What Can I Eat?
The big question is always “What can I eat on a vegan ketogenic diet?” when you first start on a ketogenic diet. The answer is- lots of beautiful foods! But it’s something that a lot of people struggle with in the early days of following a ketogenic diet. Therefore we’ve put together a few resources to help you on your way. These are based on our own experiences and what we have available to us. The lists are not exhaustive, feel free to add suggestions.
What Can’t I Eat?
Hopefully, you’ve already done a fridge and cupboard clean out and found new homes for the foods you wont be eating (or thrown them in the bin). The thing is, when you remove these temptations you’ll remove another road-block to success. The foods you’ll be ditching are:
- Grains/Legumes: Any wheat products (bread or buns), pasta, cereal, cakes, pastries, rice, corn, and beer should be avoided. This includes whole grains like wheat, rye, barley, buckwheat and quinoa. Legumes such as lentils and beans should also be avoided. Whilst there are some health benefits to them, they contain too many carbs.
- Starch: Avoid root vegetables (like potatoes and yams) and other things like oats and muesli.
- Trans Fats: Margarine or any other spreadable replacement butter should be avoided as they contain trans fats (also known as hydrogenated fats) They’re not great for our health.
- Sugar: It’s typically found in soda, juice, sports drinks, candy, chocolate, and ice cream. Anything that’s processed and sweet you can think of most likely contains sugar. Sugar is not our friend on a ketogenic diet. Sugar has many different names (61 at last count) but the most common ones are:
- Anything with sugar in the name: brown sugar, date sugar, demerara sugar, cane sugar
- Barley malt
- Molasses
- Corn syrup (including high fructose corn syrup)
- Glucose, fructose and sucrose
- Rice syrup
- Maltodextrin
- Honey, maple syrup
- Fruit juice (Inc. concentrates)
- Most Fruit: Avoid larger fruits (apples, oranges, bananas) as they’re high in sugar. Some berries are lower in sugar, such as raspberries and you can enjoy a small amount of these
- Artificial Sweeteners: Whilst low in carbs and calories, they can cause addiction and have adverse effects on our health.
We’ve compiled this following list for you. You can print it out to take to the supermarket or stick it on your fridge as a reminder. The weight of each food is equivalent to 1 gram of net carbs. An example here is 250g of mushrooms will equal 1 gram of net carbs, this means you can have lots of mushrooms! If you look further down the lists the weights will decrease. For example 28g of cherry tomatoes (which is roughly 2 of them) will equal 1 gram of carbs, this means you’ll eat less of these.
We’ve also listed the fat and protein content of common nuts and seeds. This should make it easier for you to calculate your protein and fat consumption.
We hope this information is useful, if there is anything else you’d like to add, feel free to contact us.
