Birgitta Höglund Photo Gunno Rask
Welcome to Sweden and my LCHF Blog
Hi! I’m Birgitta Höglund and I’m a retired restaurant chef living in Östersund, Jämtland, Sweden. It’s a mountainous county in the northern part of Sweden, close to the border with Norway. After eighteen years in many different restaurants I injured my back 15 years ago, which effectively ended my career and professional working life. After the back injury and a spinal fusion, I was also diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
I searched for something that would alleviate my problems and improve my health. I tried to remain as active as possible with daily physical therapy and long walks, but then a lecture by the physician Annika Dahlqvist, MD, made me change my eating habits completely (Dr Dahlqvist is the founder of the LCHF movement in Sweden). After a couple of years on this diet she was free from pain and fatigue brought on by fibromyalgia, and if she was able to cure herself, then perhaps I could too.
15 years ago
The day after the lecture I decided to exclude all unnecessary carbohydrates (such as sugar, starches, gluten-containing flours and all other grains) from my daily meals. Instead, I began eating far more vegetables than I had ever done before, and they have proven themselves worthy complements to the varieties of fish, meat, shellfish and eggs that I now put on my plate.
Instead of the carbohydrates I started to eat more fat, such as butter, coconut oil and olive oil. My food has become so much more natural and varied than it used to be, and tastes far better without all the various additives that are included in most commercially prepared foods.
I have now posted about 1,000 recipes on my Swedish blogs, Birgitta Höglund’s Food and Birgitta Höglund’s Paleo. I have so far written three cookbooks. The first one, Low Carb High Fat Cooking for Healthy Aging, I wrote together with Dr. Dahlqvist.
Then followed Low Carb High Fat Barbecue and Low Carb High Fat and Paleo Slow Cooking. This summer all three will be published in English with Skyhorse Publishing, NY. You can find them here at Amazon.
I also want to give my warm thanks to Gun Penhoat, Inger Swanberg and Maud Hedman all of whom have been very helpful with the translation and proofreading of my recipes.
Learn more about LCHF here: DietDoctor – LCHF for Beginners.
I hope you will enjoy my recipes and pictures. Eat, enjoy and feel good 🙂
Mountains in my home county, Jämtland
Hi Birgitta…i saw just now your post on one of fb groups i follow…i am happy to find someone here in europe full of recipes lchf… sometimes i go to the market and dont know what to eat cause i reconize only vegetables i had also in brazil.
now i’ll go through your blogs to be able to discover new flavors and have a nice lchf life
Ps: i am a brazilian living in belgium!!!!
Best regards!
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Hi, Paula, glad to see you here ❤
I live in Turkey in the winter time so I use a lot of fresh vegetables in my LCHF-cooking.
Hope you will find a lot that you like 🙂
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Hi Brigitta, looking forward to lots of tips and tricks and great recipes 🙂
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Nice to see you here, Lore 🙂
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Wow, you live surrounded in beauty. I keep saying I am going to start this way of eating and do a lot of the fat eating etc. but just cannot get my husband to conform, he was brought up having rice and potato on the same plate at the same time. He did say the other day though we must find new recipes but he was very upset with me because I did not buy anymore rice for the pantry. He loves his butter, kidney, cannelloni and baked beans too and insists on buying tins of them for the pantry. I must give my sister your page etc. as she has fibromyalgia too, she is 60, hubby 55 and I am 49. I wish I could change his way of eating, any ideas?
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Thank’s, Debbie , and welcome to my blog. I hope your husband will like my kind of cooking too 🙂
If he likes to take care of the griling, maybe you could buy him a copy of my Low Carb High Fat Barbecue?
Then I think it’s easier for him to stay away from the rice and potatoes 😉
Vegetables are great companions instead of potatoes and with a satiating sauce or herb butter, I think the change will be easier for him.
Glad if I can make a change for you both and your sister ❤
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Birgitta, nice to have a different view from another country. I am South African and have been on LCHF for 14 months and very happy with the results so far.I feel for Debbie…our men do love their starches! Keep giving us your delicious recipes. More and more people here are giving LCHF & Banting a try.
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Welcome to my blog, Elizabeth 🙂 So good to hear that you like my recipes, I hope they will change a lot of peoples life around the world. And that they can convince many men that food without starches tastes so much better 😉
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Just stumbled upon your blog as I begin my own low-carb journey. Excited about all the recipes on here! Thank you for sharing. 🙂
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Welcome to my blog. Thank’s and good luck with your journey 🙂
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[…] to try some more great LCHF recipes? We’re going to share a number of them from Swedish chef Birgitta Höglund’s cookbooks, recently released in the US. Birgitta also runs a popular low-carb/paleo recipe blog […]
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[…] is not just about eating meat or butter. Here’s another great LCHF recipe from Swedish chef Birgitta Höglund. She also runs a popular low-carb/Paleo recipe blog with more delicious […]
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Hi Brigitta, i am from the Netherlands. Love your blog.. Love your contry. Been there this summer aigain. I am always woundering how you folks beat the dark winter…. Now I know, you cheat!
I love your recipes. Thank you.
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Haha, you got me 😉 Glad you like my blog and my country, Martje ❤
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[…] another LCHF recipe, a wholesome, warming dairy-free soup from Swedish chef Birgitta Höglund. She also runs a popular low-carb/Paleo recipe blog with more delicious […]
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Downloaded your book to Kindle yesterday. Your recipes already made me homesick . I live in Florida and anticipate a problem acquiring some of the ingredients. I was born I Malmo and graduated Realen I Skovde. Can’t wait to try some of your recipes.
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Thanks, glad to hear that you liked my cookbook ❤
Check out the Scandinavian webshops, they have a lot of ingridients that may be hard to find in Florida.
Here's one site:
http://www.scandinavianfoodstore.com/
Good luck with the recipes 🙂
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Hello Birgitta. I have just found your blog through diet doctor and am glad to have access to even more lchf recipes and suggestions but even more excited to hear you were able to make yourself better through this way of eating. I have had fibromyalgia for most of my 63 years and I now have a very degenerated spine. I want to feel a lot better than I do right now. I did 9 weeks of lchf and really enjoyed it and found it very delicious, filling and easy to prepare but around new year I fell back into my sugar addiction when life became very busy and I was suffering quite a bit of distress. I’m trying to get that under control now and feel ready to change my life again for the better. I look forward to following your blog along with all the information on diet doctor.
I am fortunate to live in the southern corner of Western Australia and we have an abundance of pasture raised meats, fresh fish and fresh produce at our farmers markets. I grow all my own greens and herbs and have access to locally grown macadamia nuts, almonds and free range eggs. Who wouldn’t want to eat this way?
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Hi Jennifer and Welcome to Sweden.
Glad to hear that you like my blog.
Hope you will be able to start with LCHF again, sugar, starches and gluten are so bad when you suffer from Fibromyalgia.
Try to eat more real food, than it’s easier to get rid of the sugar cravings.
I don’t post on this blog anymore, but you can translate my Swedish recipes on Birgitta Höglunds Food, via The Google Translate.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fbirgittahoglundsmat.wordpress.com%2F&edit-text=&act=url
My cookbooks are also available in English, you can find them here: https://www.amazon.com/Birgitta-Höglund/e/B00MY0EY06/
Good luck, hope you’ll stay in touch 🙂
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Thank you for replying to me. I’m sorry you no longer post here. This is the first time I’ve tried to follow someone’s blog. I probably won’t try to use the translation site but thank you. I will look at your books tho. I hope you continue to be well. Thank you for inspiring me to get back on track. Best wishes.
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Oh, sorry about that, but you see it’s too hard work for me to run both a Swedish and English blog…
You can get a lot of recipe inspiration and advice about a healthy living through my cookbooks.
Best wishes ❤ Birgitta
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Birgitta, hello! I am with the DietDoctor, and got your recipe for Oxtail Stifalo off there, and cooked it. it is really lovely, but I am questioning the amount of butter that is required, and also the fact that it is 17g of carbs. Is that really the case? The recipe says cooking with oil, and then where does all this butter go. Even when I made it with far less butter, it was swimming in oil, and then not knowing what to do with that oil when there isn’t any veg or whatever to mop it up. Would appreciate if you could check your recipe on Diet Doctor, and see if it has been typed up correctly? I love oxtail, and that’s the only recipe on there for oxtail but even on a high fat diet, the amount of butter required seems excessive and not sure where to put it is another. Many thanks and really look forward to hearing from you.
Una
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Hi Una and welcome to my blog. Unfortunately there has been 2 mistakes in the recipe at Diet Doctor. The Oxtail Stifado is from my cookbook Low Carb High Fat and Paleo Slow Cooking.
In the ingredient list it only says; Butter for frying, no amount. Oil isn’t mentioned at all in the recipe. I will ask my friend Inger that takes care of all the translation at Diet Doctor to change the recipe,
Here you can find the cookbook at Amazon. Would be glad if you share my page there with your friends 🙂
All the best./ Birgitta
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Thanks Birgitta. Terrific. Will look properly tomorrow as I’m in London about to get a long distance train back home north. Need to.change that DietDoctor recipes in many ways!
Una
x
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Thanks to you. And for qustions about the carbs you have to talk to the Diet Doctor team. Have a nice trip home 🙂
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Just to say I have prderd your book off Amazon!!
Una!
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Thanks Una, hope you will enjoy it 💕
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[…] research is needed to confirm the blood sugar – fibromyalgia connection, but we think that those who advocate for low carbohydrate and paleo diets as a means to handle the disease might feel vindicated today, as they now have some evidence to […]
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