Everyday Banting Family

I am not a cordon bleu chef, nor even that great a cook, though I like to eat wholesome and tasty food. What I am is a busy woman with a career and a family to feed, and limited time on my hands. I also travel a fair amount, so need easy lunch-box meals, food that can be pre-made for the freezer, and quick-to-prepare recipes that use simple, readily-available ingredients.
Our lifestyle also requires coping with extras for dinner with very little warning.

In addition, I live with a Type 2 diabetic who has weaned himself off insulin and is now living without any diabetic medication. Amongst those I feed often, I have to consider a vegetarian, someone allergic to nuts and an alcoholic in recovery who can’t touch alcohol, as well as children and adolescents who want food they and their friends recognise, and an extended family who are not Banting-friendly.

I also need to cope with birthday parties where people expect cake with their tea. And, what’s more, I need to produce good-looking and tasty food for dinners and cocktail parties when entertaining for business, where Banting is not a suitable focus of attention.
However, eating the Banting way is important for me and my family. Since we started eating this way, my husband has been able to steadily reduce his insulin dosage, and has for several years now been free from insulin dependence and off all diabetes-related medication. Our unofficially-adopted daughter, an enthusiastic sportswoman, is keen to maintain the stable blood sugar and extra energy this way of eating brings.

My own life-long eating disorder, driven by chronic hunger underpinned by severe insulin-resistance, has subsided to a manageable murmur – I have lost more than 25kg since starting Banting in February 2014 (and been able to come off my blood pressure medication and reduce my thyroid medication as well), and want to keep on losing until I am back to a healthy weight, a decades-long desire that finally seems achievable.
But to live this way requires commitment. Few would dispute that Banting works if you work it, but working it can be a challenge, as it removes most of the quick-and-easy staples, namely sugar and starch, especially bread and pasta. So without replacements for convenient foods, I quickly started to get bored and missed my familiar favourites.
I soon realised that I did not want to feel like a weird food freak on some inconvenient, attention-seeking diet, nor did I want to force my extended family to feel any sense of deprivation so I could eat the way that works for me.

I came to understand that what I wanted in a Banting cookbook was simple, quick and familiar dishes that have been reworked for this way of eating. I have always been a keen cook, and since the beginning of 2014, when I started to see the benefits on my weight and my partner’s diabetes, I grew determined to make this work as painlessly as possible so we could stick to a Banting lifestyle. My recipe book was born out of that process and, to our delight, the first print sold out in well under a year.
However, we struggled to satisfy the demand for the book from our international customers – the cost of postage from South Africa to the rest of the world made it prohibitively expensive. Added to that was the recognition that many people wanted a portable copy of the recipes so they could cook them anywhere. And so the app was developed to make it easily available to anyone who has a mobile phone or other similar portable device.
I hope this App and the recipes it offers enables you to make Banting an easier lifestyle for your family too, whether for a teenager not wanting to stand out from her friends, a husband longing for familiar foods, or you just want to satisfy your own need for a quick sandwich on a busy day...
Essentially, I hope this app helps you live the LCHF lifestyle more easily, wherever you are...