We got a great question from a member who was curious about what OUR favorite lunches are. So, what are our favorite keto lunch options?
We link to all these recipes we love so you can make them yourselves. You can also go to our website, wholebodyliving.com. Search based on the recipe name you’re looking for to pull it up (or find new ones to try).
Tara’s Favorite Keto Lunch Options
Keto Chicken Casserole
Tara’s favorite keto lunch options start with the Keto Chicken Casserole. This recipe has some broccoli and cauliflower, chicken, and seasonings. It's creaminess, makes it one of her favorite keto comfort foods.
Here in Iowa when the temperatures get cold, comfort food gets made. Casseroles are something that's like batch cooking. You're going to cook a little bit, eat some of it, and freeze the rest. Then you have lunches for a while which makes the everyday keto food choices a bit easier.

Keto Instapot Pot Roast
Tara’s second favorite recipe is her Keto Instapot Pot Roast. This is the traditional pot roast that she grew up eating and changed a few ingredients around. She changed it a bit to be keto, and then made it even more tender and faster using the Instapot.
There's a lot of great health benefits when using pressure when you cook. They actually break down lectins in foods. These are one of those things that you might hear called an “antinutrient”. It also does a great job of breaking down collagen, so it's more digestible for your body, which is why it's so tender. So if you can use an instapot to cook this Keto Roast.

Zucchini Lasagna
Keto Zucchini Lasagna is another favorite we’ve already got in the freezer. We're coming out of zucchini season here, so this has been one of Tara's favorites.

Keto Quiche
Our keto quiche is number four. So this was one of Tara's mom’s recipes. She would make it, and it kind of became a family winter and holiday tradition to eat this keto quiche every year.
When Tara started on keto, she wanted to figure out how to adjust the ingredients to still enjoy this one. And that’s when she finally figured out how to use cauliflower rice to make this amazing keto quiche. Our kids actually like the keto and low carb version better than the one with the bread in it.
This recipe is what we make on Christmas morning. Tara has the quiche made the night before and then pops it in the oven. It takes a little over an hour to bake, which is about the perfect time. Then we do the stockings, get through presents, and then you have a hot, healthy breakfast.

Keto Coconut Flour Waffles
We would be remiss if we didn't share a few favorite breakfasts for lunch recipes. So breakfast for lunch, Tara loves our keto coconut flour waffles. We'll make a double batch and freeze them and then pull them out and have Tara's homemade maple syrup ready for that. So those are Tara's top recipes that kind of end up in rotation very often.

Homemade Maple Syrup
The final version of our maple syrup has ZERO carbs, doubles as a "fat bomb", and won't harden in the refrigerator. It has the perfect maple flavor to pair with keto waffles, pancakes and is even great brushed on salmon.

Jeremy’s Favorite Keto Lunch Options
Creamy Chicken Chili
So one of Jeremy's favorites is Creamy Chicken Chili. Tara ketofied it and he loves it. It tastes like this warm, comforting chicken and noodles soup, except creamy white chili... it's delicious and very satisfying.
You can put it on other foods as a topping too. That's what we like about it because it's a cream base. It works well with other things, like a chicken breast, or chicken thigh. If you want to get weird you could even smother waffles with this stuff. Chicken and waffles are delicious.

Best Keto Chili
Jeremy's other favorite is the one that he's been working on a lot over the last year and a half is keto chili.
Jeremy loves keto chili because every time we make it, we can try something different. You could do chipotle, or add a lot of jalapenos. One of the things he likes to do is add some liver. It's a great place to hide organ meats. And organ meats are the real superfoods in the world. The liver is gram for gram, packed with more nutrients than about every vegetable that you can find. The liver is so high in so many different vitamins that it's like taking a multivitamin by eating it.
So how we do that is to cook some up and run it through our food processor. If you're fancy and have a meat grinder, you can actually take some ground beef and grind in the liver with it. We don't have a food processor, so we cook it and then dice it and puree it with our food processor. And then we mix that in with everything else. So that's how we incorporate it.
When you make it very small, like very fine, it's not as noticeable. The liver has a very specific texture that you may not want, so you'll want to keep your ratio low, around about 20%. When Jeremy makes this chili, he tends to use between 4-5 pounds of meat. He makes a pretty big batch so that we have something to eat for a couple of days. We do 1 pound of liver and 4 pounds of something else, usually a couple of sausages and some meat, and stock the freezer.

Tex-Mex Liver Casserole
The next thing Jeremy likes is Tex Mex Liver Casserole. We like to top it with some sour cream, avocados and cheese, and different things like that. And you could get heavy on this with avocado and sour cream.
This is like a powerful, nutrient-packed meal. If you're doing one meal a day and you want to pack in a lot of nutrition into that one meal, this is a fantastic dish for that.

Sausage & Eggs
So we love to batch cook. Our quickies are if we need something fast is to make some scrambled eggs with sausage. It's pretty high in fat, eggs are a great nutrient-dense, well-rounded food.
Grilled Cheese
A keto bread, grilled cheese. Jeremy loves to use a monster or even a slice of blue cheese. Something a little more exotic to spice it up. These two bread recipes are the best for Keto Grilled Cheese.
Dairy-Free Coconut Flour Bread:

Dairy-Based Bread:

Plus…
Keep the freezer stocked
What do we do when we're busy? There's always the snack meals which were easy to come up with. But we also keep our freezer stocked, as you guys know are huge fans of Real Good Foods and how wholesome their food is.
We keep our freezer stocked with meals from Real Good Foods. Especially if we had a busy weekend without time to cook & meal prep. If you came over to our house, you're going to see Real Good Foods pizzas and bowls and bacon-wrapped chicken. We definitely keep all that on hand for when we have a big busy weekend. When we have a lot going on is when we kind of fall back on those things in the freezer.
Histamine intolerance
Something that also happens is your leftovers in the fridge develop histamines. For some people, histamines can be difficult to clear from the body. We became aware of this because Jeremy's sister is very histamine intolerant. If she eats anything with high histamines, her face turns bright red. So if this happens to you, it could be histamine intolerance.
One easy thing to do to help with this is to freeze your food. People with Parkinson's have a harder time clearing histamines from their bodies. So leftover foods could be an aggravation for their bodies.
Spend time planning
If you’re struggling with lunch, the #1 thing you can do is to spend the time planning in advance. We've become big proponents of meal planning. And I'll tell you what. For years we both resisted planning thinking it was too much work. We don't want to spend a whole day doing meal prep, but then we kind of got serious about it earlier this year. And we found out that meal prepping frees up so much space in our brains during the week. We’re no longer thinking, “what am I gonna have for lunch?” because we’ve already got something prepped and ready. The quick thing and going back on, like almonds and cheese, so we got serious about it for a month, and now every week we plan.
Decision fatigue
You may have heard of decision fatigue. Every time you have to make a decision during the day, your willpower gets a little bit weaker. By the end of the day, you've had to make so many hard decisions that you choose the easy route and cheat. And end up busting up your keto diet.
So pre-planning and doing batch cooking take that decision out of my hands for the week. We don't have to think about it. And then that's one less thing we have to decide on in the day. So at the end of the day, we're not feeling so stressed and worn out from all the decisions made.
Grab our tear-off meal planner and shopping list
Every week we do our shopping list. We have four kids. Three kids work at a grocery store, so they pick up our groceries. For us, it's a nice perk as a parent to have a teenager that works at a grocery store. Doing this frees up so much time during the week where we're not having to think about food.
So Tara created this worksheet for herself and we turned it into a tear-off pad. On one side is all the days of the week and your meals, and the other side is your shopping list organized by category. This is actually what we use to do our meal planning and what our middle child uses to do the kid's meal planning.
All our products are in our sustainableketo.com stores. This one pad will last you a whole year. It's 60 sheets, so there's one for every week. And a handful of extras for those special weeks...like all the holiday stuff that's coming up right now.
Planning in advance seems like this difficult, time-consuming thing. In reality… it will free up so much brain space during the week. You don’t have to spend any time wondering what’s for lunch or dinner because you already made the decision. This means, you’re more productive during the day and way less tempted to cheat.
Once you get into a rhythm, it is so much less work to spend the 4 to 6 hours on the weekend. Trying to track your macros takes much less time when you already planned it all out for the week.
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