Lovely Stuff

Today I thought I’d share some of the products I’ve started using and have been loving lately. In order for me to be sure that this WOE is going to be sustainable, it has to be enjoyable; and to be honest, I’m really loving getting to eat so much meat and big portions of cruciferous vegetables, I’m really not missing the potatoes, rice, pizza, pasta, bread, cereals and grains and it’s really satisfying to just open the fridge and see a whole array of locally sourced, healthy, fresh produce stacked up in there. But, whilst I really only eat one proper meal a day, I also like to have smaller things on hand that I can take my meds with or get some extra nutritional benefits from, whilst still tasting nice.

I’ve really been enjoying having a shake instead of lunch. I’m rarely hungry enough to want an actual meal around that time, so a quick protein shake keeps me going from morning to my evening meal. I posted a picture of the shake I had been using when I first switched over to low-carb (you can find that post here) but I’ve since change up the entire combo. I now use this totally different shake mix, which is a vanilla flavour and tastes so much nicer (I don’t know what it is about ‘chocolate’ flavoured shakes – and other stuff – rarely tasting anything like chocolate…but whatever!). Anyway, the new one is Premium Body Nutrition’s Whey Protein Powder:

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Each 30g serving (1 scoop) comes in at 2g of carbs and it’s sweetened with sucralose. It cost me £15 for 1kg and you can find it on Amazon here. But I don’t drink it on its own; I add another shake mix thing to it, which is a keto collagen powder from GoKeto:

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Also vanilla flavoured, it has 0g of carbs per 20g serving (1 scoop) and I got it for £27 from Amazon. You can find it here.

So I put a scoop of each powder into my BULK POWDERS Large, 600 ml Shaker Bottle:

And I love the little wire ball that these come with now; it really helps to mix up protein powders so they don’t don’t have any lumps in them. I got mine from Amazon for £3 (total bargain!) and you can find them here.

With my previous shake mix I was just blending it with water, but I’ve changed over to using a completely sugar-free almond milk now instead and it just makes the whole thing taste richer and more palatable. My current favourite is this one:

It’s by Alpro and is specifically their ‘Almond NO Sugars’ version (their regular one and their unsweetened one both have carbs in them) and this one has 0g of carbs per 100ml. Looking at the ingredients, I’m pretty happy to multiply that up by 3 and assume that 300ml also has 0g of carbs (which is the amount I add to the mixture of PBN Protein Whey Powder and GoKeto Collagen Protein Powder.) I just get mine from the local Sainsbury’s supermarket and I don’t actually know how much it costs (because yeah, I’m that bougie person who could never tell you how much a pint of milk costs, lol) but if you want to check it out there’s a bunch of info about it, along with all their other products on Alpro’s website here.

So that’s my shake mix combo which I probably have one of, every other day. Ideally I’d really like to be having one every day (to get the benefits from the collagen) but I don’t always feel like it. Some days my appetite is way lower than others and I can’t face eating until late in the evening; at which point I’m probably more inclined to go for something hot – during the winter months anyway. But that shake-mix combo tastes REALLY nice! It tastes like vanilla ice-cream or milkshake…it actually reminds me of the McDonalds thick shake flavour and the way I make it is nicely rich and not insipidly thin. It’s a great combo and really helps to assuage the odd craving for sweet stuff that still rear their ugly little head, from time to time. If you’re eating low-carb and you crave ice-cream, you should totally try this out.

And speaking of sweet stuff, we’re now onto the protein bars! I’ve probably tried about a dozen different brands since I moved over to low-carb – some are far better than others (some of them are pure minging, lol) and I currently have 2 different brands that I’ve incorporated into my WOE. This first one is my ‘everyday’ go-to snack. I’ll eat a piece of it with my meds after I wake up and if I don’t eat the remainder of it along with other doses of my meds throughout the day (which is usually what happens during the first day or so of ‘Shark Week’ when I’m completely wiped out with nausea) then I eat the other two-thirds of it in the evening with a cup of coffee. It’s a nice little sweet treat to look forward to and really feels like I’m eating a brownie. The product in question? It’s this little beauty!

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They are the SCI-MX Nutrition Choc-Chip High Protein Brownies. I buy these in a box of 12 from Amazon, for £12 (that’s £1 per brownie-cookie – great price-point!) and you can find them here. So, what do I like about them? Well, everything lol. First off, they taste great. A rich, deep chocolate flavour that really satisfies choco-cravings. Second, they’re really dense and substantial, so you really feel satisfied after eating one. Third, the pricing is great. Protein bars and protein cookie products can be a bit costly and whilst I’m more than willing to pay for a good product that I can incorporate nicely into my low-carb WOE, I’m also always really happy to find a bargain (that’ll be the Scottish part of my heritage!). These brownie-cookies are 65g each (about the average weight for a protein bar / cookie / product) and any time I eat one I feel really satiated. In fact, I’m no longer really that bothered about trying to make any of my own keto-brownies to help with the old desire to revisit something reminiscent of a chocolate cake, because these brownie-cookies meet that need and I can eat one, safe in the knowledge that I have the nutritional value already calculated and individually wrapped – which removes the temptation to eat ‘just one more’ from a multipack. I love them, what else can I say?

Another bar that I’ve been enjoying is this one:

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These are the FULFIL Vitamin and Protein Bars in Chocolate Salted Caramel Flavour. I buy the 55g bars in a box of 15 for £21 (they’re also available in a smaller 30g size, so be sure to check what you’re buying) from Amazon and you can find them here.

These bars aren’t for everyday consumption – not for me anyway – I like to keep these on hand for ‘Shark Week’, or the couple of days prior to it, when the desire to eat something sweet & chocolatey reaches another level of intense. The bars are very squishy/chewy and have a sort of a fudgy taste to them. They’re sweet, but the salt-caramel flavour cuts through that to stop it from being too sickly and they have a load of soy-crispies on the outside, to break up the overall squishy texture. And boy do they taste good! Too good in a way, because whilst they’re packed with 20g of protein and a bunch of vitamins, I don’t find that they physically fill me up like other bars do and it’s very easy to eat more than one of them in one sitting (something I did once, a couple of months ago during ‘Shark Week’). I think it’s might be because the ingredients state that they contain oligosaccharide which is a source of glucose. The overall carb amount is still under 2g per bar, but I do wonder if they still manage to cause a bit too much of a spike to blood glucose, to be something you’d want to consume regularly on a very low-carb WOE. I keep to under 20g of carbs a day and whilst – numbers wise – I could legitimately incorporate one of these yummy bars into my daily allowance, I still feel that they’re better off being kept for those moments when you really want to eat something that tastes a lot more sinful than it really is.

And that’s it for my little product update today. Being such a tiny blog it’s probably completely obvious that none of these reviews were sponsored in any way, but I figured I should just take a moment to state on the record that I am in no way affiliated with any of the products feature here and everything mentioned was purchased by me, for me. All reviews are my own, and I include them here as honest opinions of products I enjoy.

And on that note I shall bid y’all adieu.

Have a lovely weekend folks,

Blue