Low-Carb Meal Plan of the Week – Clean and Green (Based on the Green List)
This week Jonno introduces the Clean and Green Meal Plan – that is a full low-carb 7 day meal plan of only foods from the Green List of real foods.
When I was putting our first book, The Real Meal Revolution, together, I had this idea to grade foods like a traffic light, which I stole from WWF – In South Africa there is a division of WWF called South African Sustainable Seafood Institute, and one of their strategies to educate consumers about over-fishing was to rate all of the different eating fish into colours to guide our eating choices.
It worked brilliantly and now all retailers in SA use the SASSI guide when stocking and selling fish. Green mean’t safe to eat, orange meant ‘subject to overfishing’ and Red meant critically endangered, or over-fished.
I wanted to same thing, only to rate the ingredients by the impact they may have on your health. My co-authors and I worked on the first edition. In 2016 our team completely reworked them again for our next book, The Real Meal Revolution 2.0
The criteria we look at are level of processing, whether or not the food contains gluten or sugar, the carb content, and of course a discretionary measure for how likely the food is to impact your weight or health, and of course, how much you get to enjoy your food.
What I mean by that is, if we compare two ingredients like sweet potato 20g (net) carbs while garlic has 33g of (net) carbs per 100g. Garlic is green listed by our standards, but sweet potato is orange listed, even though sweet potato’s carb count is so much lower.
The reason is because you’re not going to sit down and eat through a cup-and-a-half of roasted garlic. No you’re going to season your food with it, so the total carb-load will be much lower for garlic than it would be for sweet potato.
There are hundreds of examples like above, but we don’t want you to have to worry about this, and that’s why we’ve actually produced the lists.
As I said the green list is the ‘Eat your Fill’ list. Provided you’re not eating these until you hate yourself, they will help you stay nourished and fill without making you sick or fat.
These foods are low-carb, gluten free, sugar free and unprocessed.
We don’t specify organic or grass fed, but we don’t have anything against organic or grass fed. Sustainability is the single most important thing you need to consider when you’re planning your life. Can your budget, your lifestyle or schedule, the environment and/or the economy sustain the choices you make. If you’re happy with those choices, that is great. please don’t sell your house just so you can buy organic eggs. Do what you can. Make small changes, and if you never eat an organic vegetable or piece of meat in your life, we can still be friends. I’d rather you ate mass-produced courgettes than organic fries.
In ‘Jonno-style’, most of the lunches are basically leftovers, but the dinners are properly delicious.
This is what’s on the menu this week:
For breakfast we’ve got Green Eggs and Ham, something great that you can make in advance.
A spicy supper of Chicken Livers Peri Peri
Fiery beef salad
Parmesan Chicken pieces with smokey mole sauce
Beef and Cauli-Mash Cottage Pie
Smokey Belly Ribs with Red Slaw
And a light supper on Sunday night of gammon mustard and pickle cabbage rolls.
If eating like this blows your skirt up, join our program and get new meal plans and recipes like this every week (complete with shopping lists, meal tracking tools and everything else you need to make low-carb easier and ‘awesomer’)
Green eggs and ham was taken from Super Food for Super Children
And
The rest of the recipes come from The Real Meal Revolution (published 2013 (SA) and 2015(UK))
Get a free copy of our free Low-Carb Real Food Lists to find out what you can eat to fall in love with losing weight.
