This is part of a series of writings mainly for my friends and coworkers who have asked me about my eating / health habits and since I found myself repeating the same spiel.
First and foremost, the benefits of keto have been striking for me but I hesitate to proactively recommend it too often since it’s common that people try to do it for a month or two, feel terrible during that period due to electrolyte deficiencies, digestive problems, etc, and end up at a net loss, becoming very turned off by it. When I talk about keto, I’m also not talking about doing it for 2–3 months for the purpose of losing weight; I talk about it in the frame of long term health building. So if you’d like to make an improvement in your health, possibly first develop a general awareness of how different foods make you feel, lean towards a paleo way of eating, go low carb, and try intermittent fasting. If you’ve proven to yourself that you’re able to be consistent in these things, then think about keto.
Ketosis is a state that can be objectively measured and is not just a collection of eating habits. Keto involves a high fat, low carb diet, but that’s not enough. You know you’re in ketosis when your blood ketone levels exceed around 0.5 mmol/L. People frequently use a small finger prick device to test. When you’re in ketosis, you’re engaging different metabolic states and systems. Ketones are a different source of fuel for your body derived from fat (as opposed to glucose).
Entering ketosis is a non-linear shift. If your carb, fat, protein ratio is at 70:10:20 and then you lower carb intake and increase fat intake to make your ratio 50:30:20, there’s a decent chance you’ll be worse off. If you cut to 5:75:20, suddenly your body might love you. We shouldn’t interpret each added/removed input to our body as having an effect that’s just dependent on what that input is. The effect of that added/removed input is also dependent on the other inputs to your body. So if you currently consume things that can be represented by set N. N affects what an added/removed input X may have on you. Since ketosis is based on a non-linear shift, it might be difficult to just want to dip the toes into the pool to try it out and de-risk what seems like an extreme diet. Cutting a small amount of carbs may not be representative of what ketosis would eventually feel like.
There’s also a period of transition of one week to a few weeks where one will likely feel really bad but need to maintain the ratio. Once you start consuming a lot less carbs, your body will start consuming the glycogen stored around your body. Only once your glycogen stores are essentially depleted does your body enter ketosis. In this transitionary period, your body dumps a ton of electrolytes and your body will be uncomfortable with the fact that your energy inputs are less than your energy outputs (at that point, your body isn’t geared to burn fat yet, so it’s still seeking carbs as the energy input). Best thing to do during this period is to hold the ratio and get in plenty of electrolytes especially salt.
Your digestive system will also need to get used to the high fat intake. Your stool will likely go through a roller coaster of textures and densities :P. Make sure you aren’t diluting your stomach acid and other gastric juices. Check the pH of your drinking water and make sure you don’t drink too much liquids immediately after meals.
If you’re able to make it through the tough transition and sustain ketosis, you’ll reap the benefits of higher energy levels, greater mental acuity, absence of food comas, superb insulin sensitivity, less inflammation, and greater metabolic flexibility (ability to burn fat as fuel easily).
If you’re concerned about the risks of keto, you should be. A tiny sliver of the population is genetically predisposed to do very poorly on a keto diet. It’s also had the empirical experience of a much smaller population compared to normal diets. For a point of logical reasoning, it makes sense that there’s some validity to the diet being good for our bodies if you think it from the evolutionary perspective and what kinds of foods we had access to. There’re also many indigenous populations that have lived this way for much of their culture’s history. All in all, this is an ongoing subject of research and has many open questions left to be resolved.
Here are some general tips to keep in mind if you decide to embark on the journey:
- Even though you think you’re eating enough fat, you probably aren’t. You should be eating a disgusting amount of fat.
- In the tough times, think — more electrolytes, more fat, foods that are easier to digest (e.g. maybe for the tiny carb budget, just do white rice. reduce intake of spices especially spicy, numbing ones). It is common to feel like you have the flu during the transition period.
- Expect mess ups. And these mess ups will be painful. You won’t be able to just read a hundred articles and execute perfectly for what’s right for your body. You’ll have to be very aware of how your body’s feeling and experiment. I had digestive problems and had to think a long time from first principles to figure out that maybe my tap water pH was the culprit. That fixed a big set of problems for me. I’ve also had days where I felt really salt deficient, then had too much salt and sat by the toilet puking.
- Eat, eat, eat. Don’t worry about calories. Your body will tell you when you’re full.
- You won’t crave carbs as much as you’d think after a while. Part of our love of carbs relates to our built up metabolic reliance on it and also the carb-loving bacteria in our gut that diminishes once you cut carbs for long enough.
Also published on my substack.
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