Since I've had a lot of people ask, here's what I'm doing in high level bullets, with supporting detail below it:
- Started out watching carbs and researching Keto, trying to eat Keto friendly foods. This is one of the best sites I've found for explaining Keto. Do your research. There's more to it than just eating pork rinds and bacon. Look up Youtube videos from Dr Berg, Dr Ken Berry and Thomas Delauer.
- Went on Lazy Keto, meaning that I don't track macros, which is a fancy way of saying counting calories, but knowing how much of your calories ratio come from carbs, fats and protein. You should still be staying under 20 grams of carbs, so still counting carbs.
- 16:8 fasting, two meals a day, only eating between noon-8pm everyday, skipping breakfast.
- MCT oil in my coffee most days
- Workout 3-4 days a week, mixing in HIIT, running and weight lifting
- Almost no snacking, not even Keto friendly snacks (but I did keto friendly snacks the first couple weeks to get over the hump)
- Once I became fat adapted, I started mixing in 24 hour Intermittent Fasting once a month which is a lot easier than you think it is once you're fat adapted. I've graduated to doing some 48 hour fasts. I only recommend doing IF if you're on Keto for a while, otherwise it'll just be a lot harder than it needs to be.
- I did not stop drinking alcohol, but please beware your tolerance is much lower and keto hangovers are terrible. Ease into drinking on keto and figure out your tolerance. Alcohol is what they call the "first to burn" so essentially it jumps ahead of everything else in priority, meaning that you will halt fat burning until the alcohol is burned off, even if you are drinking keto approved booze (straight liquor, sugarless mixers, dry wine, etc).
- Google Keto flu and ways to avoid it. Try things that may work for you, but everyone is different. This is basically your body detoxing from a lifetime of carb dependency. Carbs make you retain water, when you go on Keto you will start losing water weight immediately. People get excited about this and that's great, but you're not losing fat yet. You will urinate a lot and with that goes a lot of minerals so it's important keep your electrolytes and salt up during this period. The Keto flu is essentially just an electrolyte imbalance which is easily avoidable. Try a concoction of water, fresh squeezed lemon, apple cider vinegar and pink Himalayan sea salt.
What Keto is:
Keto incorporates ancestral eating principles. It only recently became popular, but it's been around about 100 years when speaking in modern terms (our ancestors ate Keto for millions of years out of necessity). Keto came about in the 1920's as doctors discovered that it was very successful treating epileptic children. The cool part to me, is that nobody really knows why it helps those children, even today. I think it's important to realize that we as a society don't know everything. We like to think that whatever the agreed upon societal consensus on something is, is the gospel. I think there's a lot we don't know so take responsibility to figure out what works for you.
Following an ancestral diet means eating wholesome, natural, organic indigenous foods – just like our ancestors did for thousands of years (Paleo, Keto, etc). The premise is that the human body evolved over a period of 2.5 million years on the hunter/gatherer diet (Paleolithic Era), prior to the introduction of agriculture, just 12,000 years ago. To break it down, the Paleolithic Era represents 99.5% of human history. More than 100,000 generations of humans living on diets as hunter/gathers. Compare this to 600 generations and .5% of human history after agriculture became a thing. Our ancestors would only eat what they could kill or grow and the body became genetically adapted to this type of diet. Our genetic makeup has NOT had time to evolve to a diet high in grains, corn and sugar. Maybe in another couple million years, but I'm not waiting that long.
The long and short of Keto is that eating this particular macro ratio of foods, results in putting your body in a state of ketosis where you begin to generate ketone bodies. At first, your body will start to excrete ketones through your urine because you body doesn't know how to use them. After a period of time, your body figures out that glucose isn't around anymore and it should use these ketones that are lying around. This is called becoming 'fat adapted' and our ancestors were likely in this state most of their lives. By and large these ketones are a superior fuel source to glucose and you begin to see cognitive benefits, as well as just plain feeling better. Essentially you have gone from a carb dependent state, where you have trained your body your entire life to use glucose as fuel, to being able to burn glucose and ketones like a hybrid engine.
Unlike things like salt, there is no daily recommended amount of sugar. You're body will do just fine without any sugar. In fact, it will thrive without sugar.
Here's what I did:
Started out by familiarizing myself with Keto and trying to watch my carb intake for three weeks, but getting nowhere near down to the 20-30 carbs per day that Keto recommends. Just things like skipping the bun on a burger, cutting out sweets, but not doing that EVERY meal...yet. After a few weeks of that, I went full Lazy Keto.
I also do what is called a 16:8 intermittent fasting (IF). I did this inadvertently for awhile not realizing it was a thing. The short way of describing this is that I skip breakfast and only eat two meals a day between noon - 8pm. I add MCT oil to my morning coffee,
which has many nutritional benefits, not to mention it helps control hunger. I never really like eating breakfast, it felt forced, but I was trying to be healthy and follow the Standard American Diet (SAD). I also do not generally snack, but will occasionally. The eating only two meals a day and not snacking helps regulate your insulin levels. If you do Keto right, you will not need to snack and you will learn your snacking is habitual or done out of boredom.
Keto and Fasting.
Keto and IF go together well for a lot of people because if you're doing Keto properly, you will find that you are not as hungry as you normally are when meal time rolls around. When your carb dependent, you blood sugar is constantly on a roller-coaster. Insulin spikes when you eat that high carb meal, fuels you for a few hours and just like any other addiction, you need another fix as your blood sugar drops. This is that overwhelming feeling you get as meal time approaches when you hear a lot of people saying, "I'm starving!" when they go 5+ hours without a carb fix. #hangry
Keto helps regulate your blood sugar so you don't have this roller-coaster. The high fat macros in the diet help you feel satiated long term. Once you become fat adapted, your body burns ketone bodies (fat) for fuel instead of glucose (sugar). Ketones are proven to be a superior fuel source as compared to glucose. The campfire analogy helped me more than anything. Imagine a fire that has a bunch of paper, twigs and kindling. This is a very fast burning, smoky, inefficient fire that provides a lot of heat really quickly and then it's gone....and needs more kindling or it will go out. That is your body burning carbohydrates. Now imagine a fire with several large logs that are burning. These logs have a low flame, orange embers, putting off a ton of heat and almost no smoke. This is your body when your fat adapted. Less smoke means its better for your body to process the exhaust of burning that fuel.
After going Keto for a couple months, I started looking into skipping meals and IF. Keto provides you with the ability to do this and if you are busy one day at work or traveling or whatever, skipping a meal is totally doable. The trick is getting over the habitual feeling of it being meal time. Once your body gets past that initial 'mind over matter' of not having a meal, you will notice that hunger subsides. That's because your body has evolved over millions of years to be able to handle periods where no food was available. Lots of things start to change in the body and people even report enhanced cognitive function while fasting. From an ancestral standpoint, it can be derived that this happens because the body recognizes the need to find the next food source, and to do so, resources are directed to the brain to make that happen. You've also likely thrust your body into ketosis and if you're fat adapted, you will start burning ketones almost immediately. So your body is directing all of the best fuel available to the brain to make sure you get creative and figure something out before you starve to death. Luckily, we don't have to worry about starving to death, so we can put that extra cognitive focus on something productive.
People always ask if something "breaks" a fast. We're always looking for that cheat code that makes fasting easier. Technically, anything with calories breaks a fast, but that's when we need to discuss what are trying to achieve with fasting. If you are fasting for weight loss and some MCT oil helps you get through your fast, you will still see tremendous weight loss results even though MCT oil has more than 100 calories per serving. However, if you are fasting for heath reasons, you are likely trying to get your body into a state of autophagy and any calories you intake could affect that. Autophagy is a cell recycling process your body goes into at the cellular level that we are discovering may have tremendous benefits such as decreasing the likelihood of contracting chronic diseases, as well as prolonged lifespan.
Fat doesn't make you fat, sugar and grains make you fat.
This is a hard concept for most people to grasp given the load of crap we've been fed over the years around what is a healthy diet. The war on fat in the 80's caused all food manufacturers to remove fat from everything making it taste like cardboard. They had to find a way to make the food taste good again, so they loaded everything up with sugar (hey, but it's lowfat!). Sugar turns to glucose and when burned as fuel for the body produces cancer causing free radicals. Our bodies are really good at getting rid of these free radicals, but being a sugar burner just bombards your body with these things constantly.
Doctors are not all nutrition specialists.
I've heard many people say their docs discouraged Keto, IF and other diets that vary from the SAD. I say to those people, "find a new doctor". There are lots of ways to do things and many doctors who support these lifestyles. Many doctors will put you on a low fat, high carb diet and look where that has got us. Quite frankly I believe if you are doing some combo of Keto, IF or any type of calorie restriction, you'll quite possibly never need to visit a doctor again. Do your own research and don't let some jackleg doctor or the government tell you what a healthy diet for YOU is.
Don't get hung up on high fat in Keto.
To get started on Keto, sure eat the heck out of fat and protein to get you over the carb dependency hump. But the idea on Keto is not to eat butter by the stick and bacon by the pound, its to eat real food, getting your fats from sources like avocados, nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, etc. Use butter in your fat rotation, but just not every meal. Ultimately, you'll want to focus on keeping your carbs under 20 per day and get most of your carbs incidentally through veggies and nuts/seeds. Many people look for the workaround with almond flour pancakes or keto brownies, but those should be treated as a lever to pull to keep you from eating the real thing. It should not be part of your normal diet. Keto gets a bad rap because people will focus on the wrong Keto friendly foods and make them a staple instead of a treat. When you're on a road trip and at a convenience store wanting a quick snack, pork rinds are a great Keto option, but should not be a daily thing.
Do you research and don't sabotage yourself.
I've seen many people knock themselves out of ketosis inadvertently because they didn't understand the calorie/carb content of certain things. For example, NyQuil has a whole days worth of carbs in one shot. Also, peanut butter is a legume and not very keto friendly which many people find super surprising. Do your research on everything you put in your body.
Eat until your satisfied, not until you're full.
This will change your life. Learn to enjoy your food and take your time. Let you're body tell you when you've had enough and give it time to do so. You'll begin to notice your carb burner counterparts will be complaining about how hungry they are before meals and how stuffed they are after meals. Keto folks will do neither.
Calorie Restriction (CR) has proven to help people and animals live longer.
Maybe Keto isn't the answer for you, but figure out a way to reduce your calories and you will lose weight. I know this sounds like Captain Obvious, but figure out a way that works well for YOU to restrict calories. Take responsibility for this. I like Keto because unlike many other diets I've been on, there is no suffering or deprivation once you get over the habitual nature of not eating sweets and breads. The types of foods you eat on keto make you feel and stay satiated. So I can lose weight without being hungry? Sign me up. One interesting take from a book I read was that every diet you've ever been on worked because you reduced carbs, whether that was your intention or not. People that go on a lowfat diet inadvertently cut down on carbs by cutting on sodas or sweets, but attribute any slight success to the lowfat aspect. #MindBlown
When you cheat or if you fall off the wagon, refocus and get back on track.
Messing up one day or even a whole weekend will not derail you as much as you may think. It took many, many days and weekends of eating poorly to get yourself to your current state. If you are eating good 90% of the time, your body will do a wonderful job at being able to perform damage control on those 10% situations. Just like eating good for a couple of days will not show a big difference, neither will eating bad. Many people have the terrible mentality of, "well, I've messed up this morning, the whole day is shot", and they use that as an excuse to binge the rest of the day. The trick is what you do long term and balancing the good with the bad.
If you do cheat...when you're on Keto for a little while, you'll learn that when you cheat, you feel like crap for 30-60 minutes after a meal when you ingest a high amount of carbs. Then you'll start to get that feeling creeping back in when the next meal rolls around where you want more carbs. It's important to not let this make you fall back into carb dependency. It should tell you everything you need to know about carbs when it makes your feel like crap after eating them.
When people ask what you've been doing:
If you successfully do what is discussed above, it won't be long until people start asking what you are doing. I have a couple of different responses that get different reactions. Sometimes I tell them Keto and IF and about 25% of the time, someone says something like, "ohhh, I heard that wasn't good long term". Don't let this get under your skin, it says more about them than it does about you. Most of the time someone says this, they are jealous, ignorant, looking for an excuse not to do it themselves or all of the above. My other answer is, "I skip breakfast and eat a lot of salads". Almost 100% of the time, the responses I get back are overwhelmingly positive such as, "good for you". #That'sTheSameAsKetoFolks
