Snacking

What can you eat as a snack on a low carb diet? As long as you're prepared it's quite simple to organise a wide variety of tasty snack foods. Here are some of my favourites:

• Nuts - almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts. These can be home roasted and a little salt added. Do not include peanuts as they are actually part of the legume (peas, beans) family so are not low carb

• Dark chocolate - a little good quality dark chocolate with at least 80% cocoa. The high cocoa content means there is less sugar. Aldi do a lovely 85% one. It's called MoserRoth and looks like a large bar of chocolate but is actually 5 individually wrapped bars. I find these very handy as they stop me eating too much of it!

• Fresh strawberries and cream - I do say not to eat too much fruit but strawberries have one of the lowest amounts of sugar

• Fresh figs and parma ham - figs are very high in fibre and contain as little sugar as strawberries 

• Parmesan crisps - bake finely grated piles of parmesan on a greasproof paper lined tray in the oven (at 180°C) for 5 or 6 minutes

• Carrot sticks and cream cheese

• Carrot sticks and almond butter

• Olives

• Cheese and gherkins

• Mixed seeds - dry fry a mixture of pumpkin and sunflower seeds in a little soy sauce with chilli flakes

Sometimes if we're peckish in the evening, Ronan creates a platter of goodies!