Keto Cheeseburger Soup Recipe with Bacon

This Keto Cheeseburger Soup is total perfection. With all the cheese, crispy bacon, and classic cheeseburger toppings, you just can’t go wrong. Your family will love it!

keto cheeseburger bacon soup closeup with bowls of topping scattered around

We love a good soup here at CIK and this Keto Cheeseburger Soup is our new favorite. It’s loaded with ground beef, cheese, bacon 🥓, onion, dill pickles, and a few other goodies.

Think of this soup a bit like our Keto Queso Chicken Soup but with burger flavors instead of Mexican. It’s still as cheesy and luscious though all without the need for xanthan gum to thicken. The cheese takes care of that We love this soup!

Also, what’s better than a recipe that’s done in around 30 minutes? It’s the perfect weeknight keto-friendly recipe.

Here is all you need to know about how to make, store, and eat this Keto Cheeseburger Soup!

Ingredients in Keto Cheeseburger Soup

  • 8 slices of bacon
  • 2 tablespoons reserved bacon fat
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 3 cloves of garlic, minced
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 2 lbs ground beef (or chicken broth or veggie broth if that’s what you have)
  • sea salt, 2 teaspoons or to taste
  • 1/4 teaspoon cracked black pepper
  • 8 oz dill pickles, cut into bite-sized pieces (about 4 dill pickle spears)
  • ¼ cup yellow mustard
  • 3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 3 cups beef bone broth
  • 1 (14.5-oz can) diced tomatoes
  • 1 (8-oz can) can tomato sauce
  • 4 ounces heavy whipping cream
  • 2 ounces cream cheese, cut into small blocks
  • 8 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
  • Toppings (ideas below!)

cheeseburger soup in white bowl

How to make Keto Cheeseburger Soup

  1. Place a 5-quart cast-iron Dutch…

Continue reading

How Long Does It Take to Put on Muscle?

You’ve started a serious weightlifting program

You’ve increased your protein consumption.

Now, how long before you start looking jacked?

While the primary goal of weightlifting should be overall health, for many dudes, one of the aims of strength training is to get swole. It’s understandable. Big muscles make you look and feel manly. Nothing wrong with wanting to look and feel a little more virile. 

The problem is, guys often have inflated expectations of how quickly they can pack on muscle mass. Consequently, when they don’t start getting the results they wanted, in the timetable they had imagined, they give up on their strength training program.

It’s therefore important to set reasonable expectations when embarking on a fitness regimen. To help you do that, below we outline how long it’s likely to take to get stronger and put on muscle. 

You’ll Get Stronger From Lifting Weights After a Few Workouts

After starting a weightlifting program, you’ll likely notice that you’re getting stronger, before you notice that you’re getting bigger.

In the beginning of a weightlifting program, any strength gains you see are primarily being driven by improvement in neuromuscular processes and not an increase in muscle mass. When you start to lift heavy weights, your brain learns to recruit more muscle fibers during a lift, allowing you to contract more muscle and enabling you to produce more force. 

This force-enabling improvement in your mind-body connection begins immediately after your first strength training workout. And according to a study out of Japan, you’ll likely see the biggest strength gains from improved neuromuscular activation occur within two months of starting a consistent workout routine. 

Even though neuromuscular improvement will help you get stronger right away, you won’t notice a big difference in your physique right away. In order to…

Continue reading

One MAD, Two MAD, | The poor, misunderstood calorie

Red MAD, Blue MAD.

[Patron link]

OMAD = One Meal A Day. AKA skipping breakfast & lunch then having a huge dinner. Don’t @ me “I break my fast at 6pm!” It’s still called dinner.

It’s a fairly rare practice, although both low carb OMAD & high carb OMAD groups have their respective echo chambers on social media. I said respective, not respectful

Both groups also claim their method makes this type of fasting more tolerable, but I have doubts… in general (not OMAD), studies don’t show systematic differences in adherence/attrition/drop outs on HC vs. LC. But there are anecdotes, and that’s fine.

My only qualms (aside from the logical fallacy thing about how the people who don’t achieve success with a particular diet usually just move on to something else, whereas those who do tend to be very loud about it online)…

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. 16% off for annual subscriptions! It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: [email protected].

Affiliate links: OMAHA. STEAKS. Check here for daily discounts and the best steaks of your life.

Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

20% off some delish stocks and broths from Kettle and Fire HERE

Real Mushrooms makes great extracts. 10%…

Continue reading

Easy Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup Recipe

Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup

This easy Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup has half of the net carbs as the famous Panera version. Made on the stove-top in a cast-iron Dutch oven, this soup is ready in under 30 minutes. We also give instructions on how to make this in an Instant Pot or slow cooker as well as how to freeze, store, and reheat. This low-carb soup can also be made vegan/dairy-free.

Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup in a blue bowl on a wooden cutting board

Who doesn’t love a big bowl of comforting soup? This Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup is exactly that, comforting. It reminds us of the classic steakhouse or cafe version everyone knows and loves. Below we’ll compare our recipe’s net carbs to Panera’s. Who do you think comes out on top??

First, let’s get to the ins and the outs of the recipe!

Ingredients in Keto Broccoli Cheese Soup

  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 small onion, diced (about 200 grams)
  • 2 stalks celery, diced (about 84 grams)
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • ½ teaspoon dry mustard powder
  • 4 cups vegetable broth
  • 1 lb broccoli florets, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 2 cups half and half, or heavy whipping cream
  • 16 ounces shredded sharp cheddar cheese
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt, or more to taste
  • ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or more to taste
  • ¼ teaspoon xanthan gum (optional, to thicken)
  • Extra shredded cheddar, to garnish (optional)

How to make Broccoli Cheese Soup

  1. Heat a 5-quart cast-iron Dutch oven over medium heat. Once hot, add butter along with the onion and celery. Cook for 4-5 minutes until starting to soften. Add in the garlic, cayenne pepper and mustard powder and cook until fragrant, about 30…

Continue reading

You May Be Strong . . . But Are You Tough?

With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2013.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Khaled Allen.

As a little boy, I was scrawny, weak, and prone to illness (much like a certain former president). For a long time, I thought I was just doomed to be pathetic, until my dad took me canoeing. In the mucky, hot, poorly maintained trails and portages of the Boundary Waters in the north woods of Minnesota, I learned that I could be tough, scrappy, and indomitable. I took a brutal pleasure in carrying the heaviest pack I could over long and steep portages, willing my toothpick legs to take one step, then another, then another, until I saw the blue expanse of the next lake peeking through the trees. That was all I had to work with: a willingness to push myself harder than anyone else, to charge headlong into the roughest terrain, and to ignore cold, rain, heat, bugs, and my own internal discomfort.

With the popularity of high-intensity workout programs, military-inspired training, and brutal adventure races, mental toughness is in the spotlight. The gold standard of a hardcore athlete is how much pain they can tolerate. But what about simple, plain old ruggedness? What does it mean to be physically tough, as well as mentally tough? Is it enough to simply be strong, or is there something more to it?

Strong But Weak

I will always remember the day I dropped in on a CrossFit class and went out for the warm-up jog with no shoes on. One of the other guys there, massively strong and…

Continue reading

You Got Lucky, Babe – The Masculinist

The opening lyrics say:

You better watch what you say
You better watch what you do to me
Don’t get carried away
Girl, if you can do better than me, go
Yeah, go but remember

 

Good love is hard to find
Good love is hard to find
You got lucky, babe
You got lucky, babe, when I found you

It’s great to put a high value on your wife or girlfriend and hold her in esteem.

But too many men don’t recognize their own value.

If you are a basic solid guy – a Christian man with a college degree who doesn’t watch porn, has a job, etc. – then you are a hot commodity yourself.

After all, remember how often you hear the complaints about the lack of good men, about how the church is 60% female, about how women are earning 60% of degrees.

In this tough dating and marriage environment, a quality man such as yourself has a high value.

It may well be that you are lucky to be with her. But she also got lucky when you found her.

Petty’s character in this song understands the truth. Good love really is hard to find. So don’t sell yourself short.

This character also understands that women want to date and marry up. Or at least the certainly don’t want to date down. So the by putting a proper high value on is own marketability, he makes himself more attractive as well.

Note too that he describes himself as the active party. He says, “When I found you” not perhaps the more obvious “when you found me.”

Men would be well served to know that they are often a much higher value dating prospect than they might think, and to think of themselves…

Continue reading

Postprandial glucose variability and reward centers of the brain. What now?

IT DID NOT INCREASE HUNGER 

*phew* had to get that off my chest

[Patron link]

A couple new studies making the rounds on social media. Being misinterpreted, or misunderstood, or just lied about. So, just another Tuesday

Tweet thread. Might be more succinct, Idk: https://twitter.com/CaloriesProper/status/1390471095652847617

Diets Varying in Carbohydrate Content Differentially Alter Brain Activity in Homeostatic and Reward Regions in Adults (Ebbeling, Holsen, Ludwig, et al., 2021)

Fancy methodology. In brief: 20-week weight loss diet, either high carb (60%), moderate carb (40%), or low carb (20%). Then during weight maintenance, they were brought in to have blood flow to specific brain regions before and after a meal of their respective diet.

They were focusing on “reward” centers of the brain, to see if any of these regions are hyper-activated by specific macronutrients (ie, carbs). And I’ll admit, the authors did just as much to lead the readers to their desired interpretation as did the people yelling about this study on Twitter.

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. 16% off for annual subscriptions! It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: [email protected].

Affiliate links: OMAHA. STEAKS. Check here for daily discounts and the best steaks of your life.

Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 



Continue reading

Crack Slaw Recipe – Keto & Low-Carb

Keto Crack Slaw Pin

This Crack Slaw Recipe is keto, low-carb, gluten-free, and vegan optional. Made in one pan with just a few simple ingredients, you’ll have a crunchy side on your plate in no time! Our version is a bit different than Keto Egg Roll in a Bowl as this is a side without protein – we do give tips on how to turn this into a main dish though!

crack slaw on a silver tray

We have a Keto Egg Roll in a Bowl recipe on Cast Iron Keto but you guys keep asking for a Keto Crack Slaw. While doing our research, it seems that crack slaw is typically what we call a Keto Egg Roll in a Bowl so we decided to put a spin on this recipe and make it more of a side and less of a main dish.

Don’t worry though, we give tips below on how to bulk this up if you’re in need of protein. Otherwise, this is a great keto friendly side dish that goes with a ton of low carb dinners. Try it with a steak, broiled salmon, or in a bowl-style meal for a full dinner.

What is crack slaw?

That’s the debate isn’t it? Whether you call it Egg Roll in a Bowl or crack slaw, the consensus seems to be that crack slaw is a stir fry type of dish that uses cabbage, protein, and Asian flavors.

People call it “crack slaw” since it can be pretty addicting we guess? Sort of like our keto crack chicken 🤤

  • 2 tablespoons avocado oil (or any other high heat cooking oil but avoid cooking with olive oil at high temperatures)
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, minced (freshly minced as…

Continue reading

Podcast #704: How to Keep Your Edge as You Get Older

It’s a common life trajectory for men: graduate college, get married, get a 9 to 5 job, have some kids, settle down in the suburbs. And somewhere along that way, they start to get a little soft and stagnant. They let themselves go, becoming less active, and more sedentary. They have more material possessions but fewer hobbies and interests. They lose their edge.

My guest has spent his life battling against this loss. In his more than five decades on earth, he’s served in the French navy, trained soldiers in close quarter combat, skydiving, long-range weapon shooting, first aid, and explosives, set a deep water scuba diving record, and studied multiple martial arts, and he currently owns a gym, teaches as a MovNat Master Instructor, and coaches men over forty in how to live better, stronger, and more vibrant lives. His name is Vic Verdier and today on the show he shares his advice on how a man can stay fit and engaged with life as he gets older. We first discuss Vic’s background before getting into why it’s important for men to seek physical achievement and become physical polymaths, and the role strength training, cardio, and working on your balance plays in that pursuit. Vic then shares his advice on keeping the pounds down and your testosterone up as you age, and why he thinks training in combatives is important on both a practical and psychological level. We talk about the importance of maintaining a connection to nature and keeping your possessions minimal, before ending our conversation with why it’s important to stay comfortable with being uncomfortable, and how men can continue to seek adventure and exploration, even when they live in the suburbs. 

If reading this in an email, click the title of the post to listen to the show.

Show…

Continue reading