People who want to stay healthy and in shape benefit from eating more protein and less carbohydrate.
But switching from old carby favourites to protein-based meals can be tricky. How do you replace cereal or sandwiches? Enter the bread-free BLT!
Why more protein?
Starchy or sugary foods cause blood sugar to rise and excess sugar to be stored as fat. A starchy meal can make you feel tired and ‘foggy’. Protein however makes you feel fuller while providing much essential nutrition.
This issue is particularly important for women, since many women don’t eat much protein (meat, fish, eggs) and often fill up on starchy carbohydrate such as bread and pasta, or cereal for breakfast. Indeed many cereals are aggressively marketed to women as ‘weight loss’ foods.
I advise my clients to eat protein for breakfast as it fills you up without making your blood sugar spike, and helps to produce the neurotransmitters of alertness so your brain feels sharp in the morning, not foggy.
But I find that if people are not used to eating protein for breakfast, or indeed lunch and dinner, it can be tricky at first to come up with a variety of palatable alternatives to cereal or sandwiches.
So here’s an idea for breakfast or lunch: the bread-free BLT!
Simply grill up some bacon, slice some organic tomatoes and wrap them in a large leaf such as chard or spring greens. Add some avocado or olives for some lovely extra fat (yes, fat is good!).
The bread-free BLT, ready for eating!
The whole kaboodle only takes a few minutes. Of course, you can expand this ‘bread-free sandwich’ principle to any kind of meat. Bacon is a particularly good shape and size, and people already think of it as ‘breakfast food’.
Choose organic vegetables and meat wherever you can. Non organic food contains nasties such as pesticides and hormones, which you absolutely do not want if you want to stay healthy and lean.
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I don’t agree with anything you’ve just said! You neeeeeeeed carbs.
Never said you didn’t, fatboy. 😉
Carbs are broken down into glucose and the body can only store around 2,000 calories of glucose – the rest gets stored as fat.
And if you are going to have some starchy carbs, have them at dinner, as this study shows that more weight loss and better glucose/insulin management occurs:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21475137
As the study mentions: Further research is required to confirm and clarify the mechanisms by which this relatively simple diet approach enhances satiety, leads to better anthropometric outcomes, and achieves improved metabolic response, compared to a more conventional dietary approach.
So one study does not mean a breakthrough in how we should all eat!