Low Carb Vegetarian Recipes

The most famous proponent of low carb meals was Dr. Atkins. He recommended cutting down on carbs and eating more protein to compensate. He did not insist on people eating meat and his firm has produced hundreds of low carb vegetarian recipes.

Low Carb Vegetarian Recipes

There are many low carb vegetarian recipes, so you will never be spoiled for choice, but if you want to make up your own low carb vegetarian recipes, you will have to learn which vegetables are low carb.

If you are talking about using oils, you will also have to study the amount of carbohydrates in the oils too as oil is usually quite heavy on carbs.

The Atkins dietary system is a very good place to start if you are looking for low carb vegetarian recipes, even if you only want to find out about the number of carbs are in each type of food that fits into your version of vegetarian diet.

Whether you will eat fish, eggs and cream and drink milk makes a great deal of difference to the type of recipes that you can prepare. The Atkins diet uses meat in most of its low carb recipes, but there are provisions for vegetarians too.

Another point to take into consideration is whether you want to lose weight too. If you want to lose weight, then you should take a look at the Atkins Induction Phase (Phase One). In this phase, you use a restricted diet of low carb vegetarian recipes to kick start your weight loss phase.

The main point of the induction phase is to eat only 12-15 grams of net carbs a day. Net carbs is not the same as net vegetables. For example, one cup of cucumber slices is only two net carb grams.

Twelve to fifteen net carb grams, can be a lot of food or it can be a little depending on the type of vegetables, fruit and legumes you choose. For example, 4 ounces of marrow is two grams of net carbs and so is 4 ounces of garlic mushrooms, but 4 ounces of mashed potato is 21 grams of net carbs and 4 ounces of brown bread is a whopping 42 grams of net carbs.

This gives the Atkins diet a lot of scope. If you are hungry, you can fill up with pounds of vegetables, but if you are not hungry you can just eat a small baked potato.

There are three other phases of the diet which are not aimed at those who want to lose weight and there is nothing wrong with choosing low carb vegetarian recipes from those sections, where there are no restrictions on grams of net carbs.

It is important to eat a varied amount of food to prevent malnutrition and constipation.

By eating low carb vegetarian recipes, you will have access to over 4,000 polyphenols, which are an important form of antioxidant. The more brightly coloured the vegetables the more chance there is that they are saturated in polyphenols.