Hello all, I was diagnosed in December 2025, so I’m new to the whole BSD way of life but have been following it for 3 months and have lost weight and reduced my HBA1C levels by over half.

I was just wondering if people could tell me what they eat on an average day to keep their carbs below 50g. I eat all the right things but seem to never get my carbs below 50g so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, any advice would be great and seeing what other people eat in a day would be good.

Thanks in advance

Hi Newbie,
I don’t typically count my grams, but I am eating very low carb at the moment. I note from one of your other posts that you sometimes have a small slice of bread or some lentil pasta. I am celiac, so can’t have bread anyway (except for gluten-free keto bread, but it is very expensive so I rarely indulge). Before going this low carb, I would sometimes have lentil or chickpea pasta as well, but I realized by wearing the cgm that it was spiking my blood sugar. In fact, even chickpeas and lentils themselves are spiking my glucose at the moment which can lead to overnight crashes (reactive hypoglycemia) for me. It’s too bad because they are so healthy otherwise. But my goal is to be less insulin resistant and more metabolically flexible so they are off the table for now. So, at the moment, if I want noodles, I have konjac/shiritake noodles or zucchini noodles or thinly sliced cabbage (instead of chow mein noodles for instance). Instead of lentils or chickpeas, I have lupini beans which are higher in protein and much lower in carbs. My other low carb proteins are duck eggs, soy free tofu (allergic to soy and have a chicken egg intolerance), hemp seeds, Greek yogurt, different types of fish and seafood, and a few nuts and a bit of cheese. I combine these with lots of low carb veg and nori seaweed snacks for iodine and salt and incorporate nutritional yeast for iron and B vitamins. If you want to lower carbs further, look for things like rapini instead of broccoli. Broccoli is a very healthy vegetable, but subbing rapini for it half the time will lower your carb intake, especially if you eat it as often as I do (3+ times per week). I try to also have lower carb nuts, so macadamia nuts or pecans instead of cashews, for instance. Put together, all these little swaps can really add up over the course of a day or week.
Hope this helps.

Newbie it might be more helpful if you tell us what you eat in typical day then we might have some lower carb suggestions.

Thank you Arcticfox. I live in the UK and have looked but neither of the lupini beans or rapini seem readily available, so I shall keep my eyes peeled for those when I’m out and about.

Verano –
Breakfast at 10am is 100g Greek yoghurt, 50g raspberries and 50g blueberries, fiber supplements, and 2 tablespoons of homemade granola following a recipe I found on this site. Lunch is mixed salad (pepper, cucumber, celery, radish, asparagus, cherry tomatoes, small amount of sweetcorn) with either tuna or chicken, no dressing. Snack at 3pm of 50g strawberries, 50g blueberries, 50g blackberries (I need this to help me get through the afternoon at work or I’ll go home and snack on naughty stuff). Dinner is a meat protein, veg including tenderstem broccoli, beans, spinach, cabbage etc, and cauliflower rice (almost for every dinner), sometimes I have lentils or konjac rice, I’ve got edamame noodles and black bean noodles to try and bulgar wheat and pearl barley, (once a fortnight I may have 25g lentil pasta), followed by a sugar free jelly or if calories allow a small piece of 85% dark chocolate (finish eating by 7pm). Cup of tea at 8.30 and 2-3litres of water during the day.

Newbie it looks like you have lots of good low carb stuff but I wonder how you calculate your carbs? Do you use an app like fatsecret? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that there are one or two items that maybe you don’t realise are pretty high carb. Strawberries are around 4g per 100g whereas blueberries are almost 15g per 100g. Maybe have a few more strawberries in the afternoon and fewer or no blueberries. I have no idea how many carbs there are in the granola you’re having but maybe leave that out and just add 10g of walnuts?
Bulgar wheat isn’t too bad but lentils and pearl barley are pretty high and make sure you are checking the carbs in cooked v dry because the difference is huge!

Truthfully, if you were to calculate the number of carbs you were eating on average day pre-blood sugar diet you will be shocked, maybe even horrified! If you having less than 100g a day that actually is low carb compared to an ‘average’ persons diet. Don’t stress too much about the number and just follow the general rule of not eating bread, pasta, rice and any vegetables that grow underground and you’ll be fine.

BTW Arcticfox I made a variation of your yogurt dressing and it’s lovely. Gone are my mayo days!

Hi Verano, I use my fitness pal to log all my food as I’ve used it for years and found it quite reliable so far. I didnt realise blueberries were so high, I shall keep them for my breakfast and cut them out for my afternoon fruit and stick to strawberries thank you for the info. In all fairness this batch of granola has some oats in which I shall omit next time round and keep it to nuts and seeds. I will have a go with the bulgar wheat and keep to a low portion to ring the changes with cauliflower rice. Thank you for the advice, im intrigued by what my carb intake was prior to this so shall go back through MFP and have a look. Have a good day all

Wow, carbs before I started the BSD were up to 250 (on a bad day) so I’ve cut them down to under 100g I’m happy, will see if the tweaks above help too

Oh wow, Newbie, I read your list and while you are on a pretty good track, the blueberries jumped out at me right away. You are consuming 12-15g of carbs in blueberries alone. As Verano says, if you can stick to blackberries, raspberries and strawberries which have less than half the carbs, that is a good tweak for now. If you do that and cut the portion of fruit in your yogurt by half and add a few nuts and some seeds like hemp or pumpkin (bonus, these are also very high in magnesium and diabetics often have a magnesium deficiency and it is a super important nutrient for glucose metabolism), you will improve the composition of your breakfast by a lot. Of course it is much better to be eating fruit than sweets and bread, so if you need them for now until you manage to change your tastes, that is fine. I’ve had to ditch the blueberries too. I thought I was doing a healthy thing by eating them as a dessert, but they were spiking my blood sugar a lot. I’m down to one portion of fruit per day. Maybe try snacking on some low carb veggies like bell peppers and cucumbers in addition or add a high fibre, high protein item with them? I like lupini beans for this. I toast them in the oven with a bit of salt and 3 tbsp of nutritional yeast. The nutritional yeast is great for adding in B vitamins that you might be missing from cutting your grains back, and is a good source of iron as well. I get the lupini beans from a local Mediterranean shop, so if you have an Italian or Greek shop nearby, you may have luck finding them there. I looked it up and it seems Tesco may have them too. They are cheaper dried, but they are quite hard to prepare (they have to soak in constant changes of water for weeks on end to get all the bitterness out) so I just go with the pre-cooked ones.
You’re already doing well to get your carbs under 100g. Keep it up! This is a learning process and you can’t be expected to know it all at once. I still get shocked by some things. I had to stop eating imitation crab. I thought it was just pollock soaked in crab brine, but I was getting it at the fish counter in the supermarket so it wasn’t labelled and I didn’t know that was what was spiking me until I saw the reading on the cgm after eating it in nori wraps with avocado and cucumber (so I knew it had to be the only thing that could have caused the spike). I looked into it and realized that they also add loads of sugar to the brine. So we all get tripped up now and then.

Hi Newbie, I would like to say that keeping under 50g is so difficult. After 10 years I have only managed it for a few days at a time before I have to sacrifice calories then I am not eating enough. Just by cutting out the main white carbs you are doing great. I was told not to eat carrots or apples or blueberries. I say, I am diabetic and this diet it for life so if I cant have the occasional treat or even basic veg then there is something wrong with the diet. We do the best we can. 50g is very low so dont feel you have to get any way lower than that.