To ask your experience of a keto diet?

[Atticusblame]

Just started this today. It's basically a very low carb diet. I have low carbed before, but not quite to the keto extreme.

Has anyone found it works well for them? And how long is it until results show? And what alcohol can I drink on it?

I don't know about whether it impacts weight loss - probably, as it is inflammatory. But I think whatever diet you follow you should try and avoid these piece of shit oils as they are really bad for you, it's just very very hard as so much food contains it

To start with he is grumpy, has smelly skin and breath and stinks the house out with cooking smells.

If you drink enough water you shouldn't have bad breath when in ketosis. In fact, water consumption is key to helping the diet work.

What's he cooking that stinks?

I eat the same meals as my family, well dinner anyway as we all make our own lunch /breakfast, the only difference is there is always veg or salad to go with it, and I don't eat the carb part, I still make it for everyone though.

Same as when I have guests over, which is often, I always make sure there is either veg or salad on the table and I personally just don't eat the carb part.

Same as when at friends, for example one recently made a chilli, I simply had it with some cheese sprinkled on top and avoided the rice, there was no veggies or salad, and that was totally fine.

In my experience getting in to ketosis and becoming a fat burner was tough. I think a lot of that is because my metabolism was ruined from years of yo-yo dieting and became very resistant. So it has taken quite a while to "reset" everything. Sometimes I still come out of it for unknown reasons which is very frustrating. Stress and hormones can affect it. Need to keep those cortisol levels down. But the benefits are amazing. Not feeling hungry is life changing when you're a binge eater!

My advice when starting is to keep it "clean" and simple. Find out your macros for your current weight and goals. Carb Manager app is my recommendation. Then, basically, pick a lean meat, pick some veg, and pick healthy fats up to those macros limits. Track everything until you know for sure what "30g of whatever" actually is. Always weigh your carbs.

Make sure to leave at least 5 hours between meals so you burn your own body fat in between. The longer the better so try not snack. It works even better if you do intermittent fasting along side it. This can be as simple as skipping breakfast a couple of times a week so you have a 16hr gap between meals.

The purpose of keto is to minimise insulin spikes and lower inflammation. So stay away from anything with any kind of added sugar in the ingredients list and minimise ingredients that are pro-inflammatory (those high in omega-6s, for example). This is why this way of eating is really beneficial for people with T2 diabetes, PCOS, psoriasis, arthritis etc. Weight loss is just a side effect of eating healthier and using fat as your primary fuel source.

Yesterday, for breakfast I had smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. Lunch was roast chicken with lettuce, tomato, olives, avocado, boiled egg and mayo. Dinner was teriyaki stir fried beef and mushrooms with broccoli, cauliflower and roasted asparagus.

How can people say that is unhealthy and dangerous??

There is a lot of ignorance surrounding keto. It is not unlimited amounts of cheese, bacon and butter. That is the "dirty keto" people talk about. Best practice is to choose low-fat/fat-free items then add healthy fats yourself. Olive oil, coconut oil/cream, ghee, eggs, avocados, (high omega-3) nuts, olives. Be careful with dairy. After you master the basics maybe try introducing the cheat stuff if you still want to. You'll know better what your body can tolerate by then.

Good luck!

I agree with pp that it depends where you start from as to how your first few months of keto will be.

I was early 40s when I started and I had had all those years of massive yo yo dieting and calorie restriction. I was definitely skinny fat.

I’ve only lost a stone on keto but my body fat has gone from 31% to 22%. And that is with very average levels of exercise. The weight I held was around my stomach ( probably around my organs) and that is where the danger also lies!! I might have looked ok but there were symptoms I wasn’t healthy.

I think your lifestyle up to now dictates how keto will be for you, alongside your genetic predisposition to insulin. I think my genetics aren’t that great for carb metabolism and then combine that with 40 years of high carb, I’m pretty sure I was heading for diabetes, despite not being obese

As soon as I started keto I just felt better, like my body was healing, I did have a withdrawal period of about 2 weeks but even in that time, despite feeling weird I also just felt better.

The health benefits have been incomprehendable, I really only went on it as another crash diet if I’m honest. But things changed rapidly that I never expected...energy levels, brain fog, not ‘feeling fat’ which must be to do with bloating from carbs, bleeding gums gone, recurrent UTIs gone, never had a cold since starting, sleep better with actual dreams every night...and a big one for me was reduction in PMS. Obsessing over calories, a freeing experience.

Soon the weight became irrelevant for me with these benefits clear to see

However, i do believe I arrived to this with a certain profile that meant it had such noticeable difference, whereas some people do metabolise carbs better and also haven’t punished their bodies with shitty low fat calorie restricted diets. Furthermore age has something to say here, we all get more insulin resistant as we get older so while calorie restriction may work in your 20s, for Many people in their 40s + it ceases to work unless you look at your carb intake, because your resistance to insulin increases over time.

The guy who runs the Diet Doctor site says he does intermittent fasting weekdays combined with moderate carb - that could be an easier way if it is too hard doing under 20g carbs a day.

I try and do something like this and find blood sugars are really good- but they were good to start with previously so maybe it depends as PP say as to your starting point. It helps for me being able to have more of a range of foods but also avoiding things which cause sugar spikes such as high GI carbs such as white bread.

So...if you look here I go to the more 'liberal' side this is useful for examples

www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/how-low-carb-is-low-carb

As you see it describes it below as follows-

How to choose
Some people may need to keep the carbs very low for maximum effect – a keto low-carb diet. This includes many people with significant weight issues, diabetes (mainly type 2) and food or sugar addiction, for example.11

Others – less carb-intolerant people – do great on a more liberal low-carb diet.12 This also lowers the risk of any side effects.

The third group – healthy, lean, active people – may not even need to eat very low carb, as long as they mainly eat unprocessed slow-acting carbs.

I agree that whatever way of eating you go, fasting is crucial. Micro fasting is leaving at least 4 hours between meals giving your body chance to get rid of the glycogen and go to fat reserves. If people make one change at all to their eating for me I’d say fasting is the thing to do...snacking culture is horrendous, people eating every couple of hours is so common everywhere I turn.

3 meals a day with 4+ hours between any food is the minimum people can do for their health.

Yes there is a whole guide to different types of fasting on that site also I find 16:8 weekdays quite easy...

Extremely effective but very hard to maintain
However i lost 2 stone in 3 months.watch out for the keto breath but that will pass x

Lots of interesting reading on this thread. I do think there is a spectrum of carb tolerance. Age, sex and where you body stores fat are things you can’t change. I’m an Apple, I don’t tolerate a lot of carbs. However I still feel the benefits without strictly being keto so long as I am low carb.

I agree with the PP who says this feels like healing. Fasting gives me a sense of calm; I’m no longer ruled by cravings.

Even at quite a liberal low carb you can get freedom from sugar spikes which is quite liberating and helps with cravings.

I’ve eaten Keto for three years - and love it. I don’t find it restrictive and essentially no longer see carbs as a food group. It reset my appetite in terms of sugar, too. Would recommend it to anyone.

Typical day:

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with a green veg (broccoli, spinach etc), made with olive oil. Cheese sprinkled on top and perhaps a bit of bacon.

Lunch: meat (chicken, steak) with lots of veg (asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, kale) and additional fat - usually a whole avocado or mayonnaise (I’m bad, and use Helmans which is dirty)!

Supper: a variation on whatever is being made: usually meat and veg, or a stew, or a roast. Just don’t eat the carb portion and usually supplement with something appropriately fat-based.

Snacks: nuts, eggs, cheese, avocado, as needed. I do also eat quite a bit of oily fish like salmon. Drink coffee with cream or unsweetened almond milk, lots of water and herbal teas, and am partial to a diet soda but try to limit them.

Usually make breakfast and lunch and Tupperware them to work, but it’s fairly easy to do if you have Pret, Pure or similar - they make the carb count very clear and have plenty of low carb options for snacks or a breakfast/lunch. Eating out is also fine and if you do it rarely you can go for sauces etc without to much worry. I eat fruit very, very rarely and then only berries.

I genuinely don’t think I’ll ever go back - I feel great, and the constant struggle with what I can/can’t eat is over.

Diet Doctor is a good start as a resource - really helped me.

It's interesting if you think about it, how quickly our bodies adapt to burning fat as it's main fuel source, generally a matter of days.

How we often feel lethargic, sluggish, and gain weight on a high carb diet, but on low carb we feel more energetic, sharper minds, cravings go, our appetites stabilise.

It does make you wonder what is optimal for humans to operate on.

In reality though most people aren't doing this because of simple health benefits. They are doing it to lose or maintain weight.

And to lose weight quite simply you cannot continue to eat as you were. Something needs to be reduced. Be it portion sizes, fat, sugar, or heavy carbs.

So in one way there will always need to be a restriction versus your previous eating habits to lose weight. As those eating habits are what led you to needing to lose weight in thr first place.

For the individual it's which works for them the easiest. If you don't really want to do it and resent the restriction, which ever that is, then you're never going to be happy with your new way of eating. Irrelevant of what that way of eating is.

What happens if you do go back? Or fall off the wagon? I think low carb would suit me and I understand that hopefully I'll no longer want, say, a yorkshire pudding with my christmas dinner, but what would happen if I did have one?

The exact same happens as when you come off any woe, if you revert back to eating as you did you will gain weight.

There is no magic bullet that allows you to loose weight, then keep it off forever more irrelevant of what you eat.

But like any woe of, a few days back on it, will remove any weight gained.

In that it's no different from anything else, be it weight watchers, calorie counting, slimming world, whatever.

It only works when you do it.

The trick of course is to gently reintroduce more carbs so you know how many you can tolerate to stop you loosing further, but also stop you gaining. So you'll be able to eat a lot more than you were when loosing weight, but simply not as many as you were doing previously that made you gain.

(dormice & frogs & bees & reptiles & ) Bears, Hedgehogs & Bats hibernate.
Adult Salmon don't feed in fresh water, when they go upstream to spawn; they fatten up in the sea before travelling back huge distances & up long rivers to spawn.
Male Emperor penguins don't eat anything for up to 5 months (nesting period).
Caterpillars fatten before transformation into butterflies, some butterflies barely feed at all.

They have to start these phases as fat as they can get or they wouldn't survive. Lots of animals have a life cycle which requires putting on a lot of spare weight in times of plenty.

Camels are adapted to store fat for times of sparsity. I suspect a lot of wild desert animals try to fatten up during rainy periods so they can get thru the times when there's less food around.

Boobs are mainly fat, they are our own way of storing nutrients for later.

If you simply fall off the wagon and have for example a Yorkshire pudding, it's no big deal, you will just have a small period of time to get back into keto and start fat burning again.as long as it takes for your body to deplete it, use it up, as it will be burnt off first, not fat.

Many atheletes, body builders for example, will carb load ahead of a big exercise session, this isn't recommended for the average person as your likely not going to do a mammoth exercise session and deplete it during it.

Falling off the wagon every few weeks makes no real difference, if you get straight back on it, but that's like ever other weight loss program.

Like LaLaLanded said, I don't think I'll ever go back. I can't imagine eating a whole sandwich or a plate of pasta again let alone carbs as the basis of every meal. It doesn't feel restrictive anymore.

I do still sometimes have a dessert or something but always in a conscious way. To answer your question @tentative3 nothing happens other than you wouldn't lose weight the same but also crucially you are likely to feel hungrier than normal for a day or two as glucose and therefore insulin has spiked. If you can accept that and just remain low carb for those few days your appetite will return to normal. Which is another positive side effect of low carb, appetite reduction. I now usually fast 23 hours 4 days a week and 18 hours the other 3 days and my paradigm is shifting even more so 3 meals in a day, let alone snacks, seems like an enormous amount. This coming from a girl who would binge eat a whole bag of gnocchi and sauce, a whole baguette of garlic bread and a dessert without thinking much of it (apart from crippling shame of course).

That's really interesting Jenala because I can binge eat those same quantities (and would binge eat pretty much exactly the same things you list as examples).

And yes, I'm more interested in what happens with a one off dessert or something like that, rather than going back to not eating keto at all.

I very rarely want to eat dessert / sugar, but if I do I do and you don’t put on weight but you do see an increase in cravings which makes you liable to fall completely off the wagon. As pp said, you have to do it mindfully, knowing that you are triggering your insulin response and that you may have a few cravings afterwards.

It’s joyous once you understand this isn’t just about willpower and is actually much more basic biology

Tentative3 if you binge on that kind of type and quantity of food you'll probably find keto/low carb very effective. I totally messed up my insulin response among other things from repeated high carb binges and this is the only thing that helped after years of trying.

I was 250lbs at my worst (I'm 5ft 8) and I'm now 187lbs so getting there.

Well I went on the scales this morning. Haven’t lost an ounce. I know it’s only day 4, so wasn’t expecting a stone off or anything, but thought the water weight thing might have made a difference.

Then, basically, pick a lean meat, pick some veg, and pick healthy fats up to those macros limits. A lean meat? Not a fatty cut?

That's unusual.

What have you been eating, can you post it?