Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Low-Carb Meals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book contains a reasonable number of recipes and lots of 'hints' that if you've done ANY reading about low carbohydrate eating, will be superfluous.

The recipes run the gamut of carb counts, though I thought that the bulk of them were much higher carb than is helpful. Following the suggestions in this book and the recipes, it wouldn't be all that hard to hit 80-100++ grams of carb per day... which is simply TOO HIGH for many people who are following low carb lifestyles.

Many recipes call for sugar, white flour, semi-sweet chocolate and cornstarch. Come ON... those are NOT "low carb" ingredients.

This is more or less a repackaged low fat/lower cal cookbook with "low carb" thrown on the cover to try to generate some market share. My copy is being donated to a charity, it isn't worth the space on the shelf for someone interested in real "low carb" cooking.

You can actually make "flourless chocolate tiramisu cake," "pasta-less lasagna," and "tortilla-less chicken quesadilla." Let Beale and Couvillon in their book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Low-Carb Meals," give you detailed instructions on how to pull off these low-carb favorites.

The book intros with this statement: "The challenge of low-carb cooking is to cook up the most delicious foods with the right amount of carbohydrates-enough to satisfy your palate and your tastes, but not so many that you exceed your daily carb allotment. An additional challenge is to make every carbohydrate count nutritionally for your best health, ideal weight, and overall well-being."

Beale, a weight-loss expert and coach, and Couvillon, a registered dietitian, succeed in writing a recipe book that meets the low-carb cooking challenge. Each chapter overflows with not just detailed ingredients and cooking procedures, but also nutrition info on each dish. For each recipe, there are notes on prep time, cook time, serving size for how many, and exact measures of grams of carb, fiber, nutritive carbs, and total protein broken down into grams from animal and plant sources.

The book also has valuable nuggets of wisdom scattered about in side-boxes, like the Recipe for Success, Table Talk, Hot Potato, and Low-Carb Vocab. At the end of each chapter is the segment on "The Least You Need to Know," which lists the chapter's highlights. Plus, there's a "Glycemic Index and Carbohydrate List" indicating the glycemic ranking and carb content of each ingredient mentioned in the book.

I especially appreciate the chapter intros, like in the section on Chocolates. It tells you everything you ever need to know about chocolate - a little background, varieties of chocolate, ingredients it goes well with, and why it's good for you.

Whether you're watching your carbs, looking for seven egg salad variations with zero cooking time, or meeting challenges like "how to make lunches without sandwiches" and "what to substitute for pasta and potatoes," this is the recipe book for you! - Ruby Bayan, (www.OurSimpleJoys.com)

Having worked in the medical field for 25 years I thought I knew everything about nutrition, but this book is fabulous. The beginning is an easy to follow explanation of how the carbs we love so much cause our blood sugar to spike; how adding fiber (veggies and fruits) to carbs can help lower their impact on our blood sugar; how eating more veggies along with protein, fruit, and carbs (in that order) can supply us with a great source of energy and fuel for the day, without a constant feeling of hunger (which spikes in blood sugar cause). I lost 15 pounds the first month I followed this eating plan. Yeah, yeah, it helps to add exercise, of course...but exercise is easier to do when you have the energy to face it !!!

If you have never read a Complete Idiot's guide before do not worry. This book is one of the better ones on a given subject.

This book gives tasty easy to fix recipes. The section on Recipes for Success is worth the price of the book alone. This section gives little know facts that can help you in your quest for more excitement in your meals.

I recommend this book to anyone that is looking into Low-Carb Meals!!!

It is easy to read and use.
Just very handy to have around and read over and over again.

Enjoy this book...I did!!!

Yours in good health

nieema

This is a truly awesome book. The recipes are delicious and easy.
I also have a Gluten intolerance and many of the recipes can be adapted for my allergy.

Having recently been converted to the Low Carb life by Gary Taube's excellent and life-changing book - Good Calories, Bad Calories Good Calories, Bad Calories - I've been interested in finding cookbooks that would increase my range of food choices while staying within a healthy (for me) daily carb count of less than 40 net carbs. This book isn't it.

As an earlier reviewer noted, a book that uses flour, cornstarch, sugar or regular chocolate, etc. in almost every recipe is NOT low carb. Which is why, no doubt, the serving sizes listed are laughably miniscule. ONE egg for breakfast? I think not.

Worse, I don't believe any of the carb counts in this book can be trusted. Here's the carb count for "nut butter spreads" (made from 2 cups of peanuts for example) on page 56, the serving size for which is 2 tablespoons: 0 grams carbohydrate.

Here's the carb count for "homemade peanut butter" (made from 2 cups of peanuts) on page 250, the serving size for which is 2 tablespoons: 7 grams carbohydrate; 5 net grams.

Huh?

Some plain chicken recipes have carb counts of 1 or 2 grams - yet a serving of plain roasted chicken has 6 grams per serving!

Bottom Line: If you're looking for real low carb recipes save your money and look elsewhere. All this book will do is reduce your bank account and expand your waist.

My wife and I have been low-carb dieting for over a month now and this book has been extremely helpful. While it is true that some of the meals can get a little high with the carb count, it is generally not too excessive and we've found it is not difficult to omit items from the recipe that would greatly increase the carb count. I have lost 15 lbs so far, and this book has not hindered or slowed that progress at all so please take what other reviews say with a grain of salt.

The biggest endorsement I can give for this book is that every recipe we have prepared has been three things:

1. Extremely tasty.
2. Easy to prepare.
3. Does not contain hard-to-find ingredients.

Some diet recipe books cannot claim number 3. Of this I can attest.

If you are a low-carb dieter, you will not be disappointed with this book. Like myself, you may have to modify some recipes to work with your diet plan. But they will be very minor alterations and you will still have a very good base to work from.

Thanks for writing such a wonderful cookbook! What do I like about the cookbook? Well...actually...everything. I'm going through it section by section and cooking wonderful meals for us. One thing that has made an impression is the vinegar/acidity concept to lower the glycemic index. It really works to help keep me feeling full longer. The Chicken Piccata is marvelous and is even better the NEXT day, for breakfast. Today, my grocery shopping was totally based on the cookbook. There are Lucy Beale-things marinating in my 'fridge as I write this......