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Learning to cook low-carb recipes for the first time can be daunting enough, but when your family is not supportive of your new way of eating, or worse – they try to sabotage your efforts by refusing your food, tempting you with carby treats, or telling you low-carb diets are dangerous or a fad, it can be even harder to stick with your efforts. What do you do when you are the chief cook at home and your family want to eat different food?
Here’s 5 tips to help you navigate this dilemma:
1. Get your support network sorted:
Speak to your family and ask for their support. Make sure you understand why you are following a low-carb diet and why it works well for weight loss and blood sugar control, then you can educate your family and perhaps even persuade them to join in and try out some of the recipes. People tend to be afraid of things they don’t understand and denounce new ways of eating as ‘fad diets’.
Low-carb eating has a lot of evidence that it is safe and effective, it is not a fad diet, so don’t be put off. Let them know you are doing it to improve your health and ask them to at least not sabotage your efforts even if they won’t positively support you. You can learn all about why low-carb diets work by doing our 2 programmes on ‘Introduction to low-carb eating’ and ‘Personalising your low-carb diet for greater success’. This will equip you with the knowledge you need to talk to your family – you may even convert them!
Be very specific about the type of support you want from family members. They may be well meaning but don’t really know what the best way is to support you. Make a list of things you think will help you such as ‘not eating snacks in front of you’, ‘making their own breakfasts or packed lunches if they want carbs’ or ‘keeping carb-based foods out of sight’. Discuss your list with them and negotiate how they can best support you.
If you are getting no support at home, seek out an external support network. This could be friends or work colleagues who are also interested in low-carb eating, or it could be our low-carb community in the low-carb club. Use the forum to vent your feelings, ask how other people cope with a lack of support at home or offer your own suggestions to help others. The Low-Carb Club is there to help you so make sure you use it to get the support you need.
2. Tempt the family with delicious low-carb meals.
Your family members may be resistant to change if they feel a new way of eating is being forced on them. You will have to be tactful and willing to negotiate or compromise to keep others on board. Try couching it as an opportunity for the whole family to eat more healthily.
Discuss the benefits to the whole family of being healthier and fitter such as being able to do more activities or sports, wear nicer clothes, look and feel younger or get off medications. If your partner or children can see the advantages to themselves of healthier eating, they may be more willing to get on board.
Try introducing some low-carb substitutes into family meals such as mashed celeriac, celeriac chips, cauliflower mash (make a 50:50 mix with rice to entice them), creamed swede or courgetti. You don’t have to tell them these are low-carb substitutes – they are just new recipes you are trying.
Serve traybakes of roasted mixed vegetables such as onion, peppers, aubergine, courgette and tomato with meat or fish instead of potatoes. It looks so colourful on the plate; it will be hard to resist. If family members insist on having a starchy staple with it, then do that for them but just give yourself extra vegetables. There’s no need to cook completely separate meals, a degree of compromise can be reached that satisfies everyone.
Try doing a hot buffet occasionally, where people can make up their own plates from the selection of dishes available. This could include some mashed potato or rice for family members, but you need to be able to resist it!
3. Involve family members in cooking and food choices
Get family members to look through your low-carb recipe books or search low-carb recipes online to find choices that they would like to try, they may be surprised at how delicious the recipes are.
Encourage your partner or children to help with the cooking. Once they realise you’re actually eating real, normal food with lots of tasty ingredients they may stop considering low-carb as a fad diet.
Many families eat different foods to each other at breakfast. If your family members want cereals, toast or porridge for breakfast, encourage them to make it themselves whilst you cook your high protein, low-carb breakfast.
Encourage family members to make their own packed lunches if they want sandwiches. It’s never to soon to encourage children to take a bit of responsibility and your partner should be able to do this too. This means you don’t need to handle the bread or feel tempted by it. Try keeping bread in the freezer and remind them to take a couple of slices out to defrost in time to make their packed lunch. Remember, you don’t have to do everything yourself!
4. Keep carbs out of sight!
If your family members insist on having carb-based treats in the house like biscuits, sweets or cake then insist they are kept out of sight in a particular ‘carb’ cupboard that you don’t go into. Keep all your carb-based foods in this cupboard rather than scattered across several cupboards where you can’t avoid seeing them. Out of sight is often out of mind.
5. Prioritise yourself and your health
Try and prioritise your own needs – you are on this journey for a good reason. Don’t let others throw you off track. You are not on ‘Master Chef’ so don’t make cooking complicated,
make use of easy ways of cooking, such as traybakes, casseroles, stews and slow-cooker recipes which require less effort and time to prepare. Consider batch cooking, portioning the meal and freezing it for another occasion when you have less time.
There are plenty of family friendly low-carb recipes out there to try, take a look on the Diet Doctor website for inspiration and develop a repertoire of at least 10 low-carb recipes that become your regular family staples. You can then add in new recipes when you want a change.
Remember good health is a package. Diet is a really important part of that package, but you also need to pay attention to getting good quality sleep, minimising stress in your life, being active or exercising and maintaining good social relationships. If low-carb eating is causing friction in your family, focus on the other lifestyle changes for a while to improve your health and introduce low-carb eating more slowly as your family adapt to the change.
Have some self-compassion. Don’t beat yourself up if you are sometimes tempted to eat carbs. Just put it behind you and carry on. You don’t have to be perfect, you just need to be better.
If family really won’t come on board, then remember you have the agency and autonomy to go it alone if you are determined enough. Though it will be easier to have the support of your family it is not necessary – you can still do this!
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