When I was first doing keto (my most recent update here), I didn’t mess around much with sugar substitutes. I was nervous about it: some people said certain artificial sweeteners didn’t count as grams of carbohydrates even if grams were listed on the package, and other people said yes they DID count and/or that some counted as grams even though ZERO grams were listed on the package, and a lot of people rolled their eyes and said “Just see how it affects your blood sugar!!” as if that is something the standard person can Just See. Also, there are big debates about whether eating sugar substitutes makes it harder to adjust to not eating sugar, and/or whether your body might “think” you’re eating sugar, and so on. It seemed too difficult and confusing, so I avoided it.

Now that I’m more accustomed to keto in general, and now that I’m maintaining instead of trying to lose weight, I mess around a LOT with things containing sugar substitutes. Here are my favorites:

 

1. Rebel Butter Pecan ice cream. Hands down the absolute best keto treat I have tried. I am waiting to find out it’s a scam or mislabeled or something. Five grams of net carbohydrates in the entire pint; that’s about the same as in two tablespoons of peanut butter. Of the first three ingredients, one is cream and another is pecans, and that is how it tastes. It’s so good. And butter pecan is not normally a flavor I’d reach for, so it’s a little mystifying.

 

2. Rebel Strawberry ice cream. Honestly how do they do it. I don’t know if I would be so amazed by it if I hadn’t gotten so accustomed to “treats” such as raw pecans/almonds (very mildly sweet!), but I DID get used to it, and so now I am a-swoon. The strawberry ice cream has perceptible strawberry matter in it, distributed very finely so you get a little bit in every bite.

There are a ton of other flavors; our store went from carrying two flavors to carrying four to carrying eight, so I think it must be selling well, and I’m hoping to try all the flavors eventually. I like the chocolate and vanilla flavors just fine, though I tend to eat them only when we’re out of butter pecan and strawberry. I thought the mint chocolate chip tasted bitter and not very minty, but that didn’t stop me from finishing it. The cookie dough flavor was weird and powdery/gritty and didn’t taste like cookie dough; I didn’t finish it. I need to give the peanut butter fudge another try: I attempted it when I was expecting too much of low-carbohydrate desserts. I haven’t tried any of the others yet.

 

3. Built Bars. I bought the sampler box on my sister-in-law’s vigorous recommendation, and at first I thought they were pretty okay but kind of weird and too expensive, and that they’d been fun to try but that I wouldn’t be reordering; by the time I finished my sample box, I’d ordered two more boxes (free shipping, discount on more than one box, free two-bar sample with each box, free six-bar sample with two-box order) (still pretty expensive, I warn you). A whole bar is five or six grams of net carbohydrates; I generally eat half a bar, because they’re expensive but mostly because I’ve noticed after half a bar I’m not enjoying it as much. I like all of the flavors except banana and coconut: I usually love coconut, but these taste to me the way coconut-scented car air-fresheners smell. And I won’t even try the banana.

The texture is hard to describe, and took some getting used to. The site says “light and fluffy” and that is not AT ALL how I’d describe them. I’d say “chewy” or…I’m not sure. Like an extra-soft Starburst or something? When I saw “whey protein isolate” high on the ingredients list, that made sense to me. It reminds me of the ingredients you can use to thicken a sauce (flour/water, cornstarch, etc.), and if that doesn’t send you running out to buy some, I don’t know what will! But they have grown on me to such an extent that, when recently I realized I was unexpectedly running low on them, I felt a little panicky.

 

4. Lily’s Dark Chocolate baking chips. When I’m craving something sweet AND I’m kind of hungry, I mix a few tablespoons of these with pecans or peanuts to stretch out the eating-chocolate experience and make it more filling.

 

5. Lily’s chocolate bars. I especially like the Dark Chocolate Almond, but the little crunchy bits of almond make it harder for me to stop eating it, so I usually get the regular dark chocolate. It feels exactly like eating chocolate, except I like it less because I generally like milk chocolate way better than dark, but I don’t like the Lily’s milk chocolate as much as the dark.

 

6. Quest bars, but really only the chocolate chip cookie dough flavor. I like a lot of the others just fine (brownie, maple waffle, mint chocolate chunk, white chocolate raspberry), but if I have the chocolate chip cookie dough kind on hand, that is ALWAYS the one I want. It’s dense and grainy in a way I first found disappointing and now enjoy. I most commonly use these as a easy portable meal replacement, like if I’m going to be away from home with Edward all day and don’t want to worry about what I’m going to eat. I’ll bring some cheese sticks, some almonds, and a Quest bar.

I find the Quest Hero bars (chocolate caramel pecan in particular) to be suspiciously good. Like, I keep checking the label to make sure it’s okay. But for some reason I get a slightly averse feeling when I think about eating them, as if my body would prefer I didn’t.

 

7. Quest cookies. Similarly to the Built Bars, these satisfy a very particular type of craving. Sometimes I just want a COOKIE. These do not taste particularly great, and they’re very dry and crumbly and a little bitter, but something about the texture makes me feel as if I’ve had a cookie, in a way that no other keto food does. I like all the flavors about the same. I usually eat half a cookie.

 

8. Sugarless Jell-o. Sometimes you just want to eat an entire bowl of something sweet. I like the lime, raspberry, orange, and lemon flavors the best. I’ve tried whipping heavy cream to put on top, and that’s VERY GOOD; you can add some artificial sweeteners to the cream. But it’s generally more trouble than seems worth it, so usually I just eat the Jell-o on its own.