Hey Dru .... Sorry for the confusion.
I think I kind of drew a blank when thinking about what and how we eat. My wife is the main cook here, and she's excellent in the kitchen. I couldn't even begin to tell you all her little tricks in the kitchen.
One thing in our regular rotation is Mexican dishes. She gets low-carb keto tortilla wraps, and then it's just the standard ingredients.
It's funny. We went to our local veterans hall last night for an event. The wife had arrived early to discover they were serving tacos. She had just bought a pack of the soft keto tortillas, and she asked me to bring them with me, so we still ate healthy while eating out hahaha.
It's amazing how unhealthy many bread items are! My favorite for instance is another main rotation in our meals is cheeseburgers. When we first started keto, I read the label of our normal buns. They had 26 grams of carbs and only one gram of fiber. So only one hamburger bun equaled our daily limit of carbohydrates! That really opened my eyes! Now, of course, we get high fiber low carb buns.
Other than that, we do eat a lot of meat dishes and they're usually accompanied with a vegetable or two. Steak & broccoli, chicken & green beans, ham and ...
Pot Roast in the crock pot with onions & carrots is a favorite. One thing I love is to chop a head of cabbage, one chopped onion & a pound of your favorite ground sausage, (preferably heavy on the sage). This is a delicious and easy meal. Plus, cabbage is a crucifer and an excellent food that helps clean the liver!
Zucchini makes an excellent pasta substitute. You can slice it into sheets for lasagna, or even into spaghetti! The texture and taste is remarkably similar to pasta!
I believe she keeps almond flour on hand for wheat & corn flour substitute. Again, almost indistinguishable between wheat flour. In stances where she absolutely had to use corn meal, she'd dilute its 3-1 almond flour to corn. (This was a rare occasion).
I grow most of our vegetables. Squash, tomatoes, bulb onions, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, collard greens, okra, kale, green peas, butter peas, etc. We raise our own egg laying chickens, so we always have fresh eggs on hand.
We try to get a side of beef and a whole hog from a family farmer friend from just down the road about every 18 months. So our meat is pasture raised and grass fed. Recently I was able to source a small poultry provider from not far away, and we got 24 whole birds & a case of thighs. The taste of locally raised small farm meats are vastly superior to store bought meats and a lot healthier, too.
We get local wildflower honey from a farm that's a stone's throw away from the meat farm. Remember, when you have local wildflower allergies that one of the best things you can do is to take a tablespoon of local wildflower honey. This will help you combat your local wildflower allergies!
Currently we double-filter our tap water, (a home osmosis water filter system is on the short list), we switched to non-fluoride toothpaste, Amish hand made bath soap. We no longer use bleached Morton table salt (that includes sugar!). We only use Celtic sea salt. It's excellent! Only premium extra virgin olive oil. No seed oils, zero high fructose corn syrup, etc, etc.
At the end of this long post I realized that I was getting a little off-topic, so check this link for keto recipes from Dr. Berg. I think there's something like 50+ recipe videos in this link. Memory tells me that he used to have a keto recipe YouTube channel or maybe even a dedicated keto recipe website, but hopefully this will get you started.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVL...iQQ2aoFmmX
There has been an growing uncertainty of our food supplies over the last many years with the push for lab grown meats, and the political pressure to downsize farms & cut meat production because of "cow farts". Hell, even the rumors of a few years ago about eating bugs are starting to show up in Europe and possibly even the USA that they're sneaking cricket & mealworm "flour" into breads & pasta. I believe it's labeled as chitera or maybe it's chican. My lifelong trust in our institutions is obviously at an all time low lol!
Whether the rampant rumors of the last few years of mrna vaccines being introduced into chickens and even spread through gmo lettuce & greens are true or not, the implications if they're true of being unhealthy is not something I want to gamble with. Soooo many "theories" over the last many years have proven to be true, long after the shill campaign had shifted to other topics.
Just look at the the mass-awakening that RFK has started in just a few months that spread like wildfire! The huge protest at Kellogg's HDQ just two days ago, too!! People are are coming to an awareness at such a rapid pace about the garbage ingredients in our food & medicines. What was it that he recently said? In 1960, autism rates were one in every 15,000 and today it's one in every 34!
When I was a kid in school, we always had one fat kid in school, (only one!) and autism was only talked about in whispers. Now, half the country is fat as a whale. When we were kids we only had a handful of vaccines. Now childhood immunization requirements are (72?) vaccines? Some stupid high number?? And just look what these things are doing to our children! Have you ever read the ingredients list for baby formula? It's enough to infuriate you.
We've even over the last few years started making our own home remedies with tinctures. Don't get me wrong, some modern medicine is important and for serious items we will still rely on such. But for simple things, natural medicines do just fine.
I don't have a list off the top of my head, but we have a pantry full of home tinctures like wild lettuce, elderberry, oil of oregano, clever, dandelion, mullein, sweet gum balls, mimosa, white pine needle, and the list goes on. Why buy a box of OTC medicine possibly made with petroleum byproducts that only mask the issue, when a natural remedy from my yard will knock-out the symptoms 10x as fast?
For instance, I felt a cold coming on the other day with sinus drainage and the beginning of a sore throat. I absolutely swear by this and wish everyone could partake of this simple remedy that works! It's Elderberry Tincture and Oil of Oregano. I'll take a tablespoon of each and every time I've used this I've only had to take two doses, (am/pm), and it knocks out a cold in one day flat!
Because this is so simple I'll give you this recipe. We're lucky to have a next door neighbor with a large elderberry bush, so we're sourcing the berries from them now. The first batch the wife made she got the dried berries off Amazon. You fill a (pint/quart) mason jar with the berries. Pour vodka over the berries. Store in a cool dark closet for six weeks, shaking once a day. Strain and re-bottle. Done!
Oil of Oregano is just as easy. We grow our own Oregano, so we'll clip & dry it during the growing season. We get a small starter plant at the garden center in the Spring. Put it in a small pot to grow. We'll fill a mason jar with the dried leaves and cover with premium extra virgin olive oil. Same with the elderberry, (and all the other tinctures), store in a cool dark place for six weeks and shake once a day. Strain through a cheesecloth, bottle & store. Oil of Oregano & Elderberry Tincture will knock-out a cold in one day flat for me. HIGHLY Recommended!
Along with Dr. Berg, we also try to learn as much as we can from Barbara O'Neill. The wife just got one of her books. She has recently come under a massive pressure campaign to discredit her work because she teaches natural healing & medicine. Big Pharma hates her, but she's definitely worth looking into if this interests you.
Hell, I even saw a video of her recently on Tick Tock where it was dubbed over by A.I. and completely flipped the actual science to the Exact Opposite! Man! The extent they'll go to dilute her message! Nuts!
Wee2r - It's great to see others on this lifestyle change, because of all the positive impacts it brings others. I feel so much better these days, and my brain fog has lifted, too!!
I used to scoff at the idea of fasting, mainly at the notion of how it positively impacts us and not just from losing weight! If you look at it though, fasting is even mentioned in the Holy Bible numerous times and even other world religions teach the benefits of fasting, too!!
I had to cringe the other day when spending twenty bucks on a small bottle of red clover tincture when RC is so easy to grow and tinctures are so easy to make! I'm definitely going to grow more RC this spring. It's actually ridiculous that we don't have any on hand.
We make our own oil & vinegar salad dressing with premium extra virgin olive oil and we keep a supply of 4% Apple Cider Vinegar (with the Mother), and never the cheap distilled stuff!
Lastly, one thing that's interesting to touch on is something Dr. Berg said a while back when I was binge-watching his videos about keto, exercise, fasting and losing weight.
One thing he said stood out to me that, (everyone will tell you this), that the key to losing weight is proper diet, intermittent fasting AND exercise. I am not one to get on an exercise routine. I'm just not. I work my ass off as it is around here in the garden and even walking miles around racetracks every so often. (I'm back working with the racing magazine). Lotus once even pushed me to get an exercise bike, and I did! Sadly, it's still sitting in the basement, covered with dust.
But Dr. Berg once said that with diet and fasting alone, it can take up to four+ years for visceral fat to be removed by diet & fasting alone. Perhaps that's why I involuntarily started losing weight again a few months ago. It just started coming off.
He said that the initial weight loss with keto is water weight, and that comes off fast. Within the first six months, I lost 40 lbs and then I stopped losing weight and stayed there for the next three years. We still adhered to the diet in principle, but I wasn't as hardcore about it. We still stuck to the basics of no simple carbs, etc.
Anyway, sorry for the long post. This is something that we're passionate about and I like to talk about my experiences to those that want to listen.
One last thing I'll touch on in this long post is how Lotus has said over and over through the years that visceral fat is the enemy of breast growth. I can never ever relay her science posts as well as she does, but that one sticks. Lose weight for better breast growth.
One last thing I'm hoping for with this weight loss journey of mine is how once this old visceral male fat is off me, any new fat gained will go directly to traditional feminine fat areas, and I'm hoping mine will find a new home on my hips & thighs lol!
Best of Luck to You All!
I'm getting to test RC extract starting in few days. Exciting times.
