Anyone have any ketogenic diet stories?
Good or bad, I'm interested
I got into fasting back in like 2019 maybe a bit earlier I forget, I was watching some some crazy dumb shit like snake diet, but it seemed to work for weight loss, but I never changed my eating so when I stopped fasting I gained all the weight back, in 2020 or 2021 I tried carnivore diet, but I went into psychosis (I have mental health issues) and I thought god wanted me to eat with my family so I started eating what they eat (which is mostly SAD junk) and I gained all my weight back
In maybe 2024 or 2025 I forget, I started watching a bunch of self help stuff, and one of the creators I watched on YouTube was Dr k (healthygamerGG) and with that I started meditating and trying to prioritize "sativik" foods, so for breakfast I would eat something like oatmeal with turmeric and cumin and vegetables, and I lost some weight on that diet, but I fell out of that routine and returned to SAD junk and gained all the weight back and then some
Last April I hit 300 pounds, the most I ever weighed, and it was a wakeup call, what really told me it was a problem might seem silly but its because my bicycle has a 300 pound weight limit lol
I decided to try carnivore again, but this time I slowly transitioned into it, because in 2021 when I tried it, I went from SAD one day to Carnivore the next and god dman I had diarrhea for 30 days lol, so this time I simply started by buying 2 cases of sardines and adding in a can every day at lunch, slowly removing other foods and adding in meat and eggs, I was probably fully carnivore by may 1st
For the first 30 days, probably all of may, I ate eggs in the morning, can fish at lunch and a pound of meat at dinner, until I got a KetoMojo (glucometer) around the 30 day mark, I was expecting super low glucose and super high ketones since I was eating carnivore for 30 days at this point, but its not what I seen, my fasting glucose was (ever so slightly) high and my ketones were constantly between 0.8 and 0.9 (at least they were rock steady I guess)
But as I was seeing these measurements for a few days I had also stumbled upon the medibolic mind YouTube channel and people using ketogenic diets for mental health issues, so I figured let's try a medical keto diet
medical keto diets are actually kinda hard to find any info on, but as far as I can tell they seem to be really simple, you can boil them down to a ratio, like 2:1 or 3:1, so I chose 2:1, so for every 1 part protein + carb I eat, I would eat 2 parts fat
So for example if I ate 70g protein and 15g carbs, i would need to eat 170g fat, which is kinda harder then it sounds, I feel sorry for epileptics who need to eat 3:1 or 4:1 every single day and never fucking up to control seizures, you basically need to chug 35% cream to hit those numbers
So added in fat bombs I'd make with nut butter and tallow to increase my fatI play around with what I add but I may do something like melt tallow in a pot, whisk in some stevia and and cacao to taste (basically a chocolate bar but tallow In stead of cacao butter) pour into a foil lined dish, drop in a few whole nuts for crunch and sprinkle some salt, and then freeze, eat straight from the freezer and top with some but butter
I also lowered my protein, I would try to aim for between 70 and 80 grams a day, and I loosened up and ate some vegetables, technically fruit, stuff like tomato and cucumber and olives and peppers, (I love a horiatiki)
From the beginning of April till about the end of august I dropped from 300 pounds to 255, this probably wasn't diet all alone, because I went from completely sedentary, I would almost never leave my room, to walking the dog for hours a day, and lifting weight once or twice a week, being in heavy ketosis just increased my NEAT (non exercise activity) like I would find myself just jumping up from.the couch for no reason, and I started to roll with it and do stuff
In September I started eating the wild fruit that grew around town, crab apples, wild sour grapes, chokecherries, hawthorn fruit, nanyberries I basically take a picture of every plant I find and my phone tells me what it is (plant.net) and then I google uses for the plant, I also tried many teas, mint, lemon balm, wild bergmot, catnip (all those are mint family), goldenrod, rosehips
But since I started eating the stuff I find on the ground my weight stalled, I went from 255 in august to 257 as of right now, I also had some other effect, my scalp got itchy again, my armpits got more smelly, more aches and pains I notice, I feel more exhausted from my walks, some of this like the scalp and smell may be candida or something idk, others might be inflammation or negative effects from constantly switching between normal metabolism and ketosis
Oh and the heart burn, before I started (pre-april) I had VERY BAD heartburn, like it would keep me up in the night, I would.sleep with a bottle of water/baking soda solution beside my bed so when the heartburn woke me up I could drink it, this was going on for like a year maybe, the main driver was sugar, when I ate a sweet it would.act up, but I couldn't stop eating sweets, but when I started carnivore it got dramatically better fast, fat would still trigger it a bit, but sugar was like a 8/10 pain and fat was 2/10 pain, but after some time the fat even stopped hurting, and now I never have heart burn anymore, even if I eat the fruit like I have been, which would have preciously been horrible pain
Oh and some other things, i try not to drink coffee often, I have gone months without coffee at all, but the last 3 weeks I have had some more then I'd like, I need to start tapering it again, and ditto for tea, even when I had no coffee at all I'd have tea once or twice a week so I wasnt completely no caffeine
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What's your keto story?
There's not much point in the super specific restrictive diets UNLESS you're aiming for short term weight loss (e.g, to meet weight requirements for a surgery, or for an athletic reason like a body-building competition for weight categories). The reality is that you're not going to eat only meat for the rest of your life. Keto diets eliminate MANY vegetables and pretty much all fruits for having too much carbohydrates, which is, uh, just not a good idea for your overall health.
If you had to go on a diet, the meditarranean diet is probably the best bet, as it mostly resembles normal things normal people eat.
Otherwise, you can always try GLPs. They can be pretty affordable these days, even without insurance.
Nothing wrong with coffee? It's somewhat loosely correlated to weight loss in studies, even. Of course, don't drink milk or sugar with it. Then it's bad. But coffee and tea are good for weight loss, and don't really have any adverse health effects unless you're drinking way too much of it.
Coffee is very bad for sleep, weight loss isn't my main concern anymore, but overall health is, I figured weight loss will come as a side effect if you are in good health
Coffees half life is like 6 hours or something, so if you go to bed like 12 hours after your last cup, you still got a quarter of caffeine in you
It’s the other way around. When you lose weight those other health markers improve. Being obese means you get worse sleep and so on. Losing weight would be like taking off rocks from soil before you plant the garden. Planting the garden isn’t gonna get rid of the rocks.
Caffeine is great. It gives you increased focus, energy, gives you a hit of dopamine. It was villainized a few years ago, but there’s no health benefits to cutting it out unless you’re overdosing on it like crazy.
Everyone in my life who has done keto ended up gaining all the weight back because they would stop the diet when they reached their goal and then continue with their disordered eating.
A coworker of mine had to go home once cause she was doing keto and sometimes your body has some kinda allergic/inflammatory reaction to the lack of carbs? Dunno, I didnt really understand what she was saying and I suspect she didnt either.
I was skinny as a child/teenager/20s adult because I didnt eat enough, first because I was sensitive to food texture and later on because I couldnt afford food. The result is I’m very, very good at portion estimating for myself. I know exactly how much food I need to not starve.
Now as a mid 30s adult, Ive got the money and the alcoholism to gain a ton of weight and whats kept me at a reasonable weight is just eating until I’m no longer hungry, not until I’m full.
If I just make sure the meal is a full meal, protein, veggies, carbs, I can portion out maybe half of what I know will make me full, and that amount lasts me the same amount of time. I have a little bit of food noise I think because of the alcoholism, but its never been terrible.
Tl:dr in just like, my opinion, diets like keto cover up disordered eating and what you really need to do is learn to portion your meals such that you eat until you’re no longer hungry instead of when you’re full.
The high fat and salt content you intake from a keto diet can lead to gout. That’s what I’m betting she had.
Maybe? Her whole face blew up like a red balloon, it really looked like some kinda allergic reaction
You hit the nail on the head with "stop the diet and continued with disordered eating", if you do stop keto you need to transition to something normal, and can't go back to whatever you ate before, if it didn't work before, it won't work this time either
I hate when people say "you gain all the weight back when you stop the diet", its kinda akin to saying " oh I quit smoking and it got easier to breath, but then I started smoking again and I can't breath again"
I may stop.keto one day, but what im not going to do is eat packaged foods all day like I used to, if I eat carbs it will be shit like rice and sweet potato and maybe occasionally homemade bread, not poptarts, and cookies and doritos, I ate enough of that shit to last a lifetime, its engineered to make you over eat, maybe some people can eat a single portion, but a lot of people can't, and the whole bag of chips, or whole.sleeve of cookies just vanish when they set out to just eat a serving
Its also why I hate the everything in moderation advice, it may be fine if something is not addictive, but when it is addictive it places the blame on the person for having weak willpower, and not on fritos-lays where it belongs imo, these companies do weird fucking stuff like run studies on what will get people to eat more
Sorry for the rant lol
I think you need to approach this more like an alcoholic would. When you say "I may stop keto one day, but what I'm not going to do is eat packaged foods all day like I used to," it's not that that's wrong, exactly, but it's completely missing a plan and an acknowledgement of just how hard it is to not do that. It's like an alcoholic saying "I'm just not going to drink too much anymore" when they've already tried that. I see you bouncing from diet to diet - even in this thread! - from keto to eating only foraged foods or whatever.
None of this is going to work. Crash diets never work. That's just not how the body is wired. You've got to learn how to eat normally without putting extreme restrictions on yourself. Primarily, that likely means getting junk food out of the house, not going to where the junk food is, and not letting yourself get so hungry that you lose self-control. Eventually, your body's thermostat will re-regulate, to at least some extent.
Oh yeah absolutely agree with all of this, I forgot, dropping processed foods is one of the things I did to maintain my weight as an adult. I just don’t even buy that stuff, don’t keep it in the house. Some people I know took it a step further and they stopped going to big name grocery stores because 80% of those stores is just individually packaged crap. It helps me to mentally view it as the garbage that it is.
The other is I learned to cook. So much easier to portion your meals when it’s something you made at home and can freeze leftovers of.
Third, I don’t eat snacks at all. I either eat a meal or I don’t eat. If I’m hungry, I need a meal, and if it’s food noise then I don’t need a meal.
Once upon a time, I was taken by my (rightfully) concerned grandmother to a family friend who was a private practice nutritionist. That's an unregulated term, which is to say that the person who I saw was a quack. The diet they had me on was what I would describe as "proto-keto": it was keto before it was popularized under the name; it's the only diet I had seen to that point that barred fruit. At the time I was also getting serious about going to the gym.
Unfortunately it did more damage than good. I'm sure everyone has heard of the "keto flu" before, but this doctor didn't warn me of that and when you're running on a treadmill for maybe the third time in your life and are starting to feel what might be heart palpitations it's not a good feeling. It was pretty obvious it was from the diet since it was not going away until I ate something.
This ended up doing a lot of damage to me in the long run. It got me off of taking care of myself - both in terms of physical fitness and diet - for over a decade, during which I gained somewhere between 100-200 pounds. Though it wouldn't be fair of me to blame it all on this one event and not on years of trauma, image issues, and self-flagellation.
In any case I really don't think that ketogenic diets are wise to sustain long-term for most healthy people; we need fiber and most keto diets generally get little if any. If you have epilepsy or maybe diabetes, then keto is great, but for everyone else then there are better options.
@Gopher, it sounds like you have a lot of digestive problems. Have you actually talked to a dietitian about your problems?
I havnt seen a dietician, I did see a dietician in 2013 before I ever heard of keto, when I started to gain weight due to a antipsychotic, and this might be shallow of me but she was fat herself, so I wasnt too confident in her ability to eat
Hey, if you didn’t trust the dietitian‘s opinion, you could have always gotten a second opinion! In any case I would suggest talking to another one now. Nutrition is always going through some changes, and so is your body, so it’s probably worth another shot.
I've never tried it. My sister is a dietician and has strong feelings about it, as you might imagine. Her opinion is that keto is for epileptics, and she's seen some really gnarly side effects for people who aren't. What I've learned from her: eat lots of whole grains, eat a balanced diet, it's ok to eat snacks in moderation. If you can't stop pooping bananas help. She would probably be offended that this is the bulk of what I remember of what she's told me but here we are!
Cosign the "keto is for epileptics" from everything I've read and listened to on diet and diet culture.
Personally the brief time I did keto was miserable - headaches and brain fog - and now as a diabetic it's considered unsafe for me. Counting carbs is as triggering as counting calories and I find it far more effective to pair fat and protein with my carbs rather than removing them/severely restricting them.
It is my experience that it's rarely sustainable and not particularly healthy in practice and that most people are better off eating a little of the thing they want rather than denying themselves and often inevitably bingeing or quitting due to being miserable.
The biggest issue I have with that advice is what does balanced mean? Even to argue for the opposite side of the aisle of me, and I havnt read ancel keys book yet cause I barely read but my understanding is he describes the macros of the foods the populations he studied ate, and those macros are what he called the Mediterranean diet, i think i seen said it wasa a certain amount of protein fat and carb, and the fat was surprisingly higher then youd think but low in saturated, and the protein was lower then typically consumed today, I'm pretty sure it didn't include the stuff we eat today on a daily basis in moderation, if that's what balanced means, idk, I need to read keys book so I can argue this better lol
I'm paraphrasing because I'm an ecologist, but from what I understand, you want a good mix of vegetables, fruits, protein, carbs, healthy fats, and whole grains. She would have specific guidelines and handouts, I'm sure, but unfortunately for you I know more about bird food than people food, so I can't really participate meaningfully in a human food debate.
I will say that everything she had told me sounds reasonable and fact-based, and she doesn't espouse any particular approach to eating - she just wants everyone to have the nutrients they need, however that works for the particular human in front of her. She gets frustrated with diet fads because they often contain some kind of critical nutrient imbalance that can cause more harm than good. She's the expert, so perhaps it would be good to talk to someone like her?
There are rough target amounts for the fat/fiber/carb amounts you should be aiming for, based on body weight and aim - that's what I understand to be balanced.
And then you refine it further based on future plans, ideally with the help of an expert. Perhaps you need a lot more protein if you're doing lots of strength training. Maybe rather than carbs being 40-50% of the total, they should be closer to 30% due to other health issues, and so on.
And then you take those amounts in grams, and see what foods let you hit those targets in the healthiest way
For balanced, I like Michael Pollan’s line “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” A mix of veggies, fruit, grains/starches, and proteins. Don’t overthink it too much.
A related line of his: “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Might be great-grandmother at this point, but the advice is still the same. A lot of the keto/paleo/diet-related foods at the store fail this test.
I had to learn balance from a historical perspective, my family growing up also had really terrible food habits and so I didn’t learn how to cook until my late 20s.
This is my mental picture for how it works:
In times of food scarcity, your body needs three major categories:
Protein and minerals: animal based or beans/lentils/tofu
Fiber and vitamins: plant based
Calories: carbs and spices
You want your meal to be equal parts protein and fiber, then to up the calories add carbs as needed. For a cheap meal, it’ll be mostly carbs like a lot of mexican/asian/indian dishes. For an expensive meal it’ll be basically a salad like a lot of mediterranean dishes. If you’re more comfortable with American/western dishes, you have equal parts all 3 categories, neatly separated on a plate.
Noted
I did keto for a while, got to my lowest weight as an adult for a time.
I just couldn't hack it long term, it started making me feel really deprived not being able to have my sweet treats.
I also was advised by my doctors to stop keto due to my cholesterol.
Good luck!
My experience with keto is only second hand and i didn't get to see how it turned out because the friend doing it moved jobs and we lost contact. The first couple of months he and his wife were happy with it
For myself, what worked was tracking calories and being pestered by the app to log all the things. Also had various educational materials to learn to make better decisions.
Still a work in progress, I'm at almost 100kg again after a very stressful year.
I believe in logging, when I first switched to the 2:1 keto diet I logged every single thing in cronometer to get an idea of what my macros were, and also because I did that I also saw what my calories were
I was on keto for two years (you can see a post I made here during that time).
Pros
Cons
I have since gone on a vegan diet. My cholesterol and blood pressure are in the ideal range now, and I have lost 70lbs in almost a year and a half. I'm in the best shape of my entire life. It is much easier to be compliant with a vegan diet than a keto one. This is one anecdote: your mileage may vary.
Compliance depends on the person, that's why i hate the term FAD diet, you can pick vegan, keto, Mediterranean, carnivore, paleo, or whatever, and there is some people who stuck with it long term, and also tons of people for whom it was a fad, different diets will appeal to different people
My cholesterol is probably higher, but I havnt got bloodwork done yet so maybe not, bit porbably, my blood pressure has actually decreased though cause I have tracked that using the pharmacy machine
I did a keto diet back in late 2021 and I went from ~300lbs to 218lbs in the course of three months from August to November. I did the dirty version of it, ate a lot of bacon and cheese, steak, keto pizza, and so on. While I was trying to lose weight my initial goal was to crush my A1C as I had been diagnosed pre-diabetic and had black blotches on the folds of my skin which signaled insulin resistance.
That goal was met but in 2022 I stalled out on my weight and even gained some back. Towards the end of 2022, starting in November, I decided to take my diet more seriously. Instead of doing keto I instead simply counted my calories. I ate a high protein diet where I would also eat carbs and vegetables. I would skip any extras and the deserts I had were low calorie options such as Yasso bars. That was significantly more sustainable than the keto diet I was on. And I ended up getting to ~170 toward the end of 2023.
I’ve fluctuated since but not anywhere to the extent that I used to (I used to fluctuate ~60lbs pretty easily).
I understand where you’re coming from with this “natural” stuff and the keto thing. I used to think like that, I also did stuff like Paleo when I was a teenager. I don’t think any of that stuff works long term, and the weight loss you experience is from being in a calorie deficit and when your weight stalls it’s because your metabolism adjusted to your current weight and you’re no longer in a deficit.
Just my two cents on that. My cholesterol also shot up like a mother fucker when I was on keto. And now I’m in the healthy range, and I still eat plenty of red meat and drink 300mg of caffeine a day.
I don't know what my cholesterol is, but I have a baseline cause I happened to get bloodwork around a week or 2 into the diet, so I'll see how it compares to next time I get it
I'm going to go back into a strict keto protocol once the winter hits and there's no fruit when inwalk the dog, but I'm not married to it, I kinda want to try 30 or 60 days only living off food native to my area next fall just for fun, grow dent corn, squash and beans, leech acorns, sunflower seeds, pemmican, berries,, I need to do more research as to what people ate before Europeans arrived, but I think it could make a fun experiment, and its kinda the opposite of keto, other then pemmican its all high carb low fat
With the post and this reply I really think you need to increase your protein content because it seems like you’re minimizing it in your diet on purpose. Protein gives you a slight metabolic improvement and is important for muscle growth.
But, overall if you wanna be serious about losing the weight you’re gonna have to stop the speciality diets and count the calories.
Well counting the macros I'm indirectly counting the calories because fat is 9 calories and protein and carbs is 4, so I know I eat typically around 1700-2300 a day depending on the day, like for the example I gave in the post
70g protein = 280kcal
15g carvbs = 60kcal (340kcal)
170g fat = 1530kcal (1870kcal)
There is no science in this comment, only personal beliefs. There is nothing about weight loss here either.
I kind of aim at some kind of keto-diety thing for 3-4 days before I go on my multi day fasts, I do this to enter (or get close to) ketosis before I start fasting.
For me it helps me focus on the fasting if I face the "keto-flu" before and separately from the actual fasting.
I aim to do weekly fasts four times a year, but this year I've ignored one opportunity, did one for "just" 4 days (I was I'll prepared) and only one full weekly long fast. It is not a big thing for me to skip one or six of these. They are feel good moments, not ascetic self-flagellations.
For me the fasting is part of my vision on how to notice time, ritualize my life a little and remind myself of the abundance of calories I have access to (I also truly believe it is healthy to let the body use its stored resources from time to time).
I'm going to weigh in with some info outside of the legitimacy of keto diets - as I have no data points - and focus on the food. My wife got gestational diabetes when she was pregnant with our son and it meant that she kind of had to eat a keto diet that whole time. Costco has freaking awesome keto friendly snacks! Jojo's chocolate bars are freaking delicious. Skinny Dipped Peanut Butter Cups are still a house staple. And we learned about making keto friendly, low sugar icecream by blending frozen blue berries with coconut milk.
So yeah, not much info on the diet itself but I created whole meal plans for my wife and tried to make her options as broad as possible so if you're interesting in recipes and meal plans let me know and I'm happy to share more.
i most gave up coffee and switched to 200mg caffeine capsule and 250mg theanine. Theanine takes off any potential jitters and rounds out the caffeine so it tapers is instead of crashing.
caffeine and grapefruit juice is good after a break for kick starting your metabolism, i believe.
years ago i went from 225 to 180 (6’4”) doing s modified zone diet that i still do today. it’s so easy — don’t eat junk food, focus on quality protein, only enough carbs as i’ll burn, and limit sugar as much as possible. sugar, alcohol, and most things that come out of a bag are trash and has no business in a body that is trying to lose weight. :)
i’ve never been a snacker, but unless you’re eating smaller meals, i’d avoid it. if you do need to snack, celery and carrots are good.
i don’t eat a lot of fruit since it’s full of sugar.
do you cook everything from scratch?