Please note that I am not a doctor. I've been on a keto diet for almost a year now with only positive effects. I've lost a pound per week and I've not even caught a cold or flu. Your mileage may vary. I highly suggest you see a doctor for advice on whether the diet is suited for you. My doctor advised I try it, so it's not some fringe thing. I believe very few people should not go keto for medical reasons.
The keto diet is also known as "low carb/high fat" or "Atkins induction phase." Note that this diet is NOT Atkins, though it has some similarities in the induction phase only.
The diet is counter intuitive. It goes against many of the things you've been told about dieting.
- Don't starve
- Don't count calories
- Portion sizes not so important
- Eat fat
- Eat red meat
- Low fat foods are actually bad on this diet
- Exercise not required
- Lose weight and keep it off.
- Gain mental clarity.
- Energy. Once on this diet, I have been walking or running several miles a day.
- Reduce many health risks, including cancer.
- No need to count calories.
- No need to exercise. You will burn body fat 24/7 once in ketosis.
- No need to starve yourself, starvation is bad.
- The food is really good.
See side effects later in this document.
A keto diet is one where you restrict the amount of carbohydrates you eat in favor of more fat and protein. Your body will eventually change from creating insulin to handle the carbs you eat to creating ketones (the source of the name keto) to handle the fat you will be eating.
Your body creates insulin to convert carbs into energy. The excess is flushed from your system or stored as body fat. Most people don't realize just how many carbs they eat in a day.
When you starve your body for carbs, your pancreas produces a minimal amount of insulin and your liver starts producing ketones.
Your body requires a certain amount of blood sugar to feed the brain and cells. You can choose to let insulin convert carbs into blood sugar or have ketones convert fat into blood sugar.
Your body will become a fat burning machine. You don't have to exercise, though it is still good for health reasons. Your body will burn fat all day and all night, regardless.
The basis for low fat diets is that you create a calroic deficit. By eating fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. It seems to work.
The basis for low carb/high fat diets is that you create a fat deficit. Whatever difference between the fat you eat and the fat needed to create blood sugar will be taken from your body fat.
Eat no more than 20g of net carbs a day and you will surely enter ketosis.
Drink lots of water. A gallon a day is a good start. If you find yourself peeing a lot, you're doing it right!
Don't shy away from fat. Butter is good. Bacon grease is good. Fat tastes great!
If you focus on this, you will almost certainly begin to lose weight. Your weight loss will be rapid at first as you shed excess water, then it will be steady over time.
After a few days, your body will be in a state known as ketosis. Once in that state, your body is a fat burning machine.
Everyone's body is different, so you will develop your own style of diet and food you eat for yourself.
Read the nutrition labels on the foods you want to eat. You might browse the grocery store a few times, picking up various foods and getting a feel for the amount of carbs in each.
Getting to 20g of net carbs or less might seem tough at first, but once you identify the foods you like to eat that are low in carbs, eat until full.
You want to get as many of your 20g of carbs as possible from vegetables.
Fiber is a carb, but it is not absorbed by the body, or broken down by the digestive system. This is why we count net carbs as total grams of carbs minus grams of fiber.
Atkins goes a bit further and also doesn't count grams of sugar alcohols. I'm not sure if this is a good approach, but I am sure that Atkins wants to sell you lots of sweet treats with high carb and sugar alcohol counts. I personally don't count sugar alchols, so those treats look like big carb count items to me.
You will find the foods you eat are high in fat and protein and low (or zero) in carbs. Fat and protein will naturally curb your appetite. When doctors and scientists study the keto diet, they find that people on the diet automatically eat fewer calories because they just aren't hungry much of the time.
DO NOT CHEAT! See the section on cheating below.
I use the browser on my iPhone constantly. Search for "asparagus carbs" to get a carb count and fiber count, so I can calculate net carbs and choose a portion size.
You can use a keto calculator (google for one) to determine how many calories and grams/percentages of each of fat, protein, and carbs you should be eating daily. The % of each is known as a macro, as in macronutrient.
The general rule is you will want to be eating 65% of your calories from fat, 30% from protein, and 5% from carbs.
Going long times between meals or snacks is a really bad thing to do on this diet. Doing so causes your body to go into a mode where it will actually stores fat because it thinks it will need it later as you are starving worse.
See the section on fat fasting later in this document.
This list is not complete, but should give you a great start:
Sugar, potatoes, pasta, rice, beans, grains, sweet fruits (anything but berries, basically).
You will discover via google nutrition results or from the food labels that these foods are certainly well over your daily 20g of net carbs limit. By a lot!
Beware of breaded foods as the breading or batter will almost certainly have high carb counts. Watch out for croutons and dried fruits (rasins, etc.) in salads as well.
First of all, eat fresh foods where possible. Very little of your diet should come from a can.
This list is incomplete, but should give you a good idea:
Meat (beef, lamb, goat, venison), fish, pork, poultry, eggs, healthy fats (butter, coconut oil, olive oil, mayo, etc.), non-starchy vegetables, berries, nuts, seeds, cheese, heavy cream.
The general rule for vegetables is to eat leafy vegetables that grow above ground.
You want almost all your net carbs to come from healty vegetables.
Watch out for spices. Many contain a high carb content. For example, a tablespoon of cinnemon contains 6 carbs!
Feel free to use spices, but be sure you count them in your 20g limit.
Alcohol is not forbidden on this diet, but you do have to watch what kind of drinks you consume.
A 5oz glass of wine is about 4g carbs. The clear hard liquors are zero carbs. Do not mix hard liquor with high carb mixers!
You will find that in ketosis, your alcohol tolerance is greatly reduced, so you won't need to drink a whole lot.
Do not cheat. When you overdo carbs while on this diet, your body leaves ketosis state and your body reacts by retaining water. You will likely see immediate weight gain of a few pounds.
If you cheat, then return to your keto diet/menu, it will take you several days to get back into ketosis.
Even worse, your body will become keto adapted after about a month of dieting, and it will take that long to get keto adapted again after cheating.
Keto adaption is a state your body gets into after weeks of being in ketosis. When you first go into ketosis, your body will still be partially running on glycogen stores. It takes a while to deplete these stores. As you deplete your glycogen stores, your body sheds a lot of retained water.
Once you have depleted your glycogen stores, your body will be making a high level of ketones and a minimal amount of insulin.
I've noticed few side effects to the keto diet. Everyone's experience will be different.
As you first get into ketosis, you may experience what they call the "keto flu." People describe this as at least mild discomfort and fuzzy headedness. At worst, the symptoms can be pretty much like a regular flu bug.
Face it, your body has been addicted to carbs for years, and there simply is no way to avoid withdrawal.
The good news is the keto flu doesn't last more than a few days. Everyone is different.
I barely noticed I had any sort of flu. I was already walking several miles a day and just kept doing it. I drink a bit of coffee and that seems to have mitigated the effects.
While in ketosis, you may experience a sort of metallic taste in your mouth and bad breath. Mouthwash and brushing your teeth will have no effect, since it has nothing to do with what's going on in your mouth. It has more to do with
Drinking lots of water will reduce bad breath. Bad breath is also a sign you are eating too much protein.
If you're drinking lots of water, you will naturally have to pee a lot. It is a good thing and a sign you're doing it right.
Additionally, your pee may actually smell funky and be a bit on the sticky side. Again, this is normal.
Your body is really good at processing the kinds of food you will eat on your low carb diet, so you will poop a lot less often.
One side effect of this diet is you are eating lots of meat and fat, neither of which contain fiber which can cause constipation or lack of bowel movements.
I recommend using a fiber supplement, like Benefiber, as well as making sure you eat fibrous vegetables in your diet.
In the morning, I drink 3 cups of coffee with 2 teaspoons of Benefiber each. Count the carbs! That's 4 grams total carbs, 3 grams fiber for 1 gram net carbs each 2 teaspoons. Or I basically start the day using 3 carbs for my coffee and 17g for the rest of my day.
You're losing weight and fat. Of course you'll fit into smaller clothes.
Hamburger is cheap, but steak is expensive. You can eat both, but hamburger all the time can get boring.
During weight loss, your body naturally will go through periods of weight loss plateaus. That is, you will not see weight loss on the scale for some period of time. This is normal, and nothing to worry about.
Even though you may not be losing weight, it may be that you are losing inches around the waist and elsewhere. You may be losing fat and adding muscle, and muscle weighs more than fat.
I've had two weight loss plateaus in the past year and went down a pant size during the first.
One possible way to bust through a plateau is to do a fat fast. Otherwise, I say keep on ketoing and you will eventually break through.
Some people say that if you hit a weight loss plateau for a few weeks, you might kickstart the weight loss again with a fat fast.
A fat fast isn't really a fast at all. You will consume 800-1200 calories worth of fat, and little or no carbs and protein. The rule is at least 80% of calories from fat. You fast for 2-4 days, depending on the results and how you feel.
There is no hard and fast rule for how to do a fat fast, but I can give you an example of how I've done it.
A half pint of half and half or heavy cream have roughly the same nutrition info. 16 servings, 50 calories each, 6 grams of fat each. 16x50 = 800 calories, 16x6 = 96g of fat. Mix the half and half with a few cups of coffee as the day progresses.
To give you an idea of what I eat, here are a few meals ideas.
- 9oz steak, 2 cups of broccoli, butter, and a cesar salad without croutons.
- 4 slices of bacon and 3 eggs cooked in the bacon grease.
- 2 servings of salami slices, mustard, and low carb cheese.
- Hamburger with no bun, bacon, cheese, jalapeno rings, mustard, mayo, and a fried egg on top.
- Broiled salmon covered with shrimp in a butter sauce, asparagus, and a salad
- Bowl of: shredded coconut, handful of almonds, teaspoon of cocoa powder, teaspoon of stevia, handful of raspberries.
- Coffee with a tablespoon of coconut oil.
- Crack slaw - steam a bag of broccoli slaw mix and stir into a pound of browned 70% lean hamburger (add jalapeno if you like spicy). Season with asian spices (soy sauce, fish sauce, siracha), or hot sauce, or anything else that sounds good to you and is low carb.
- Browned hamburger with fresh mushrooms and a can of low carb coconut cream. Reduce until the sauce is thick. Season with curry.
- Mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes. Steam it and pulverise in a food processor along with cream cheese, regular chees (cheddar), and bacon (and the grease).
- Bacon wrapped asparagus.
- Almond milk, cocoa powder, 2 tablesppons peanut butter, stevia. A great tasting sort of chocolate milk.
- Deviled eggs. Can't get enough of them.
This list is certainly not complete, but hopefully it gets you thinking about what to eat.
Eggs are one of the most ideal foods on this diet. Scrambled, fried, omelettes, hard boiled, deviled, etc. An egg has 74 calories, 5g fat, .4g carbs, and 6g protein.
A handful of almonds is 169 calories, 15g of fat, 2g net carbs, and 6g of protein. For some reason the salted ones are net 2 carbs and the raw ones are net 3.
A cup of broccoli is 31 calories, .34g of fat, 3.5g net carbs, and 2.5g protein. We love butter, right? You also get 135% of the RDA for vitamin C, along with lots of other nutritional goodness.
A cup of asparagus is 27 calories, .16g of fat, 2g of net carbs, and 3g of protein.
An avacado is 322 calories, 30g of good fat, 4g protein, 3.5g net carbs, of which 13.5g are fiber.
If you have questions, please fill out an issue.
Feel free to fork this repo, make changes as you see fit, then issue a pull request.