Have you plateaued on your low-carb diet. If so why? The answer could be that you are getting more carbs in your diet than you are aware of.

How does this happen? It happens by neglect. People neglect to check labels or look up foods online to find out how many carbs they are eating. As a result, they plateau quickly, get discouraged, and resume unhealthy eating.

What’s in Your Salad?

Eating uncounted carbs happens all the time in salads. And I’m not just taking about the croutons. Most people who are on a low carbohydrate diet are savvy to avoiding them. However, even in a salad without croutons, there are still many uncounted carbs.

My eyes were opened to this when on one occasion, I had a salad with some craisins in it. At the time, I did not think anything of it. However, later on in the evening I decided to check the carbohydrate count just to see. I was surprised. I always expect the carb count to be higher on fruit, but I was not expecting this. There are about 22 carbs in 1/4 of a cup! After, this I started counting carbohydrates in many of my questionable favorites.

Another Common Oversight

Here is another common oversight that I have committed myself and have also seen regularly in other people’s choices. This oversight is sauces. For example, many cheese sauces have flour in them. Often lowcarbers will not think of this because cheese is often OK on many low carbohydrate diets. And when we make this sauce at home we usually use cheese and heavy cream. But the pre-packaged kind will mostly use flour. This should make any good low-carber reconsider ordering  the broccoli, cheese soup.

A popular sauce that often has more carbs that expected is tomato sauce. Almost all the canned tomato sauces have sugar added. Check the label before you make that spaghetti squash with spaghetti sauce.

It’s Just the Broth

Another culprit is broth. I have seen many people order chicken noodle soup and ask the server for just the broth. However, much of the starch of the noodles can leach out into the broth. This creates a much higher carb count than expected.

The Fix 

There is an easy way to fix this and it is to simply check the labels. If it’s a kind of food without a label, look it up on line. If you are out at a restaurant, ask questions. Doing these simple things will help keep you on the weight-loss path.