I’ve been living a ketogenic lifestyle for a few years now. I go in and out once and a while but seeing the “fat is bad” theory thrown out the window with research like this makes it easier to remain committed.
The trouble comes with the way society has been conditioned to have carbs with every meal. Like 90% of the food my peer group eats are surrounded in carbs. Even for a company-wide lunch in the office: the go-to is usually a couple dozen pizzas.
Once you’ve lived low carb for a long time you look at people in line at a coffee house grabbing a bagel and a milkshake and just feel bad for the crash they will have later.
I’m happy to see Keto becoming more and more socially known. Accessiblity around low carb options is getting better and better. My favorite will always be a protein style burger from In-N-Out though.
You hit the nail on the head for exactly why I couldn't stick with a ketogenic diet. It became too much of a burden on the people I was with to feed just me because everything they wanted was stuff like tacos, pizza, rice dishes, fried dishes, etc. I have an unresearched (by me) theory that the reason we have so many carb heavy diets is due to the fact that carbs are such cheap calories. They were good for surviving when we were poor but now we should move past them
Americans have a tendency to go to extremes. The normal American diet is way too high in carbs, and so when we try to do something about that we go way farther in the other direction than we have to. We aim for very low carbs, and that ends up being a pain, and we revert back to our default ridiculously high carb diet.
It doesn't have to be so binary.
Try aiming for a modest level of carbs. I aimed for 40% of calories from carbs, and ended up around 30-35%. That was a significant reduction, but nowhere near what most would consider low carb.
At that level of carbs you can have tacos, and pizza, and those other things. You might have to tweak some of them (add more meat to your pizza, for example) or pair them with other dishes to balance them out, but tweaking is a lot easier than foregoing them.
Are the very low carb diets better? It's unclear but even if they are, a merely OK diet that you can stick to long term is better than a great diet that you cannot stick to.
Will this work for you? Maybe not--one of the most important things researchers are learning is that there is no one size fits all in diet. It worked well for me [1], and it is pretty easy to try, so why not give it a shot?
I picked 40% as a first goal because it is easy to compute from the nutrition label. Take calories, divide by 10, and change the unit from "calories" to "grams", and that is how many grams of carbs that food can have and still meet the 40% goal.
To see if the whole meal meets the goal, just do the check for each item, and keep track of the total of the differences between cal/10 and g carbs for each item.
For example, suppose you are considered a Wendy's double with cheese, and large fries. The burger is 810 calories, 36g of carbs. 81 > 36, so it easily meets the 40% goal. The fries are 530 calories, 64g of carbs. 53 < 64, so they are over the goal. But how about the meal as a whole? You could add the calories, and add the carbs, and compare, but better is to look at how many carbs you would need to add or remove to each item without changing the calories to make it 40%.
For the burger, you could add 45g of carbs and meet the goal. For the fries, you would have to remove 11g of carbs, or add -11g carbs. 45g + -11g = 34g of carbs. Your proposed meal is OK.
Now suppose that afternoon you have the chance to have a chocolate chip cookie. 200 calories, 30g carbs. It's over 40% (20 < 30) by 10g. But you were ahead 34g after your earlier meal, so you can have the cookie and still be OK for that day. Having the cookie brings you to 24g ahead for the day.
What I did was try to make sure that the first meal of the day had lots of protein and fat, so that I would be ahead by quite a bit. I'd then keep track mentally of how far ahead I was during the day, and would try to avoid letting myself get behind.
In theory there is nothing wrong with letting yourself get behind at breakfast or lunch, and making it up at dinner. In practice, though, that means that if anything happens that disrupts your dinner plans you could end up behind for the day. If you start ahead disruptions are less likely to blow the whole day.
[1] Result: 140 pounds lost over 18 months, and stable weight since then (six months). (Also a drop in blood sugar, from an A1C of 8.1 on multiple diabetes meds to 4.8 on no meds. I've been under 5 for the last six months, and my doctor removed the diagnoses of diabetes from my chart).
Check out the /r/keto sidebar on Reddit. I keep various PDFs in Dropbox of keto options at various fast food establishments. You can always get taco bowls with no tortillas, McDonald's without the buns, a burger without the buns at a burger joint, etc.
For emergencies, I keep a few shaker bottles in my car with protein power already added. I just add water if we go somewhere with no keto options.
But this research says nothing about such a strict and artificial diet over a long period of time. I wonder, do you know of any people who have eaten keto all their life and lived to an old age?
A few years does not prove a lifetime. If a million people ate your diet and lived X% longer than a similar set of people who didn't it might prove a useful stat. You might wind up dying of something not obvious today at 70 due to your diet, or not. No easy way to know. That's the problem of dietary knowledge.
totally agree. when there are no carbs around me - i have zero problems sticking to keto. whenever there's a party and some snacks - i'm in a danger zone unless i brought my own snacks in which case i'm a weirdo.
Reading through all the comments and this one stood out. I am currently a 'reluctant vegetarian' for health reasons of course (bad choices were made during my younger years and now I am so paying for it). However. In-N-Out would be allowed were I near one. I like to eat grass (grass like veggies). Cows eat grass. I will eat the cow that ate the grass at In-N-Out burger. /shrug. Sounds legit to me.
- I'd also have a 'healthy shake' there as well. I remember their adverts that mimic'd/mocked the shake diets and it still makes me chuckle.
Oddly enough, every time I practice Keto, I am almost the exact opposite; always hungry, cruddy energy but I sleep like a rock.
On low(ish) fat and high carb; easily satiated, decent energy, sleep like a baby (awake a lot but no screaming or poop).
With the above explained, I have not tried A Balanced Diet - perhaps to get the positives of both modes and mitigate or lessen the negatives. Honestly this is the first time, while I am typing this, that I've come up with that angle for myself.
Fat is bad for some people, though. How satiated someone is by carbs or protein tends to be pretty consistent, but fat is more variable between individuals. Some people are just predisposed to overeating fats.
Yep, it's surprising how hard it is to avoid. Compound that with sugar being in almost everything and it ends up being remarkably hard to find options that won't cause your blood sugar level to spike.
Do you have any recommended reading on your diet, and the potential problems of a modern milkshake-abundant one? I could just Google it but it's hard to cut through the noise/misinformation when researching diet stuff for the first time.
Mainly asking because my diet yesterday was a six pack of Kirin Ichiban beer, a double cheeseburger, and a large P. Terry's chocolate shake, and I felt fine and still had a very productive day. I want to know why I'm able to tolerate stuff like that, and how/if that armor might start falling off as I get older.
Not GP, but I've also followed a ketogenic diet for a couple of years now. When I first started I learned a lot from Dr. Peter Attia and the videos he has on YouTube.
One example[1] goes through him talking about the self-experimentation he's done with the diet and the variations of it. From memory, it was pretty informative (albeit general) on the chemistry/biology surrounding it.
The trouble comes with the way society has been conditioned to have carbs with every meal.
I am pretty sure that isn't conditioning. Eating a burger with no chips is just plain wrong, and the same the other way around as well. When I am eating rice and meat together, if I eat just meat, it doesn't taste good. It is so specific, that there is a specific amount of rice that has to go with the meat. Everyone knows this. That can't possibly be conditioning. People complain of "too little rice", "too much meat" etc. No one could have been conditioned so specifically.
Comments
I’ve been living a ketogenic lifestyle for a few years now. I go in and out once and a while but seeing the “fat is bad” theory thrown out the window with research like this makes it easier to remain committed.
The trouble comes with the way society has been conditioned to have carbs with every meal. Like 90% of the food my peer group eats are surrounded in carbs. Even for a company-wide lunch in the office: the go-to is usually a couple dozen pizzas.
Once you’ve lived low carb for a long time you look at people in line at a coffee house grabbing a bagel and a milkshake and just feel bad for the crash they will have later.
I’m happy to see Keto becoming more and more socially known. Accessiblity around low carb options is getting better and better. My favorite will always be a protein style burger from In-N-Out though.
You hit the nail on the head for exactly why I couldn't stick with a ketogenic diet. It became too much of a burden on the people I was with to feed just me because everything they wanted was stuff like tacos, pizza, rice dishes, fried dishes, etc. I have an unresearched (by me) theory that the reason we have so many carb heavy diets is due to the fact that carbs are such cheap calories. They were good for surviving when we were poor but now we should move past them
Americans have a tendency to go to extremes. The normal American diet is way too high in carbs, and so when we try to do something about that we go way farther in the other direction than we have to. We aim for very low carbs, and that ends up being a pain, and we revert back to our default ridiculously high carb diet.
It doesn't have to be so binary.
Try aiming for a modest level of carbs. I aimed for 40% of calories from carbs, and ended up around 30-35%. That was a significant reduction, but nowhere near what most would consider low carb.
At that level of carbs you can have tacos, and pizza, and those other things. You might have to tweak some of them (add more meat to your pizza, for example) or pair them with other dishes to balance them out, but tweaking is a lot easier than foregoing them.
Are the very low carb diets better? It's unclear but even if they are, a merely OK diet that you can stick to long term is better than a great diet that you cannot stick to.
Will this work for you? Maybe not--one of the most important things researchers are learning is that there is no one size fits all in diet. It worked well for me [1], and it is pretty easy to try, so why not give it a shot?
I picked 40% as a first goal because it is easy to compute from the nutrition label. Take calories, divide by 10, and change the unit from "calories" to "grams", and that is how many grams of carbs that food can have and still meet the 40% goal.
To see if the whole meal meets the goal, just do the check for each item, and keep track of the total of the differences between cal/10 and g carbs for each item.
For example, suppose you are considered a Wendy's double with cheese, and large fries. The burger is 810 calories, 36g of carbs. 81 > 36, so it easily meets the 40% goal. The fries are 530 calories, 64g of carbs. 53 < 64, so they are over the goal. But how about the meal as a whole? You could add the calories, and add the carbs, and compare, but better is to look at how many carbs you would need to add or remove to each item without changing the calories to make it 40%.
For the burger, you could add 45g of carbs and meet the goal. For the fries, you would have to remove 11g of carbs, or add -11g carbs. 45g + -11g = 34g of carbs. Your proposed meal is OK.
Now suppose that afternoon you have the chance to have a chocolate chip cookie. 200 calories, 30g carbs. It's over 40% (20 < 30) by 10g. But you were ahead 34g after your earlier meal, so you can have the cookie and still be OK for that day. Having the cookie brings you to 24g ahead for the day.
What I did was try to make sure that the first meal of the day had lots of protein and fat, so that I would be ahead by quite a bit. I'd then keep track mentally of how far ahead I was during the day, and would try to avoid letting myself get behind.
In theory there is nothing wrong with letting yourself get behind at breakfast or lunch, and making it up at dinner. In practice, though, that means that if anything happens that disrupts your dinner plans you could end up behind for the day. If you start ahead disruptions are less likely to blow the whole day.
[1] Result: 140 pounds lost over 18 months, and stable weight since then (six months). (Also a drop in blood sugar, from an A1C of 8.1 on multiple diabetes meds to 4.8 on no meds. I've been under 5 for the last six months, and my doctor removed the diagnoses of diabetes from my chart).
agreed. I wish ketogenic meal kits and keto-friendly restaurant ratings / reviews / guides / accreditation were more prominent.
Check out the /r/keto sidebar on Reddit. I keep various PDFs in Dropbox of keto options at various fast food establishments. You can always get taco bowls with no tortillas, McDonald's without the buns, a burger without the buns at a burger joint, etc.
For emergencies, I keep a few shaker bottles in my car with protein power already added. I just add water if we go somewhere with no keto options.
Yep. It’s all thanks to the agricultural boom. Grain is everywhere and it is CHEAP.
And subsidized!
rice and tortillas are carbs.
But this research says nothing about such a strict and artificial diet over a long period of time. I wonder, do you know of any people who have eaten keto all their life and lived to an old age?
A few years does not prove a lifetime. If a million people ate your diet and lived X% longer than a similar set of people who didn't it might prove a useful stat. You might wind up dying of something not obvious today at 70 due to your diet, or not. No easy way to know. That's the problem of dietary knowledge.
totally agree. when there are no carbs around me - i have zero problems sticking to keto. whenever there's a party and some snacks - i'm in a danger zone unless i brought my own snacks in which case i'm a weirdo.
Don't bother about it. In the eyes of the others, everybody who is in a keto diet is already a weirdo :-)
Reading through all the comments and this one stood out. I am currently a 'reluctant vegetarian' for health reasons of course (bad choices were made during my younger years and now I am so paying for it). However. In-N-Out would be allowed were I near one. I like to eat grass (grass like veggies). Cows eat grass. I will eat the cow that ate the grass at In-N-Out burger. /shrug. Sounds legit to me. - I'd also have a 'healthy shake' there as well. I remember their adverts that mimic'd/mocked the shake diets and it still makes me chuckle.
what crash? are all these people you see in the coffee shop diabetic?
I've been on keto (on and off) about 50% of the time in the past 3 years.
The worst part is not being able to eat/drink at social events, and dehydration.
The best part is never feeling hungry, stable energy levels throughout the day, and not needing to sleep as much.
I also tend to binge a lot when off keto...
Oddly enough, every time I practice Keto, I am almost the exact opposite; always hungry, cruddy energy but I sleep like a rock. On low(ish) fat and high carb; easily satiated, decent energy, sleep like a baby (awake a lot but no screaming or poop). With the above explained, I have not tried A Balanced Diet - perhaps to get the positives of both modes and mitigate or lessen the negatives. Honestly this is the first time, while I am typing this, that I've come up with that angle for myself.
Probably on carbohydrates because that is why everyone here is "on and off".
You can drink at events. Stick to soda water and vodka or diet coke and vodka, etc.
Not needing to sleep as much?
I tend to wake up earlier when on keto (~1 hour).
Fat is bad for some people, though. How satiated someone is by carbs or protein tends to be pretty consistent, but fat is more variable between individuals. Some people are just predisposed to overeating fats.
Yep, it's surprising how hard it is to avoid. Compound that with sugar being in almost everything and it ends up being remarkably hard to find options that won't cause your blood sugar level to spike.
Do you have any recommended reading on your diet, and the potential problems of a modern milkshake-abundant one? I could just Google it but it's hard to cut through the noise/misinformation when researching diet stuff for the first time.
Mainly asking because my diet yesterday was a six pack of Kirin Ichiban beer, a double cheeseburger, and a large P. Terry's chocolate shake, and I felt fine and still had a very productive day. I want to know why I'm able to tolerate stuff like that, and how/if that armor might start falling off as I get older.
Not GP, but I've also followed a ketogenic diet for a couple of years now. When I first started I learned a lot from Dr. Peter Attia and the videos he has on YouTube.
One example[1] goes through him talking about the self-experimentation he's done with the diet and the variations of it. From memory, it was pretty informative (albeit general) on the chemistry/biology surrounding it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqwvcrA7oe8
I am pretty sure that isn't conditioning. Eating a burger with no chips is just plain wrong, and the same the other way around as well. When I am eating rice and meat together, if I eat just meat, it doesn't taste good. It is so specific, that there is a specific amount of rice that has to go with the meat. Everyone knows this. That can't possibly be conditioning. People complain of "too little rice", "too much meat" etc. No one could have been conditioned so specifically.