A good old fashioned fry up

There are few things better than fried sausages, bacon and tomatoes. It was probably on this basis that the Atkins Diet became so popular. Lots of protein makes you feel full very quickly and gives you the macronutrients you need to build muscle. In my case I used kanga bangas and shortcut bacon. That's about as low fat as you can get as well as being low carb and high protein. Yes, I am starting to hear voices of people telling me, "no, good fats are good for you, why are you trying to avoid them?" But the fact is that this food is fried in oil. And no particular macronutrient provides the silver bullet to weight loss, whether it's protein, fat or carbohydrates.

Grill'd Bunless Burgers

At Grill'd, there's a bunless option. It sounds like bad value 'cause you're paying the same price and not getting the bun. However, it turns out the bunless option is just as filling as with the bread (especially if you also want chips), since the bun is not a filling component of the meal anyway.

This is the bacon and cheese burger. The great thing about having the sauce on the side instead of inside a sandwich is that you can have as much or as little as you want (and it's a LOT of sauce, but having worked in a fast food restaurant myself I know they actually put that amount in the burgers!! This is especially a concern with a high fat sauce like aioli).

The zucchini chips sound like a good alternative to potato, but with the batter they put on the zucchini, they are actually almost as high in kilojoules as their potato counterparts and don't even taste as good (waaaay to salty, and kind of slimy tasting if the batter falls off).

In conclusion, even though restaurant bun-free burgers are better than I expected, the ones I made at home were just as good. I have mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup etc at home that need to be used up too!

Bread free hamburger

I wanted to make a low carb version of one of my favourite meals: The hamburger. This is one of my attempts, accompanied by oven baked potatoes (which I unfortunately left in the oven for too long without oil, which meant overly dry though slightly crispy potatoes and a ruined baking pan). The egg and burger pattie were both cooked in the microwave. You could say I was trying to make this low in fat, but really my aim was to reduce the calories by as much as possible (since fat as the highest density of calories).

This is a high fat version I created for my dad and brother while I stayed in Bateman's Bay. The bacon is streaky and has been fried to a crisp on the stove, as has the egg and pattie. The whole thing is covered in wholesome seedy mustard.

Somehow everything tastes better when fried in cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. Maybe I should compromise and have this instead of wasting my time with eating low fat things 3/4 of the time and chocolate 1/4 of time.

Mad Mex Naked Burrito

This is a decidedly low carb, low fat meal. It's essentially a burrito without the tortilla, cheese or sour cream. All the things that would give it flavour, right? Yes and no. I figured that since most restaurants use everything they can to make everything as flavoursome as possible, I couldn't really go wrong with ordering something more boring. And I was right: the steak is heavily flavoured and the pinto beans are salty. This is enough to balance out the blandness of the rice and lettuce. The only thing that I disliked was that the rice tasted stale. But rice is difficult to keep fresh in a fast food restaurant. Rating: 8/10.

Easy low carb slim Bolognese

530 calories

Ingredients per person (I made 3 servings)

33 g aged cheddar cheese, the icing on the proverbial cake. It's a bit brittle, but packs a ton of umami into the meal.

1/3 jar organic pasta sauce randomly picked up on special at a chemist (due to being close to its best before date, probably. This seems to be the only way shops like this end up selling stock)

A pack of slim pasta, also from the chemist. It seems one of the staff had been considering buying it because she asked me I it was "any good." If you like slightly jelly-like vermicelli, then yes, its fantastic. And it happens to go rather well with tomato based sauces.

1/3 of an extremely huge almost half kilo  onion from one of those 10 kg bags. Diced with the pivot method and a nice, sharp knife. Fried until caramelised with spray oil.

1/3 diced carrot

300 g premium beef mince formed into a pattie with a little flour to bind and spices

Method: cook everything in a microwave for 10 minutes and serve with noodles

Next time I'm substituting the noodles for long, thin slices of carrot (thin enough to bend)

Low carb Meat Stew

This is basically a beef and potato stew with kangaroo and swede as low carb substitutes. I used one of those kangaroo roasts (which was annoying because it had all those cords holding it together in to a roast shape. What a pity) with the beef stock and fried onions, and stuck it all in a slow cooker for 8 hours. The result was just as filling as the beef and potato counterpart at a fraction of the calories. Gram for gram, swede is almost half the calories of potato and tastes almost the same, especially when both potato and swede are already so heavily flavoured with the meat of the stew. Kangaroo is also one of the most lean meats available. It is as lean as chicken breast and a million times more flavoursome.

Okonomiyaki style omelette

Okonomiyaki, otherwise known as "Japanese omelette," or "Japanese pizza" is basically an omelette that contains flour and cabbage and has various toppings ("anything you like") as well as the kewpie style mayonnaise that is so common on top of Japanese dishes and a special "okonomiyaki style sauce," or bulldog sauce. Or XO sauce. I'm not sure what. In any case, my aim was to create my own low carb version. I made a cabbage omelette which I topped with low fat mayonnaise and a mixture of BBQ sauce, Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce. The textures are definitely different to the original, but I'm hoping the flavours are similar.