Ideas on low carb sides with these dishes?

[Eesha]

Hi all

I think I want to try low carbing to see whether I can lose some weight for once but I'm struggling a bit to amend what I'd have with the family.

Mornings : cereal
Lunch : bagel with chicken/mayo x 2 or egg and one toast
Dinner : chicken pie / sausage and lentils casserole with mash / cottage pie / rice and curry

Its dinner where I want to try and eat less carbs in but how? Very basic I know!

Remove the carb element and replace with low carb vegetables. For example, we have curry with broccoli. Some people make broccoli or cauliflower rice, but we don't bother. We just have chilli/curry/Bol etc with broccoli florets or similar. There are low carb pie recipes if you google too.

What you have there is VERY carb heavy for a low carb regime.

If you just want to cut carbs then I would start but not having any potato, bread, rice, pasta, noodles, cereals

But if you want to keto then you need to be looking at no more than 20g of carbs a day

HTH - good luck, it works!

Exactly what @lettersbyowl said

Celeriac is a good low carb alternative to potatoes. Is delicious, especially when roasted.

You're starting from quite a high carb baseline there so it may be quite a shock to go low carb all at once.
I'd recommend easing yourself into it. Pick one meal to focus on at a time. Once you have the hang of it, make a second meal low carb etc.

I know what you mean - I love low carb eating but my house is full of hungry growing teens (all slim as rakes) and so I have to adapt what I'm doing so that I'm not cooking separately for myself.

This is what I'd try based on what you've posted;

Mornings : cereal

Replace the cereal with eggs or a low carb porridge (no oats - they're mostly nut based). I skip breakfast now. I've never liked it and I can have a really long window of fasting with no breakfast.

Lunch : bagel with chicken/mayo x 2 or egg and one toast

You could still have the chicken/mayo but on salad. Eggs you can have poached on a bed of spinach or boiled with mayo and lettuce/cucumber.

Dinner : chicken pie / sausage and lentils casserole with mash / cottage pie / rice and curry

Chicken pie filling could be ok without the pastry and with green veg. You'd probably be ok with a few lentils in a veg based casserole and swap mash for carrot/swede or cauliflower mash. I'm still planning to have curry but everyone else has rice as usual and I have a steam bag of green veg 'rice'. Very nice and it also goes well with meatballs and bolognaise.

It's taken me a long while to get my head around adapting things and feeding my family at the same time.