Low Carb on the Run

Food & Diet Low Carb
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Eating Low Carb is all well and good, when you are at home, and you control every aspect of the food you eat.

But what about when you are out and about?

What are your low carb tricks when you can’t control every ingredient in the food you eat?

For example, dining at restaurants, when accepting a dinner invitation at a friends house, when on the road traveling, etc?

A worst case example, how about a trip to Disney World?

Other than living on salads for an entire week, how would you approach maintaining your low carb lifestyle?

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Not intended to be low-carb but I guess fits into that category.

When wanting a quick snack out and about and neither wanting to spend much nor wanting to buy junk nor wanting to take lots of time, I find one of the quickest, cheapest and most filling snacks at quite a few of our convenience stores are a pair of hardboiled eggs which typically are available in either Red or White for a dollar.

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Breakfast is easy, eggs and sausage at any breakfast place, usually ordered ala carte so you don’t have to say no to the toast and hashbrowns.

Dinner is easy, fish or steak at any medium to high end restaurant, sauce on the side.

Lunch however is usually a minefield.

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For lunch, In-N-Out Burger allows a “low carb” burger, replacing the bun with lettuce. But any burger place would allow you to put the bun aside.

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I’ve had good luck asking rstaurants for burger and salad with lettuce instead of the bun.

Subway can create a salad for you instead of a sub. Or, I’d be OK walking into any fast-food restaurant and asking for a couple burgers and side salad and tossing the buns. (I can’t actually do any fast food places, including Subway, in real life.)

We don’t have the kinds of convenience foods you guys do in the US. I went to a conference in the US last year where I was able to buy pre-boiled eggs, pre-cooked bacon, pre-chopped celery and so on. I was so surprised at how many ready-to-eat things there are - I’d never seen anything like pre-cooked eggs or pre-cut celery here, but it worked really well for a hotel room that only had a fridge. I ate boiled eggs and bacon for breakfast, tuna sandwich for lunch (on low-carb bread I had brought), and salad for dinner every day.

But I’m way more restricted than regular low-carbers because I have multiple food allergies, which makes just grabbing things from random restaurants or picking and choosing from a buffet or menu impossible. If I didn’t have allergies, I think eating low-carb is easy once you get into it, because you don’t have cross-contamination issues to deal with. You could just order a regular menu item and not eat the stuff that’s higher in carbohydrates.

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Also, I see a lot of people mention Quest bars as something that’s easy to grab and eat. I think that some people find these spike them and others don’t. (I can’t eat them, so am not sure.) I think Kind bars are also fairly low carb.

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I’ll have to take a look at the Quest and Kind bars. So far, it seems that all the various protein bars, etc. that I find at my local Kroger are loaded with sugar alcohols in place of sugar, which pretty much defeats the whole point of looking for low carb, in my experience.

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Good Beef Jerky takes the place of protein bars for us. Note this is not the commercial crap that they sell at convenience stores but real jerky from a meat market that doesn’t fill their recipe with stuff you can’t name. It travels well, and the problem is usually keeping non-D’s out of the bag.

Other protein bars just seem like a candy bar with protein powder added.

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