So you’ve started the keto diet and you’re beginning to make progress. Great job! But as with any diet, you’ll quickly find that it’s not all easy going.
One of the common challenges that’s often left out of the conversation, is how to make keto work for the family. Humans are intensely social creatures and eating at breakfast and dinner time are common times to socialise as a family. It’s challenging enough to sort out meals for a big family, let alone adding keto to the mix.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the main challenges associated with following keto when you have a family, as well as some great tips to help make it work. Let’s get started!
Table of contents
Challenges of keto with a family
1. You're the only one following keto
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest challenges of following keto is that you’re the only one on the diet. When following keto solo, your food goals and those of your family can vary drastically. This can cause some tension and disagreement about food selection. In addition, going it alone can be more of a lonely experience.
As a result, you’ll have to have summon a lot more willpower to stick with it.
2. Diverse food preferences
Catering to family members with different food preferences means striking a balance between familiar favourites and introducing new flavours. This is challenging enough when following a traditional Western diet, but becomes much more difficult when trying to adhere to keto.
While eating similar meals everyday may work for you, your family may not be as enthusiastic. This will require some creative thought, integrating tasty foods that satisfy the whole family.
3. Picky eaters
Managing picky eaters can be a real challenge when you’re trying to stick to keto. Preparing meals that integrate both your keto requirements and the preferences of picky eaters can sometimes seem impossible. Remember, while picky eaters may often be children, a fair share of adults (and teenagers!) can also be picky.
Although picky eaters may be challenging to manage, it’s still important to encourage children to eat healthy foods.
4. Time constraints and different schedules
Modern family schedules are often hectic, leaving limited time for elaborate meal preparation. As a result, many families resort to pre-made meals which can be quickly heated in the oven (think frozen pizza).
Unfortunately, this is not a particularly keto-friendly solution (and not healthy either!), so won’t always be possible if you’re trying to stick to your keto diet. What’s more, with diverging schedules, people are often eating meals at different times, making meal prep much more challenging.
5. Health considerations
Accommodating various dietary needs, allergies and food intolerances involves vigilant label reading and learning to navigate alternative ingredients.
Although keto may be suitable for you, it may not be the best option for other members of your family (especially children with specific dietary needs). As a result, you’ll need to be able to tailor your meal prep to ensure all family members are adequately catered for.
6. Budget constraints
Striking a balance between providing wholesome meals and staying within budget can definitely have you scratching your head. This is particularly the case as keto will often have you eating meat and fish, which are more expensive options. If you’re on a tighter budget, you’ll have to be a lot more creative and stick to the most cost-effective options.
7. Meal fatigue
Repeatedly cooking the same meals can quickly become monotonous and mundane, leading to dissatisfaction. As you may know, consistent meal-prep is great for adhering to keto and reaching your health and wellness goals.
However, cooking the same meals over and over can quickly become boring for the rest of the family. This requires a balance between adding new variety, while ensuring the keto-friendliness of the meals.
8. Limited cooking skills
Let’s face it, not all of us are Gordan Ramsey in the kitchen. Having limited cooking skills can have you repeatedly cooking the same basic meals. If you’re used to buying prepared meals, you probably haven’t had to develop your culinary skills.
However, now faced with the prospect of preparing keto-friendly meals for the whole family, you’d be forgiven for having a little panic. Brushing up on your cooking skills can take time and can leave you not knowing where to start.
9. Balancing nutrition
Striking the right balance between meeting nutritional needs and serving meals that satisfy individual preferences requires a lot of effort. Remember, other members of your family may have different requirements due to age, sex or level of physical activity. This can complicate meal preparation and requires identifying nutrient-dense ingredients that hit all the right notes.
While following a keto lifestyle can be a great choice, there’s no doubt that trying to integrate keto for the whole family comes with its challenges. These include diverse preferences, busy schedules, and the health considerations that define family life. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, which can leave you uncertain about how to continue.
However, we’re here to assure you that with a few changes, you can make your keto diet work for you and your family. In the following sections, we’ll delve deeper into some of the tips and tricks that can help make keto work for everyone. While there may be limitations, there are ways to minimise the challenges mentioned earlier.
So, let’s explore some of the strategies we’ve found that can make a real difference.
How to make keto work for the whole family
1. Educate and explain | 2. Family meal planning | 3. Have some quick go-to meals | 4. Use a meal planning app | 5. Use a meal prep company | 6. Have some frozen keto-meals ready | 7. Involve the whole family | 8. Have a keto-friendly kitchen | 9. Get creative with recipes | 10. Snack smartly | 11. Learn to cook new recipes | 12. Homemade desserts
1. Educate and explain
Educating your family about the purpose of the keto diet helps build a solid foundation for healthy eating.
By communicating openly and honestly, you’ll be able to encourage your family members to adopt healthier eating habits. By explaining the principles of the keto diet in simple terms, such as the shift from carbs to healthy fats as a primary energy source, you can simplify the process and provide a rationale behind the changes in their meals.
Getting family members involved from the start helps create a collective challenge, which will enhance the experience for the whole family. When everyone is on the same page, the keto transition becomes a collaborative effort, rather than something that is being imposed. By educating your family about the potential health benefits, such as improved energy levels, mental clarity, and weight management, you can motivate your family members to adopt keto.
2. Family meal planning
As mentioned earlier, meal planning can be a real challenge with everyone’s diverse preferences and requirements.
By involving the family in meal planning, you can share the burden and get input from everyone. You’ll also be able to collectively decide on meals that work for everyone, compromising where necessary.
As an additional tip, why not create a weekly meal plan that includes keto-friendly options and meals that can be adjusted to suit individual preferences? This way you can get all the discussion out of the way before the week starts and save valuable time during the week.
What’s important to consider is that some family members may have slightly different requirements. You can help cater to these needs by focussing on a main dish, as well as having separate sides that suit each individual’s needs.
3. Have some quick go-to meals
If we’re honest, sometimes planning meals falls to the bottom of the list of priorities. Before you know it, it’s meal time and you’ve got nothing planned. Equally, some people really don’t enjoy super organised meal planning and would prefer to do things more spontaneously. Regardless of which camp you fall into, it’s great to have some quick go-to meals up your sleeve.
These should be meals that are nutritious, healthy and tasty.
However, in order for them to be both keto and quick, they need to be simple. Using as few ingredients as possible will help greatly, and will also save you lots of time in food preparation. A good example is chicken thighs and mushroom stir fry. Packed with fats and protein, low in carbs and rich in essential vitamins and minerals.
4. Use a meal planning app
Sometimes embracing technology can save you a lot hassle, giving you more time for the things that really matter. This is increasingly important nowadays, where work days are long and prioritising family time has become more of a challenge.
Meal planning apps allow you to enter your requirements and, using their algorithms, develop a custom weekly meal plan. This is a great option if you don’t want to think about meal planning at all, and would rather devote your energy elsewhere.
Some examples of meal planning apps include;
5. Use a meal prep company
Now this one is not for everyone, but we can’t argue with the convenience.
Using meal-prep companies takes all the hassle out of planning and preparing meals.
Companies like Hello Fresh have become incredibly popular for exactly that reason, with particular popularity in large urban areas.
If you’re a busy professional, you’ll greatly appreciate the convenience that comes from a meal-prep company. By entering your specific requirements, they can create a customised meal plan and deliver the raw ingredients to you on a daily or weekly basis. All that’s left is for you to follow the enclosed instructions and enjoy their delicious meals.
Taking this one step further, there are meal-prep companies that provide customised cooked meals. This is even more of a time saver but more likely to hurt your wallet. Both of the options mentioned here are much more expensive than preparing your own meals. While ‘expensive’ is relative, we’d still recommend only using this on occasion.
While you’ll benefit from the convenience, you’ll end up paying a premium and could miss out on the bonding activity of prepping meals together as a family. A great option to have however, especially during particularly busy periods.
>>Check out our guide of the best keto meal delivery companies in the UK
6. Have some frozen keto-meals ready
Let’s say you follow all these tips but you still find yourself in a bit of a pickle. You’re home after work, everyone is hungry and you’ve been so busy that the shopping has been neglected. I’m sure all of us have found ourselves in this situation at some point and the go-to option is normally ordering a takeaway.
However, as I’m sure you’ve found, most takeaways don’t have keto-friendly options. However, don’t despair!
A better back-up is to have some keto-friendly meals frozen and ready to be heated.
When you have the time to cook meals, it’s a good idea to sometimes cook a little extra. This can be frozen away as a backup when you’re out of options.
While we’d always encourage you to eat freshly prepared food where possible, we appreciate that life sometime gets in the way. In these situations, having a few go-to frozen meals can be a lifesaver!
7. Involve the whole family
Involving the whole family in cooking can be a great way to bond and relieve some of the pressure for you to do it all.
When time is limited, having everyone pitch in can greatly relieve the pressure on one person to prepare all the meals. This division of labour can help things move more quickly, saving you valuable time. When everyone is back from a long day, the quicker everything is prepared the better!
Getting children involved in the process is also highly recommended. This helps to instil great habits, and teaches children really valuable lessons and life skills. Teaching kids to cook and make healthy food choices is a great way for them to develop lifelong good habits. This will help ensure they prioritise their health and wellness, and stay away from processed pre-made meals.
8. Have a keto-friendly kitchen
Creating a keto-friendly kitchen is an important step in making the diet work seamlessly for the entire family.
Your kitchen is an extension of youself and the decisions you make will greatly influence the progress of your diet. By filling your pantry and refrigerator with keto essentials, you create an environment where making nutritious decisions becomes much easier.
Having a well-stocked keto-friendly kitchen streamlines meal preparation and minimises the temptation of reaching for non-keto options. Essentials like avocados, lean proteins, healthy fats, and an array of low-carb vegetables should be included in your meals. This setup simplifies the process of crafting balanced meals that cater to everyone’s dietary needs.
On the flip side, you also need to consider what you shouldn’t have in your kitchen. Junk foods like ice cream, cookies and cakes should be removed from the kitchen altogether. This reduces the temptation and makes it easier to stick to your diet. There will be times where you have some cravings for unhealthy foods. So eliminating them from your kitchen will make it easier to deal with the cravings as they arise.
9. Get creative with recipes
Getting tired of the same foods is a real challenge of keto for the family (even if you were doing keto alone!).
A great way to overcome this monotony is to get creative and start experimenting with new recipes.
Adding new sauces and spices can go a long way to adding some variety to your diet. If you want to change it up even more, try adding different combinations of vegetables or trying new meat options. Something that can easily be overlooked is the number of different keto meat options. This means you don’t just have to stick to beef and chicken!
>>Check out our article on food choices on the keto diet, for a full list of food options.
If you’re trying to get your family onto the keto diet (or at least support you by occasionally eating a keto meal together), you’ll have to address the missing carb-heavy favourites, e.g. pizza and pasta. By experimenting with alternatives, for example zucchini noodles (we call these courgettes in the UK), you can still feed your family some of their favourites while sticking to your diet.
10. Snack smartly
If you feel like you need a little something to hold you over till your next real meal, a healthy keto-friendly snack can work wonders.
While we’re not big fans of snacking, many other people swear by it.
Of course, you’ll want to try and substitute any unhealthy snacks that your family was previously used to. You can incorporate healthy vegetables such as carrots, cucumbers and celery, which can be a great snack when combined with hummus or salsa. Other great snack options include a variety of seeds and nuts, such as almonds and walnuts.
While snacking can be incorporated into your family’s diet, it’s important to avoid snacking out of boredom or habit. Even healthy snacks, such as nuts, contain calories. Overindulging can therefore lead to weight gain and can be detrimental to your overall health goals. Practice mindful eating and moderation and you’ll do just fine.
11. Learn to cook new recipes
Following the keto diet and involving your family can be a great excuse to improve your culinary skills.
In today’s world, most people lack good cooking skills, in spite of how valuable they are. If you and your family embrace this as an opportunity to improve your skills, all of you will be reaping the benefits for years to come.
Learning new skills is great for your overall development, especially one as essential as cooking. This can help to keep your meals interesting and keep you motivated on your keto journey. While sticking to similar meals may help with consistency, it limits the vast variety of foods you can experiment with. By embracing the opportunity and learning to cook new dishes, you’ll be able to add variety and new flavours to your diet. Ultimately, this can help you stick to your diet over the long-term.
12. Homemade desserts
If your family are used to eating desserts after dinner, it can be quite the adjustment to give these up. The good news is that you don’t have to completely stop them!
With a little creativity, you can make keto-friendly desserts that give you that hit of sweetness, without the extra carbs.
Homemade keto-friendly desserts are a great option to reward yourself and your family for adhering to the keto diet. By substituting sugar with natural sweeteners like stevia, you’re able to get your ‘sugar’ fix, without damaging your keto progress.
>>Check out our article on natural sweeteners to learn more about them!
Final thoughts
As we’ve outlined, there are many challenges to meal prep for the family, particularly when factoring your keto diet into the mix. What’s important to remember is that while it’s natural to want to encourage your family to join you in following keto, not everyone has to follow the exact same eating pattern.
By being flexible and adapting to the eating preferences and requirements of different family members, you’ll be able to keep making progress in your diet, while satisfying your family.
By involving your family in the meal preparation and cooking, you encourage them to support you on your keto journey. This may even convince some of them to adopt the keto diet and benefit from all the diet has to offer. Even if your family choose not to fully partake in keto, you can still include them, and help them establish good habits and valuable cooking skills for later life.
