My In-laws came down several weeks ago to help us work on the back garden of the house we are trying to sell. Dad offered to go and get low-carb burgers for everyone from Hardees because I had no food or dishes to cook with in the vacant house. It was delicious! It was basically a large beef burger between huge stacks of lettuce instead of a bun. I didn’t miss the bun at all! When I got home, I looked up the calorie content to record in my journal and was floored! It may have been low carb, but it stil had 36 g of fat and 470 calories! They had so much mayo on it to more than make up for the lack of bun.
A few weeks later I decided to try my own version of the low-carb burger and see if I could get the calories under control. Every bit as tasty…with about 200 fewer calories.
I started with a lean Jennie-O Turkey burger pattie, cooked with garlic salt on the Foreman grill. I lighted spread it with reduce fat mayo. Then topped with 3/4 oz of thin sliced cheese, ketchup, red onion, mustard, and pickles. Then wrapped the whole thing in huge romaine lettuce leaves. It was less than 300 calories and sooo good. Definitely will be doing this again!
Virtually any diet that significantly restricts the number of calories consumed, even a diet that is described as low-fat (because the subjects are instructed to reduce the proportion of fat calories they consume), will cut the total amount of carbohydrate calories consumed as well. This is just simple arithmetic. If we cut all the calories we consume by half, for instance, then we’re cutting the carbohydrates by half, too. And because these typically constitute the largest proportion of calories in our diet to begin with, these will see the greatest absolute reduction. If we preferentially try to cut fat calories, we’ll find it exceedingly difficult to cut more than 400 or 500 calories a day by reducing fat — depending on how much fat we were eating to begin with — and so we’ll have to eat fewer carbohydrates as well. Put simply, low-fat diets that also cut significant calories will cut carbohydrates significantly as well, and often by more than they cut fat.