Eating well deliciously!
Of all the diets and ways of eating that I’ve tried in my efforts to lose weight, I only feel compelled to write about the keto diet. In all reality, I wasn’t impressed with my initial results after strictly following the keto diet for Read more
One of the things that surprised me when I first moved to the US, was the fact that many Americans do not use a variety of spices and seasonings (other than salt and pepper) to season their food. In the Caribbean where I’m from, Read more
In any discussion about healthy diets or lifestyles, there’s often talk about what and how to eat. Very rarely is there any discussion about what we should be drinking to supplement our nutritional profile. In this post, I’ll be discussing several types of beverages and the most healthy drinks for your health.
We must consume sufficient liquids every day to prevent dehydration and to add vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, fiber, and other nutrients to our bodies. I’ll be discussing four of the main beverages I recommend for anyone looking to improve their health and well-being.
It’s amazing to know that something as simple as a drink can have such a great impact on our bodies and adding any of the drinks below will greatly benefit your overall health.
Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) & Lemon Tonic, is a concoction that I came up with to assist me in my weight loss journey. It’s made with just a few ingredients that can make a great positive impact on your general health. ACV has recently come to the forefront as a nutritional powerhouse and it’s said to be beneficial for a host of conditions and ailments. Some of the therapeutic properties of ACV include:
Lemon juice is the second important component of my ACV & Lemon Tonic. Lemon juice is also full of nutritional benefits including:
Angostura bitters, water, and liquid stevia round out the rest of the ingredients for this tonic. Angostura bitters contain digestives that help with fat metabolism, improve protein digestion, and reduce gases and bloating. The liquid stevia adds a bit of sweetness as this beverage is very sour.
I usually drink this ACV & lemon tonic before and during my high-fat keto meals. It helps me to digest heavy meals and also helps to keep me full for many hours. It’s a gift for intermittent fasting and you can get the recipe here.
Kombucha is another beverage that’s gaining popularity among the health-conscious. Some folks think kombucha is an exotic beverage that probably tastes weird and would never think to try it. I say to these people that they’re doing themselves a disservice as kombucha can be delicious as well as extremely healthy for the human biome.
So what is kombucha? Kombucha is a fermented tea drink that has several health benefits including:
These are just a few of the benefits of this remarkable beverage. There are many types and flavors available, so experiment to find one that you like. Your body will thank you.
It may surprise some that I’ve included soda or seltzer water in this list of most healthy drinks but bear with me and you’ll see why. There is nothing inherently healthy about seltzer water, but it can be of great help to anyone trying to beat a sugary soda addiction. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Soda water has the fizziness of regular soda with none of the sugar and it is available either plain or flavored. Anyone trying to break their addiction to soda pop can do so by using seltzer water with a sugar-free sweetener added to make it taste just like a regular carbonated beverage.
We need to drink at least 8 cups of water every day, but some people find it difficult to drink this much plain water throughout the day. Drinking seltzer water can help with the daily water requirement and help to stave off dehydration. All carbonated water is not the same, so you should try several brands to find the one you like.
Last but certainly not least of the list of the most healthy drinks for your health is water. We are 60% water. We cannot survive without water, yet many of us find it difficult to drink this most vital of fluids. Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom combine to give us this plain, tasteless liquid that is essential to good health. Among the benefits of drinking water:
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the benefits of water, it’s merely a drop in the bucket. Water, bar none, is the most healthy drink you can consume for your health and well-being.
In addition to the above-mentioned drinks, you can also add other beverages like coffee, herbal tea, juiced vegetables, and diluted fruit juice to round out the list of healthy drinks for your health. Coffee and tea contain antioxidants that help combat inflammation and fruit juices contain many vitamins and fiber that are beneficial to health. Fruit juices must be diluted with either flat or carbonated water to cut down on the amount of sugar that may be found in some.
Consuming any or all of these drinks helps to fulfill your daily water intake requirements in addition to providing antioxidants, vitamins, pre-biotics, fiber, and many other nutrients.
I’d love it if you tried my ACV & Lemon Tonic. If you do, please get back to me to let me know how you liked it and if it works for you as it does for me. Let me know in the comments and I’ll get right back to you. Until then Happy Drinking! 🙂
I live in New York City. This means my kitchen is tiny and I don’t have a lot of room for a lot of the kitchen equipment many of us take for granted. As someone who finds Zen in cooking, I was a bit Read more
In recent years, “sugar” has become a bad word. While we enjoy its delicious sweetness, we now know that excessive consumption of sugar makes for a world of serious ailments including diabetes and obesity. To mitigate the damage that sugar causes, many of us Read more
After years of trying a multitude of diets and continuing my search for one that will finally give me the results I want, I learned about the keto diet. I did my due diligence to find out what was required of this diet and what sacrifices I would have to make to see results. I learned that keto is basically a high-fat, low-carb diet on steroids. I have done low carb before but this was on another level and this was going to be challenging.
Since I had no idea where to begin and there are so many versions of this diet available on the internet, I decided to try a 9-week keto diet that came with a complete daily meal plan. I thought that this approach was perfect because all I had to do was follow the meal plan easily. It turns out that having a meal plan is great but eating meals that are off-putting, not so much. I mean I had to eat a slab of butter for breakfast for chrissakes! Ick!
To wit this post. To prevent my fellow keto dieters from the fate of having to eat an entire wheel of brie or a slab of butter with cucumber for a meal, I’ll post an entire day of keto diet meal ideas and foods that are totally customizable as they are interchangeable. I promise you won’t have to scarf down unadulterated fat for any meal.
I have already published some breakfast keto-appropriate recipes on this blog and some of them are keto-friendly. I won’t go into full recipes for this post, but will rather offer some keto breakfast meal ideas using keto-approved breakfast foods. You can mix and match to come up with a varied and balanced keto breakfast for every day of the week.
Keto Breakfast Foods
Using the above list, you can come up with myriad keto breakfast meals or check out my recipes for some more ideas. I enjoy eating the same breakfast each day and don’t find it boring at all as I can always tweak it to make it more interesting.
What’s my usual breakfast? Almost every day I have 2 eggs, a handful of strawberries, turkey bacon, coffee with MCT oil, and/or creamer. That’s it. Sometimes I’ll change out the meat or the berries, add cheese to the eggs, or add a low-carb roll or biscuit. This simple breakfast keeps me full for upwards of 5 hours!
Use your imagination and enjoy all these healthy keto diet breakfast foods!
Coming up with a list of keto snacks is relatively straightforward with the easiest of all available options being nuts. Nuts are full of good fats and are energy dense so they will keep you sated for several hours. There is an amazing variety of nuts available and each provides different nutrients that support and replace the ones you may be missing by omitting/lowering carbohydrates from your diet.
In addition to nuts, you can try other energy-dense foods that don’t require cooking and preparation. Here’s a list of keto snack ideas that you can put together to come up with a flavor profile you enjoy.
Keto Snack Foods
You can mix and match any of these keto snack foods or enjoy them individually on their own. Just be sure to follow the serving sizes recommended by your version of the keto diet or what you require for your daily macros.
Keto lunches are usually comprised of a lean protein and a side of vegetables. Again, the beauty of keto is that you eat real foods that require minimal preparation to enjoy. You can also adjust the diet to omit foods you don’t like and add the ones you do. On my 9-week keto diet plan, for example, one of the keto diet meals for lunch included tuna fish. I don’t like tuna fish, so I subbed in canned salmon.
Keto Lunch Ideas/Combos
You get the gist. Select a protein and pair it with some kind of vegetable and you’ve got your quick and easy keto lunch.
Keto dinners are basically a repeat of lunch – that is a protein paired with a healthy, low-carb vegetable. From time to time I add a low-carb cheese biscuit made with Carbquick for a nice carby twist. I also sometimes have some homemade keto bark or keto chocolate mousse to round out my keto dinner.
Keto Dinner Ideas/Combos
The combinations of meat paired with vegetables are limitless so there’s no reason to be bored eating keto diet meals.
Many people are afraid to try the keto diet because they’re afraid of the amounts of fat that they’re required to eat or feel that they’d miss eating carbs. I understand this thinking as I thought so myself. I was concerned about eating all the fat that’s required for this diet, specifically saturated fat. Too much of anything is not good, but I still wanted the other benefits of the diet.
I have since learned that fats are not the enemy but I still didn’t eat a lot of the meals that came with my keto diet plan because they were too high in saturated fat for my taste. So while it’s great to have a built-in keto diet meal plan, it’s best to make keto meals that are both high in fats and healthy. I did this but substituting Earth Balance vegan spread for butter, eating lean proteins (I don’t eat pork and rarely eat red meat) and I use an ungodly amount of avocado!
In summary, I think it’s always better to adjust any standard keto meal plan by including foods you enjoy and that are intrinsically healthy. Do you follow the keto diet? Share some of your keto meal ideas with me in the comments. Happy eating!