or batch cook once a week.
Please leave a comment below letting us know how you stay low carb when you don’t want to cook.
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Alcohol Comments
What are your best tips for how to stay low carb when you don’t want to cook? Please let us know below.
Are you concerned that butter, cream, cheese and other foods foods high in saturated fat are unhealthy? In all likelihood, you don’t need to be.
Although still considered controversial by some experts, several large systematic reviews of clinical trials have found no evidence that eating foods high in saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease, early death, or other health problems:
British Medical Journal 2016: Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73) [systematic review of randomized trials; strong evidence]
Nutrition Journal 2017: The effect of replacing saturated fat with mostly n-6 polyunsaturated fat on coronary heart disease; a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials [strong evidence]
Learn more: A user guide to saturated fat ↩
Meat is a high-quality source of protein and other essential nutrients. The evidence linking it to heart disease, cancer, and other health issues is very weak: Guide to red meat: is it healthy? ↩
Eggs are an excellent source of protein. Although they’re high in cholesterol, eggs don’t seem to raise cholesterol levels much in most people, and they may even reduce some heart disease risk factors:
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2018: Effect of a high-egg diet on cardiometabolic risk factors in people with type 2 diabetes: the Diabetes and Egg (DIABEGG) Study—randomized weight-loss and follow-up phase [randomized trial; moderate evidence]
Nutrients 2017: Consuming two eggs per day, as compared to an oatmeal breakfast, decreases plasma ghrelin while maintaining the LDL/HDL ratio [moderate evidence]
Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care 2006: Dietary cholesterol provided by eggs and plasma lipoproteins in healthy populations [overview article; ungraded] ↩
No time to stop for lunch? Just take a vew neatly cut pieces....
Flavor and smooth cream cheese with olive oil, garlic and salt - or any strong flavor you like - and when you're famished, roll it up in hard salami slices, spread it on celery, etc.
Keep hard-boiled eggs in the fridge to make deviled eggs with extra mayonnaise, or to chop up and add to tuna or green salad.
* Keto friendly snacks: olives, almond, macademias, crudite with a mayo or sour cream based dip
* Once a week, I make oopsie bread. Grab some and make a sandwich.
* Meal replacements: several websites sell keto friendly protein powders. Search around for your sweetener of choice; I use True Nutrition because they use stevia and let me build a custom blend with protein, fiber, and vitamins. Mix with a little heavy cream, some water, and shake/blend thoroughly.
* Know the keto friendly restaurants in your area. A few local Chinese places are happy to do "no rice, extra vegetables", and a nearby Thai restaurant will swap out rice for shredded cabbage. Yeah, it's probably got some corn starch and a touch of sugar, but not enough to break my low carb diet.
* I'm considering this but haven't done it yet: making savory "fat bombs" ahead of time, then consuming throughout the week.
Second, make sure your keto-friendly options are good enough to have even when you feel like cooking. This reduces food waste and minimizes the temptation to break your diet.
Finally, make sure to have multiple options including sweet and savory choices. If you only have one option, it will get overused and you'll get tired of it.
My recommendation would be to look towards Hemp Seed Hearts (mild, nutty flavour & loaded with "complete" protein, 3 tbs has 10 g protein), hemp protein powder, and chia seeds (3tbs has 5 g protein and 11g of the 13g carbs are fibre) for additional protein sources. The Hemp hearts would be good on salad or stir fry, in savoury fat bombs or some sort of "bread", the powder added to smoothies, and the chia seeds make an awesome pudding with heavy cream or coconut milk (I usually put them in some water first to make a thick paste as I've found they don't swell up in fatty liquids so well) and flavoured with cocoa and/or vanilla. Try red chard for colour in stir fries or omelets instead of peppers. Not so much "no cook", but you could prep ahead of time. The occasional (half?) serving of pulses probably wouldn't hurt too much either.
Also, I‘d like to ask one question regarding sweeteners…what is the rap on erythritol? Tks and Brgds
Meal 1 idea -- Grab one of each and head out to work - the meal is done and ready to go! I eat this for lunch over a salad if you like:
1. Hard-boiled and shelled eggs comes 2x in a pack with 10 packs
2. Fully cooked bacon - no pre-cooking needed just heat in microwave or eat it cold
3. Wholly Guacamole in to go pouch sizes
4. 2x baby bell cheeses
Meal 2 idea:
1. Buy mushrooms, asparagus and cabbage and add two tablespoons of butter. Portion these out in raw form to meals sizes. I use a food saver vacuum seal to keep in the fridge for the week. Microwave for 5 mins or so when ready to eat. No cooking.
2. Costco sells cooked chicken skewers. Combine this with a salad and the veggies you microwave. Top with olive oil, a bit of lemon juice and avocado or your fav salad dressing.
I buy things like cottage cheese,sour cream,salsa, cheese sticks which I can put in my purse..hard boiled eggs, olives, celery, romaine lettuce,cream cheese with herbs, coffee, eggs with cheese..
Gloria, not sure what you mean when you say low carb food is mostly garbage....it's just real, whole food. If you want processed, pre-packaged prepared food....well, yeah, that's mostly garbage, and usually NOT low carb, Maybe you're looking for something like http://www.realgoodfood.com ?
While I'm at it... Egg cartons promoting 'organic vegetarian feed' is ludicrous. Chicken are not vegetarians. They are primarily meat eaters. They eat mostly worms and insects but will really go after lizards and snakes if the opportunity is there!
This website is a good source. The visuals (plates of food, types of veggies etc) are my favorite tool to help overcome 48 years of bad habits.
Or I do the chorizo cabbage thing - not sure what it's called... fry chorizo, remove from pan, fry sliced white cabbage in butter, add cream replace chorizo. I know you said no cooking but this is so quick it barely counts as cooking...
reference the visual charts here when shopping and start by eating your chosen foods as often as possible (I found buying too many tasty and inspiring things in one haul actually created stress). But don't slip backwards, keep a rough journal even if you only have energy to fill it out once/week. Being chronically ill makes the application of any diet a bit more complex, but don't give up. Just be carb aware to start with as a sustainable way of eating... Then, when your mind is ready, go low carb and keto will almost be natural. That's how I started. :-)