Keto made easy

Potatoes in a Shared Fridge

2017-07-10

July 2017 — day 27

Jumping in cold sounds clean. You stop, you're done, no slow taper, no half-measures. What nobody tells you is that the food doesn't jump in with you. It just sits there.

The fridge problem

I live with somebody who wasn't doing keto. When I quit carbs all at once, there was a whole bunch of food left in the fridge and the pantry, and some of it was carb food that I liked and she didn't. So now it's just there. I didn't want to throw it out. I was trying to feed it to friends when they came by (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

I'll be honest: it would have been easier to be on this diet if those foods weren't around. But I didn't really have problems staying with it, mostly because of the medical reason I started. When it's about not becoming diabetic, it feels less vain than a weight-loss diet, and that kept me out of the pantry (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

What I missed, and what didn't fool me

I'm not going to tell you keto is all fun. I missed potatoes. I missed bread. I missed noodles. I missed some restaurants I couldn't eat at anymore (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

And I really do appreciate everybody putting out the fake recipes, the cauliflower bacon mac and cheese and all that. But mac and cheese is mac and cheese, and cauliflower wasn't going to change that for me (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

Fat bombs didn't win me over either. The best one I tried was four tablespoons of cream cheese, two of peanut butter and two of heavy cream. Kind of tasted like peanut butter cream cheese. I wasn't impressed with the flavor of any of them, and they melt into a mess fast at room temperature (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

What I actually missed most was crunch. Chips, fries, breading, crust: all gone, and keto food can get kind of mushy. So I ate a shitload of pork rinds. Crushed up, they make a decent breading for chicken. I also cooked my bacon further than I normally would, just to get some tooth in an egg salad (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

Fruit was mostly out. I had berries with whipped cream about three times in those first weeks, in little metal sauce cups I bought at a restaurant supply store so the portion stayed small. It hit the sweet tooth and didn't knock me out of ketosis (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

The mayo problem

Here's one I caught myself on. Since starting keto I'd eaten a lot of mayonnaise. Avocado with mayo, egg salad, tuna salad, the works. And mayonnaise is mostly soybean oil, which I had problems with, both for the environment and for my health. It had become way too big a part of what I was eating (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

I looked at the olive oil versions at the grocery store, and they were still mostly soybean oil, just flavored with olive oil. So I said I'd look into making my own. I warned people that olive oil mayo tastes like olive oil, and that peanut oil would probably make a more neutral one (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

And on meat: I told people grass-fed has a different fat profile and it's worth looking into, and then admitted I was buying normal grocery store meat myself (video cTGYIFOTPl8). I advise it. I wasn't doing it.

The fat number that surprised me

This is the part I think matters most.

The usual line is that keto is about 70% fat. At the calories I was supposed to be eating, 70% would have been about 1,400 calories a day from fat. I was getting about 700. I'd eat around a thousand calories, 70% of it fat, and then I'd stop, because I wasn't hungry (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

In the same video I said keto is primarily about not eating carbs. Fat is optional. It's what you eat if you're still hungry after everything else (video cTGYIFOTPl8). And because I was eating so much less overall, I figured I probably wasn't eating much more fat than before keto, even though my percentage was way higher (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

So I wasn't forcing a deficit. I wasn't white-knuckling anything. The hunger regulation was doing it, not my willpower.

What I'd tell you now

Hunger, not willpower, was making my deficit, and I'd still build around that. My later videos went further: by late August 2017 I was telling people to stop eating too much fat if they wanted to lose weight, and in a 2018 upload I called fat the variable you raise or lower by goal (Keto Basics for Beginners). The literature agrees the deficit is the engine: in a ward study at equal calories, cutting carbs did not lose more body fat than cutting fat (doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2015.07.021). On the fat itself, the National Lipid Association's 2019 statement says low-carb diets lower triglycerides and raise HDL, with a variable effect on LDL (doi.org/10.1016/j.jacl.2019.08.003), so get your lipids checked, which I said then too (video cTGYIFOTPl8); see Cholesterol on Keto. One caution: "eat only when hungry" is not a safe rule to run alone if you have a history of disordered eating; read this and talk to a doctor first. More on fat in How Much Fat Should You Eat?, Cooking Fats and Oils, fat bombs and a beginner grocery list.

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