Hey everyone, I'm trying to work this SB but I have a few quirks.... first, a lot of the SB recipies and LC in general use a lot of bell peppers for flavor.....I can't stand the taste of them no matter the color (green, red yellow...whatever) is there a good substitute? Just leaving them out works, but there's not much flavor when you do.
Second, All the LC diets use artifical sweetners, I can't use ANY of them, they make me moody and bi***y or give me migraines. I have used Stevia liquid without side affects. Any recipie ideas you all might have or direct me to threads from the past I'd appreciate it
Thanks

OMG!! I eat mountains of bell peppers, I eat them every day! It depends on what you are making. You can look at the list of approved veggies here, I would definitely recommend eating LOTS of veggies. Salads, steamed, soups or whatever, that first couple of weeks. I did and didn't have any of the constipation etc that I had heard of...

Definitely depends on the recipe. If you post some examples of what kinds of recipes you mean, we might be better able to make suggestions.

As for the fake sweeteners, if you have some kind of reaction to them, I'd avoid them. Maybe you'd be better off with some kind of modified SBD, using, say, turbinado (raw) sugar? At least it's less refined than white sugar or HFCS. You could always still do phase one for a week or so (I'm assuming you could live without sweet treats for a few days? ) to detox, then switch to a less-refined sugar when you need to use sugar. It might slow down your weight loss, but better that than to use sweeteners you react to.

I am allergic to all bell pepper when cooked, I typically add onions in its place or you can add fennel bulb.

kyemom - how strange! I'm allergic to green bell peppers in any form, but ripe bell peppers are fine! And it's only bells--chili peppers don't bother me (at least, not in the same way!).

Well, that breakfast cheesecake from the files sounds great, but it uses a lot of Splenda anyone know how much Stevia crystals to use instead? I can't eat any of the SF jello, pudding or any of those things because they all have Nutrasweet or Splenda, does anyone have any recipies for these using Stevia? None of the flavored waters will work for me either, and most of the already packaged SB goodies all have Splenda so I need to make everything from scratch.

Tygr, I don't know much about Stevia... There appears to be quite a lot of recipes here: http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=83 That use it.. You could attempt to modify the recipes there to be SB friendly.. While Atkin stresses low carbs, SB stresses GOOD SLOW Carbs. Perhaps you can google Stevia too for recipes?

I'd just play around and add it to taste. I'm not so much into sweet stuff, plus I found that foods started to taste sweeter after my first phase 1. Guesstimate based on how much sugar you'd add to a similar, non-diet recipe, and use roughly the equivalent of stevia.

I am pretty sure you can find recipes for cooking with stevia. I think I've even heard of cookbooks, but I don't know for sure.