A Full Day of Keto – Eat This Today! Keto Menu & Recipes (2024)

Video | Keto Breakfast | Keto Lunch | Keto Dinner |

The keto menu shared in this blog post contains less than 25 total grams of carbohydrates. If you are just getting started with keto, simply curious about what a keto day of eating looks like, or you’ve hit a weight loss plateau, this full day of eating keto has you covered. I share the easy recipes for a make-it-yourself breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

A Full Day of Keto – Eat This Today! Keto Menu & Recipes [Video]

In this video, you’ll learn…

• How many carbs you should be eating in a day.
• Recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and more!
• The relationship between macros and calories.

How Many Carbs for Keto?

As I mentioned, the foods in this one-day keto menu contain about 25 total grams of carbohydrates, 9 of which are fiber. If you are coming from a high-carb lifestyle where you were consuming refined carbs like cereal, sandwich bread, soda, pasta, and desserts regularly, this will be a significant change for your body.

Even if you were eating a healthy high-carb diet, your daily carb consumption was likely around 50 percent or more of your daily calories (1).

A keto diet is a very-low-carb diet where your carbohydrate intake will be less than 10% of your daily calories. It will take time for your body to adapt to this way of eating. So if you make this switch overnight, you may experience keto flu symptoms, such as fatigue, cravings, and irritability.

To lessen those symptoms, you may want to start with a low carb diet before jumping into keto. If so, you can see my blog post that shares a full day of eating low carb.

Keto Breakfast

Eggs are a favorite food for keto dieters because they provide your body with fat and protein yet contain virtually no carbohydrates. Eggs can also be enjoyed in a variety of ways. You can fry them, scramble them, or eat them hard-boiled like I share in the keto breakfast below.

Hard-boiled eggs are good to have on hand if you are following a keto diet because they work just as well as a grab-and-go keto snack in the afternoon as they do in the morning. However, if plain hard-boiled eggs don’t excite you, eating them with a spicy dipping sauce will certainly up the game.

For instance, you can whip up a dipping sauce by mixing together two tablespoons of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, 1/8 of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and a dash of salt and pepper.

With two hard-boiled eggs, this Quick Keto Eggs with Spicy Dipping Sauce recipe contains just over 1 gram of carbohydrate, yet it is packed with energy thanks to the 35 grams of fat and more than 12 grams of protein.

That is a macronutrient ratio that you want as a keto dieter. A keto diet is a very-low-carb, high fat, moderate protein diet. This macronutrient intake prevents the blood sugar and insulin spike you get when you eat something refined for breakfast, like cereal or a muffin. When insulin is high, it prevents the release of fat from the fat cells.

Right from the start of the day, you have a satisfying meal that keeps your blood sugar and insulin levels low and under control.

Plus, if your morning is rushed or you are practicing intermittent fasting in the morning and need a late breakfast that is easy to transport, you can make the hard-boiled eggs and dipping sauce the night before and then just grab-and-go in the morning.

Download the Keto Breakfast Recipe

Keto Lunch

Vegetables can be part of your keto diet; you just have to know which vegetables to choose. Non-starchy vegetables are lower in carbs than starchy vegetables. I have a blog post with lists of starchy vegetables vs. non-starchy vegetables if you’d like the full breakdown.

However, you can get in the ballpark by thinking of starchy vegetables as those that tend to be heavy and dense, like potatoes, corn, and butternut squash. Non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, are light and airy, making them work well on a salad. This brings us to the lunchtime salad included in this keto menu.

All varieties of lettuce are low in calories and carbs but provide a lot of hunger-satisfying volume. For instance, this salad has three cups of salad greens that only add 38 calories and four and a half grams of carbs, three of which are fiber.

Including a salad in your daily keto diet also supplies you with the perfect vehicle to bring healthy fats into your daily diet. Adding fat to your diet helps your body transition away from a primarily carb-burning metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism.

For this salad, I added three tablespoons of feta cheese crumbles, two tablespoons of walnuts, one tablespoon of raw sunflower seeds, and one and a ½ tablespoon of full-fat dressing. Those salad toppers added more than 30 grams of fat to the day’s menu.

Download the Keto Lunch Recipe

If you are new to keto, thinking about getting started, or you’ve hit a rut with your keto diet, I encourage you to include a daily salad like this one. The volume and high-fat content will work together to keep hunger away, allowing you to go longer between meals.

That is something you want if weight loss is your goal because it allows your blood sugar and insulin levels to drop to a point where fat release from body fat is encouraged.

Keto Dinner

Any meat or fish will be low in carbs, so a great thing about a keto or low carb lifestyle is that you can eat at a restaurant as easily as eating at home. For this keto meal plan, I’m using fish, specifically cod, but I could have just as easily included chicken or steak.

To make this Keto Cod recipe, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and placed one pound of cod fish in a baking dish with one tablespoon each of avocado oil and lemon juice. I then seasoned the fillets with a tablespoon of dried basil and a dash of salt and pepper. That is really all you need to do with a firm white fish like cod. But for this recipe, I topped the fillets with slices of tomato and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese before placing them in the oven for about 20 minutes.

Download the Keto Dinner Recipe

Keto Tartar Sauce

One thing about fish is that it is not particularly high in fat. This recipe serves four, and each serving contains just over five grams of fat. Because the dinner entrée is low in fat, I am adding fat to it with Tartar Sauce.

When you follow a keto diet, something you need to look out for is condiments and sauces. Many of them contain sugar and high-fructose corn syrup that can sabotage your weight loss and knock you out of ketosis. Fortunately, you can whip up homemade tartar sauce with just three ingredients that you may already have in your kitchen.

I made this tartar sauce by stirring together ¼ cup of full-fat mayonnaise, one tablespoon of dill relish, and one teaspoon of lemon juice. A serving, which is one-fourth of this recipe, adds 12 grams of fat to our keto dinner.

Download the Keto Tartar Sauce Recipe

Keto Side-Dish: Bacon Roasted Brussels Sprouts

I am also adding more vegetables and boosting the fat content of this keto menu with Bacon Roasted Brussels Sprouts. You’ve heard it said that bacon makes everything better. That is true of Brussels sprouts. You want to select a good-quality bacon that does not contain added sugar or similar items like maple syrup because that will add carbohydrates to your meal.

To make this recipe, I used a pound of Brussels sprouts. I cut them in half and drizzled a ½ tablespoon of Avocado oil over them to allow the salt and pepper to stick. I then added a ¼ pound of chopped bacon to the sprouts and put them in a 450-degree oven for about 30 minutes until they were slightly charred around their edges.

Download the Keto Side Dish Recipe

Calories and Macros

The meals shared in this blog post add up to just under 1,200 calories, which will be low for some. This works well for demonstration purposes because it is easier to add low-carb/high-fat items rather than subtract them.

When we breakdown the macros for this keto day of eating, we see that the menu contains less than 25 total grams of carbohydrates, making up about 8% of the daily calories, with just over 20% coming from protein and more than 70% of the day’s calories coming from fats.

Many people will find that this macronutrient breakdown allows them to lose weight and get into ketosis, which is the state in which your body releases body fat to produce ketones. However, just eating keto for one day will not give you those results.

When you switch from a high-carb diet to a keto diet, you force your body to run on fatty acids and ketones rather than carbohydrates. This transition is great, but it takes time. The world we live in is filled with carbohydrates. Without a plan, it can be hard to avoid temptations and stick with a keto diet long enough to gain the benefits.

If you need a plan to follow, you can check out my 21-day keto challenge. During the challenge, you’ll eat a keto diet with daily menus containing no more than 25 total carbs. You also get daily Busy Day Plans and additional Grab-n-Go Emergency Meal suggestions, so you stay on track even when life gets too busy to cook.

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful week!

Reference:

(1) Manore, Melinda M. “Exercise and the Institute of Medicine recommendations for nutrition.”Current sports medicine reports4.4 (2005): 193-198.

About the Author

Becky Gillaspy, DC, is the author of The Intermittent Fasting Guide and Cookbook. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.vv