Today I would like to share one of my favorite low carb recipes with you. Let’s make some low carb filled zucchini – perfect for your fitness diet!
This is super easy and fast to make, doesn’t have a lot of calories and is perfect if you are on a low carb diet. I was even eating this while I was on my ketogenic diet. It will provide you with clean protein and good fiber through the zucchini.
I like to fill zucchinis but you can also use sweet potatoes, pumpkin, peppers or whatever veggie comes to your mind. Lately I have been seeing those awesome round zucchinis. They look so cute and are the perfect size.
What I also like about this recipe is that you really don’t need a lot of ingredients or time to make it. You literally just throw everything together in a bowl and fill the zucchinis with it.
In this blog post I want to share some of my favorite food blogging tips with you! I brought a very specific example with me today. I will show you my food blogging tips while preparing coconut bowls with you!
Food blogging is an art for itself.
Don’t you think that most dishes look extremely hard to make? Looks like we spent hours doing it?
I will explain some simple steps by showing you how to make pastel coconuts. Anything with yoghurt is usually a good choice for a great foodpic. It stays in place and doesn’t start melting like if you were for example taking pictures of nice cream.
The simplest thing is to give the white yoghurt some color. You can do different shades of one color or in our case have an array of pastel colors. If you look at the picture on your left even the simple colored yoghurts already look like art for themselves. Don’t they?
Tip #1: yoghurt always works
Tip #2: add some color
Once you have your basics go and find a good place to take the pictures. Once you have got the dish ready you won’t have that much time to start preparing your setting or find the right light. So before you start giving your dish the final touches explore your apartment to find the perfect picture lighting spot. Make sure to take pictures with natural light, using flash for food pics is a deadly sin 😉
Tip # 3: prepare the setting before you finish your dish
Tip #4: shoot with natural light, no flash
Another simple trick that I love to use is pouring the yoghurt, chia seed pudding or nice cream into tropical fruits. Coconuts work extremely well, as they usually give great contrasts to your pictures. But you can also use pitayas, pineapples or melons. All of these will be a true eye-catcher.
If you work with nice cream, make sure to freeze the coconuts or any other fruit you will use as your bowl before so your ice cream won’t melt that quickly when you are trying to take the perfect picture.
Tip #5: Use tropical fruits as bowls
Tip #6: freeze before filling
Now we come to the most important part: the decoration. What always works wonderfully is to freeze berries. Once the thaw a bit they will have a beautiful silver shimmer. Make sure to spend a lt of time on the decoration. This can make or break your dish. This can turn your plain boring yoghurt into a piece of art. So get creative and have an eye for details.
Tip # 7: freeze berries for decoration
Tip #8: get creative and have an eye for detail – personally I think a great decoration is the most important thing!
So now you know some of the basic super important food blogging tips and tricks. Please let me know if you want me to write more blogposts on this topic. Is there anything you would like to know in specific? Let me know in the comments!
We all see them on Instagram – the famous unicorn super smoothie bowls. It always looks like a magical creation sent from a different galaxy for you to enjoy.
Today I want to show you with this very simple blogpost how easy it is to make a unicorn bowl all by yourself. There are only a couple of simple tricks you need to know in order to make a beautiful creation and impress all your friends with it.
What I love about nice cream is that it is really so super easy to make. It takes about ten minutes and you have a delicious low fat snack. Working with frozen stuff however is also a great challenge – at least for me – as ice cream simply will start melting and you need to be fast before everything runs away.
But a little practice and soon enough you will be making the most magical bowls yourself.
So lets jump right into the recipe 🙂
This is what you will need:
3 frozen bananas
100ml any kind of milk
4g of blue spirulina powder
4g of pink pitaya powder
And that is literally it. If you want you can add an extra scoop of protein, coconut flakes or a teaspoon of almond butter. There are many ways you can pimp the basic recipes.
There is only one thing you need to prepare before you can start making the recipe. You will need to cut the bananas into slices and freeze them overnight. Also, you will need four bowls. Make sure to also put them into the freezer so they will be cold once you start working with the nice cream.
Now pour the milk into the blender and add a couple of banana slices. Start mixing and keep adding more frozen bananas. You might have troubles mixing it at first. Stop the blender, use a spoon to mix up the frozen blend and start mixing again until you get a very smooth consistency.
And that is literally it. If you want you can add an extra scoop of protein, coconut flakes or a teaspoon of almond butter. There are many ways you can pimp the basic recipes. There is only one thing you need to prepare before you can start making the recipe. You will need to cut the bananas into slices and freeze them overnight. Also, you will need four bowls.
Make sure to also put them into the freezer so they will be cold once you start working with the nice cream. Now pour the milk into the blender and add a couple of banana slices. Start mixing and keep adding more frozen bananas.
You might have troubles mixing it at first. Stop the blender, use a spoon to mix up the frozen blend and start mixing again until you get a very smooth consistency.
Take out the cold bowls from the freezer. Divide the nice cream into three different bowls.
Now its time to add the color. Put a teaspoon of pink pitaya powder into the first bowl and mix it well until you get a beautiful pink color.
Add the blue color to the second bowl and again stir well. Take the third bowl and add a bit of the blue and a bit of the pink powder until you will get a nice purple color.
Now you need the fourth bowl. Divide the bowl mentally up into thirds and pour in the different colors from different sides. Take a spoon and slowly swirl the colors together.
Almost done! The final step is decorating your bowl. You can use bananas, strawberries, blueberries, granola, coconut flakes, sprinkles, macarons and what ever else you can think of!
Now quickly take a pic – it melts fast. and enjoy your beautiful bowl.
If you try this recipe please send me a picture of your bowl. I would love to see your wonderful creation.
Since I am currently on a keto diet, which is a very extreme form of a low carb diet, I wanted to share one of my favorite sweet recipes with you. When you are on keto it is seems to be quite hard to still satisfy your sweet tooth, however, with these delicious low carb keto bounty bars you won’t even miss the real sugar! <3
My take on a keto diet
Being on a low carb diet can be quite tricky. Especially when you are trying to eat something sweet. On a ketogenic diet especially you have to cut out most of your carbs and replace them with fats. These tasty keto bounty bars will provide you with a good amount of healthy fats from the coconut. Your nutrition intake should be somewhere between eating 60-70% fat each day. Research says proteins should take up 25% and carbs only 5%.
The longest I have been on a keto diet was for 5 weeks. It has helped me tremendously to fix a bacterial problem I had in my stomach as the bacteria was survived by eating carb. Once I cut out all the carbs I was able to starve the harmful bacteria and was fine again. So a keto diet can actually have great health benefits. I would not suggest this diet to be your general way of eating though. I find it to extreme and at some point I believe your body will be missing valuable nutrients you get from eating fresh fruit for example.
How to make keto bounty bars
So, this is another really easy recipe. As you know my recipes usually don’t take longer than 15 minutes and this also a really quick one – no cooking skills required!
First you start out by making the filling. Simply put all ingredients together and mix well until you get a crumbly mixture. It should be moist and stick together. Shape the filling into little bar shapes and place them on a baking sheet. Let them harden in the fridge for 2 hours. They should be really cold when you take them out! You can even put the keto bounty bars in the freezer for a bit so they will harden faster.
The next step is to make the chocolate coating. The darker your chocolate is the less carbs you will have. Of course a 99% dark chocolate also tastes bitter. I usually shoot somewhere between 75 and 80%.
Melt the chocolate in a medium heat proof bowl. I usually do it in the microwave because it is faster, but if you want to do it the proper way then melt it over the steam of boiling water or at 45 degrees in the oven. I like to add a bit of coconut oil to my coating so it is easier to distribute over the keto bounty bars and also hardens better after.
Take out the cold bars from the fridge or freezer and dip them into the chocolate. Let the superfluous chocolate drip off the bars and gently place them on the baking sheet again. If you want you can sprinkle them with coconut flakes now. Best you let them cool in the fridge again for another hour.
You see how easy this recipe is. Done are your easy keto bounty bars. 🙂 I hope you will try this low carb recipe soon!
Below I have summarized the recipe in a printable version for you:
Put the coconut flakes into the over at 180 degrees for about 7 minutes until they turn golden.
Put them into a bowl and stir liquid coconut oil, Philadelphia cream cheese, whey protein and the Flavdrops in. Now form little bars and put them on a baking sheet.
Put them into the fridge for half an hour.
Melt the chocolate with the extra coconut oil. Pour chocolate over the bars and sprinkle with more coconut flakes. Now cool them again in the fridge.
Notes
Nutrition values for 1 bar: 120kcal, 35g fat, 2g carbs, 15g protein
carinaberry.com https://carinaberry.com/
I hope you enjoyed this easy recipe. You can store them in the fridge for like a week and always have a low carb snack at hand! Check out my super clean protein Rafaello snack recipe too. I am sure you would love it!
And did you know I am also on YouTube? I am sharing tons of helpful food blogger advice there and show you some of my favorite recipes as well!
Have you ever calculated your Instagram engagement rate? It is a very important number that shows you how active your audience is! The easiest form of engagement is a like, followed by a comment.
Engagement rates
Engagement varies as your account grows, but generally you can say that anything between 2-4% is acceptable engagement. Anything above 5% is excellent. I noticed that accounts under 10k usually have a much higher engagement somewhere around 8%. I also know many micro-influencers who have less than 10k but 10-20% engagement and are often getting more likes than accounts with 50k!
This is a weird phenomenon I still haven’t quite figured out yet. It seems like the more follower you have the less engagement you get. Some accounts with millions of followers only get 1-2% engagement.
Crazy right?!
I did some research and found some interesting insights from the influencer marketing platform Markerly who reported that accounts with less than one thousand followers have a like rate of about 8 percent.
This drops increasingly as influencers become more popular. Between 1.000 and 10.000 followers the influencer can record a like rate of about 4%. The like rate keeps decreasing within the range of 10.000 to 100.000 followers to only 2,4%. Once reaching the 1 million followers mark the rate drops to 1.7%. According to Markerly the rates for comments follow a similar pattern.
I wanted to show you the graphic here where you can see the decrease of likes and comments compared to increasing followers.
I also found a super interesting fact in a book called „influencer marketing“ where the authors established a 90-9-1 rule regarding user engagement. They looked at social communities and found out that 90% of all followers are people who view information but never or rarely take part in the conversation. The next 9% of followers contribute a little and the final 1% are those that create almost all the engagement and conversations.
I have to say this something I totally notice on my own account as well. I always have those couple super engaged followers who comment and like every single one of my posts, then I have a couple who occasionally will write a comment and then a big amount of people who just look at the content, but won’t take any action.
So now finally how do you actually calculate Instagram engagement rate?
You can calculate your engagement rate by dividing the number of likes you get by the number of followers times 100. (E.g.: 1.500likes : 34.000followers x 100 = 4.4%)
Make it your little assignment today to calculate that number, it is a very interesting info into your accounts health 🙂
If you don’t want to calculate the engagement rate yourself I have a great tip for you. There is a free tool called Kicksta that will calculate the engagement rate for you.
I hope this article was helpful and I simply wanted to show you that you don’t have to start getting worried if you notice a decrease in engagement once your account starts growing. Even the statistics show that it is a normal thing that happens. Check out my other Instagram growth blog post for more info:
Yet again Instagram has changed its algorithm at the beginning of this year and staying on top of the loop is harder than ever.
It becomes continually more difficult for content creators that their followers actually see their posts. Right now it can happen that only 10% of your followers actually see your posts. Myself and a lot of my blogger friends have seen a huge decrease in likes over the past weeks.
However, with this blogpost I wanted to summarize some important changes for you so your photos wont get buried and unseen. You can increase your exposure by using these useful insights. I have done a lot of research on this in the past weeks and I hope this will be helpful for you. 🙂
Hashtags
So this is how hashtags generally work: The more likes you have on your pictures, the bigger hashtags you will be ranked in.
Hashtag Size: Before you were allowed to use up to 30 hashtags per post. Pull away from using the maximum number of hashtags. Now it is recommended to only use 5 hashtags, because otherwise Instagram will see you as a spammer if you max the hashtags all the time. Other people say it is still okay to use between 25-27 hashtags, but I would not recommend that. Less hashtags will be getting more engagement. So, use hashtags that are specific for your niche and have less than 1 million posts within their own hashtag!
Hashtag Use: Also, don’t use the same hashtags over and over for each post. Instagram will notice that as well. So, it is important to find new unique hashtags each time.
Hashtag Location: Another important thing: Don’t put the hashtags in the comments. From now on Instagram won’t show hashtags in the comments in the search results. Therefore, the hashtags go into the caption.
Caption
This brings me to my next point which is your Instagram photo caption.
Here we have an update as well.
Changes to the caption: Prepare your caption really well because once you have posted it no changes should be made. Don’t repost or change anything once you post. The more you try to tweak your caption once it is uploaded it, the more your visibility will drop. So, post your photo with your description and your five hashtags and then just leave it.
To summarize this review your caption well before you post and don’t change anything within the first 24 hours.
Comments
There have also been updates on how Instagram notices comment interaction.
Timeline:When you post a photo you will need to respond to the comments within 60 minutes or your posts visibility will gradually decrease. So, you have to be actively engaged as a real person. The more comments you will get in a short amount of time will make Instagram think that your post is worth sharing to all of your audience.
These are the most important changes I wanted to share with you. If you want access to all algorithm changes and learn how to new update affects your stories, comment groups, follow strategies, comment lengths and story hashtags you can check out my new online course here.
Disclaimer: The information provided here has been gathered through miscellaneous sources and my own experiences on the platform. Some information may differ slightly. I cannot guarantee the validity to this information, but did my best to cross check my sources thoroughly.
Learn how to work with the algorithm and set up a successful account in our online course.
DID YOU MAKE THIS RECIPE?
Tip #1: yoghurt always works 
Tip #5: Use tropical fruits as bowls
