Its The 4 Week Diet Review!

It's 4 weeks since we started this journey into a low carb diet and this week is a non mover so we're stuck with a 9lb loss during those 4 weeks. I'll be honest I was hoping for a bit at this point but that's still not to be sniffed at.

What I really need to do now is to have some consecutive days without any alcohol as I still haven't worked out whether that, albeit in low carb delivery system such as wine, effects how the body's metablolism works.

Over the last few days its been a bit more of the same so bacon and eggs, omelette, salads etc. I made another "low carb" chicken curry and this time it was using a morrocan style chick pea and spinach soup (again from Sainsbury's) as the base for the sauce. I did,however, add some sweet chilli dipping sauce to it (high carb!! but not much) to get the heat. As before the rice substitute was cauliflower but because this time I was making for two and there wasn't enough cauliflower I also used some broccoli. The result was OK but I think it is better using just cauliflower on its own or with just a couple of florets of broccoli and not in 50/50 portions like I used.

The final result for the week may be dissapointing but I have still had more protein than carbs each day this week so maybe I am using up the fat but storing the protein which when stored as muscle is somewhat heavier than fat anyway so let's not get too disheartened and lets keep going with the diet.

Low Carb Chicken Curry and Rice

Today I made myself a low carb version of chicken curry and rice. I love a curry but to have a curry without a rice dish or a bread was just killing me until I came across this rice substitute which we'll come to later. This is therefore a perfect dish for those on a low carb or atkins diet.

First up the curry - the ingredients I used were:
1 small onion - chopped (approx 5 net carb)
150g packet of chicken breast (approx 0 net carb)
1/2 tin of Sainsbury's Parsnip,butternut squash and ginger soup (approx 0 net carb)*
Tikka Curry Powder to taste
Garlic powder to taste
Cumin powder
2 cardomom pods

Pour some oil in a pan and heat up and then add the curry spices to your taste. Mix the spices in with the oil and after a couple of minutes add the chopped onion. After a few more minutes add the chicken breast and fry until cooked or if using pre cooked chicken breast then fry thoroughly. Add the soup, mix and simmer for 20 minutes.


Next the rice - well not rice actually as we know that rice can seriously put a dent in a low carb diet although brown rice can be accommodated once in a while. For this we will use cauliflower (approx 1.5 net carb) to create our rice substitute.

To do this you need your food mixer with the shredder blade attached. Fill up the funnel into your mixer with cauliflower florets and shred. I did this three times for the dish I created for myself. In reality this is about 3 or 4 decent sized florets which are cut up to go in the tube. Now once you have shredded the cauliflower then you will have a lot of small rice size pieces of cauliflower in the bowl. Transfer this shredded cauliflower to a bowl suitable for a microwave and cook for 3 and a half to 4 minutes on full power.

The bowl with the cauliflower was very hot when I took it out of the microwave so watch out for that. The curry should be complete by now. If you need a bit of extra fibre then this is a good time to stir in some benefibre or fibresure or some such fibre additive.

Hopefully if all has gone well then when it gets on the plate it should look like the picture above. The net carbs for this meal come in at around 8g.*

* The Sainsbury soup declares a carbohydrate per 1/2 tin to be 7.2g and a fibre content of 10.2g which to me gives a net carb of 0 (or minus 3). On the off chance that Saisnbury have already deducted the fibre from the carb this would make the whole meal to be around 18g.If you are of the opinion that the net carb is minus 3 due to the fibre content then the meal could be as low as 5g.

Any comments on the maths and the premise of carb - fibre are appreciated