Feeling deprived vs. bothering to cook

I often hear people talking about how hard it is to stay on lowcarb because they just can't resist the high-carb foods around them.

I understand that the foods are great. What I don't understand is why most people aren't more proactive in dealing with that issue:

My goal is to learn to make so many totally awesome low carb foods, including desserts, that there is never ANY reason for me to feel insanely tempted, to feel like life is unfair, to feel like I am deprived of high carb foods.

There is a growing number of lowcarb ingredients that allow vastly more options than there were three years ago. Not to mention there are a lot of veggies that replace each other really well IF you know how to cook & prepare them correctly to achieve that. You can make a mock apple pie, mock mashed potatoes, lemon curd, chocolates (of a variety of dessert types), all kinds of cookies, cheesecake in a zillion variants, ice cream in every imaginable flavor, pizza, fried rice, breads, waffles, and I grant that a few of these amount to replacement foods, however, they are often so awesome tasing that even high carb people will ask for thirds and eat all your leftovers and often not even know it isn't the original if you don't tell them.

And plenty of things ARE real. Cocoa is not high carb; only sugar is. All hail the god of sucralose liquid (the 'reverse molecule' version of sugar) in sweetzfree, fiberfit, polyD and DaVinci's flavor syrups, as well as splenda and other options that are solids. Cream is not high carbs; only sugar is. Cream cheese is not high carb either. Nor is real peanut butter. The only reason these things tend to be high carb is sugar and flour. Sugar can be replaced (and its bulk with PolyD). Flour can be replaced in 'some' things -- mostly in things that don't need to "rise".

At this point, while it's still sometimes more work or more demanding on creativity, there is such potential in creating low carb foods at home, often from fairly healthy base ingredients, that there isn't a lot of reason for someone to go about feeling deprived. The logical solution to craving anything is to figure out how you can make a lowcarb version of it that tastes great enough to delight you. Presto. You're not deprived.

I might add that when you stay off sugar and carbs long enough, often the things you used to love like crazy in the high-carb world taste different to you. So once you're lowcarb, often something lowcarb will taste better than a regular pie would, as your body doesn't have to react to the sudden massive kick of so much sugar/starch.

Ever in search of the perfect recipe!