School lunch ideas??

[Courtneysmum]

Can anyone help with ideas for school lunches please??

 

[KarenB]

Keto diet? Classical? What ratio?

Is there a place to warm food?

Picky eater? Able to eat anything? (like raw veggies)

 

[Courtneysmum]

At the moment just trying to keep carbs down & fats up.
We usually eat paleo but usually let the kids have wraps & I want to cut them out. Now I'm stumped.. There's not really anywhere to warm food

 

[KarenB]

OK, well, Jonathan is on the 4:1 ratio (fats to protein and carbs), so the meals we fix for him are super strict, and you can probably not need to be.

But the 3 school lunches we send are:

Guacamole with cheese, olives, and veggies/fruit
Mix Haas avocado with mayo for guacamole. Or you can just slice avocado and put mayo (and a little lemon juice and salt if you wish) on top (mayo packets work nicely, or you can just send in those little tiny rubbermaid bowls) Then with this we send olives (either black or green), cheddar cheese cubes, and lo carb fruit (any of the berries, or star fruit) or raw veggies (celery, cucumber, green pepper, carrot, broccoli, etc.)

If you're not too worried about ratio, you could send other fruit like melon or apple
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Tuna salad (I send the salad in a ziplock bowl -- this can be served over lettuce)
Tuna, mayo, onion (and whatever other veggies you like to throw in -- like celery, dill pickle relish, etc.)
With this we also send olives and assorted raw veggies (green peppers, etc.)

You could also send in egg salad instead of tuna.
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Cheeseballs and assorted fruit/veggies
Make cheeseballs from cream cheese rolled in flaxseed meal (or pecans). I add a little butter to the cheese to get the fat ratio up higher because we're on 4:1. This can be served with whatever fruit or raw veggies your child likes.

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Now, I have to chop up Jon's veggies into bitesize pieces, and he has trouble manipulating peanut butter in his mouth, but if this weren't an issue, a nice snack (or part of a meal) would be celery sticks topped with either cream cheese or peanut butter.

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Another meal I sent in a lot was a jello mousse (jello mixed with whipped cream and maybe a little cream cheese or mayo) served with Jimmy Dean sausage patties (already cooked) and some sort of lightly steamed veggie (but there was a microwave to warm up the meat and veggies).
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If you had some way to keep it cold (maybe freeze night before), you could send in a smoothie made with heavy cream, high fat plain yogurt, and berries.
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Any kind of a big salad works well - any sort of combo of lettuce, cabbage, celery, peppers, tomato, and for protein you could top with cheese and/or chicken breast and/or boiled egg, and then for a dressing you could use a vinagrette, or a high fat/lo carb dressing like blue cheese or ranch.

Basically, at our ratio, a cold meal is a salad. However, if you go to the Charlie Foundation website, they have recipes for things like muffins and flat bread and cookes and such - - they are made from either flaxseed meal (which can be bought at Walmart or your local grocery in the flour section usually), or from ground nuts.

 

[KarenB]

You have to be careful with flaxseed meal -- because it can cause blood thinning. Our nutritionist recommends a maximum daily amount of 15 grams.

But it works great for constipation which is sometimes an issue when eating higher fat meals.

 

[Courtneysmum]

Thanks so much Karen does almond meal work instread of flaxseed meal ?

 

[KarenB]

Yes, definitely, you can use that. You can take any nut and grind it up in a coffee grinder and substitute that for flour.

Almonds are not as high in fat as nuts like cashew or pecans or macademia, but they work great.

 

[KarenB]

I'm not much of a baker, so haven't tried some of those cookie and muffin recipes. That's why Jon ends up with raw veggies and fruit for lunch most days (of course, they're healthy).

I did make a pretty mean cheesecake for his birthday. You basically just use a regular cheesecake recipe and leave out the sugar. You can use an artificial sweetener (but I find that the cream cheese is naturally sweet) if you like. We top it with sugar free aerosol whipped cream (my best friend) and strawberries

 

[KarenB]

I just wanted to mention that using the ketogenic diet with kids should be approached with extreme caution. Usually, this diet is initiated in the hospital (3 day stay) so that the kids levels can be checked.

You especially want to be super careful if your child is on Topomax or Zonegran or Depakote (Valproic Acid). Topomax and Zonegran tend to cause kidney stones and acidosis, and also the Ketogenic diet does, so the two together can be dangerous (we're doing both Zonegran and Keto diet, but have his C02 levels checked a lot, plus he gets a potassium supplement to keep things buffered).

I can't remember what the problem is with Depakote, but I think its something to do with ammonia.

At any rate, make sure your child is drinking LOTS of water or other fluids. At least 6 cups a day.

 

[AngelwithDentedHalo]

I saw flax seed at Costco today, heard it has good benefits but didn't know it can thin blood, hmm. Would have to ask doctor if it could be dangerous for me since I've had a brain bleed

 

[AngelwithDentedHalo]

After reading this, don't think I'll try flax seed. It does have health benefits but can also have side effects, link below.

http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/whattoeat/a/flaxinfo.htm

 

[KarenB]

Tip we had from nutritionist was to store in the freezer. It pours just as easily when frozen, and don't have to worry about it getting rancid.

The 15 grams a day limit (from our nutritionist) is about 1 1/2 tablespoons. We typically just use about 5 a day. A little goes a long way.

A lot of the kids on the keto diet have problems with constipation, and use the flax seed for that. We have the opposite problem -- diarrhea, so sometimes have to back off on the raw veggies.

 

[Courtneysmum]

I just wanted to mention that using the ketogenic diet with kids should be approached with extreme caution. Usually, this diet is initiated in the hospital (3 day stay) so that the kids levels can be checked.

You especially want to be super careful if your child is on Topomax or Zonegran or Depakote (Valproic Acid). Topomax and Zonegran tend to cause kidney stones and acidosis, and also the Ketogenic diet does, so the two together can be dangerous (we're doing both Zonegran and Keto diet, but have his C02 levels checked a lot, plus he gets a potassium supplement to keep things buffered).

I can't remember what the problem is with Depakote, but I think its something to do with ammonia.

At any rate, make sure your child is drinking LOTS of water or other fluids. At least 6 cups a day.

Thanks Karen.
I'm not going fully keto..
My daughter eats alot of bread so I basically just want to remove this as it's just empty cals & replace it with nutrient rich calories.
I'm not a fan of carbs either, I eat the Paleolithic diet..
Reducing her sugars and carbs (sugars again) can only benefit her I'm sure

 

[KarenB]

Yes, definitely removing refined sugars won't do her any harm, and may do her a lot of good.

Apparently a LOT of people have gluten intolerance, and this is linked to seizures, so taking bread (and other wheat products like noodles, sphagetti, cereal, etc.) out of her diet may also be helpful.

Just removing sugar and wheat from her diet may be the answer. I'd advise doing that first, and seeing what happens, before taking stricter measures.

One thing I discovered is that there's lots of hidden sugars in things like ketchup, bbq sauce, Chinese and Thai food (the sauces), salad dressings and that sort of thing. Before Jon started the Keto diet, we'd first just cut way back on his sugar and wheat products, and that really helped. But then one day he ate BBQ for one meal, and Chinese for another, and had a bunch of seizures, even though he hadn't had obvious starches like bread or potatoes or rice. I think it was the sauces in those foods.

 

[Courtneysmum]

Yeah I'm a personal trainer so know a fair bit about nutrition & where the nasties are hidden

 

[KarenB]

That's great, because 2 years ago, I was absolutely clueless about that sort of thing. We had a vague suspicion that he might have Celiac disease or some sort of gluten intolerance, because we'd been living in Asia, eating a rice based diet, and when we came to the U.S., he started eating a lot of bread and other wheat products, and he went from having a seizure every 2 or 3 months to having weekly seizures.

The blood test for Celiac came back negative (even though we gave him lots of wheat products in the few days before having it), but I've since heard that there's lots of false negatives with that test. At any rate, our Epileptologist has told us that even if Jon goes off the Ketogenic diet, we should keep him off foods with gluten.

Another factor that we thought might have played in was processed foods -- when we were in Asia, most of his food was made from scratch, but in the U.S., he was eating more processed foods -- so perhaps the preservatives or whatever was in it was triggering seizures.

 

[Courtneysmum]

That's great, because 2 years ago, I was absolutely clueless about that sort of thing. We had a vague suspicion that he might have Celiac disease or some sort of gluten intolerance, because we'd been living in Asia, eating a rice based diet, and when we came to the U.S., he started eating a lot of bread and other wheat products, and he went from having a seizure every 2 or 3 months to having weekly seizures.

The blood test for Celiac came back negative (even though we gave him lots of wheat products in the few days before having it), but I've since heard that there's lots of false negatives with that test. At any rate, our Epileptologist has told us that even if Jon goes off the Ketogenic diet, we should keep him off foods with gluten.

Another factor that we thought might have played in was processed foods -- when we were in Asia, most of his food was made from scratch, but in the U.S., he was eating more processed foods -- so perhaps the preservatives or whatever was in it was triggering seizures.

Have u had just the blood test for gluten? As there's a more invasive test that will tell you for sure