Keto made easy

Six Thousand Members, and Behind

2017-11-07

November 2017 — about five months in

Here's the irony. When I ran into my blood-sugar problem and found keto, I was in the middle of trying to cut obligations out of my life. I was actively trying to get things off my plate. And then, against my own better judgment, KetoDick and the Keto Basic group became two brand-new things on it (live RFTC2543).

This was a live video I did with very little warning, tragic lighting and a dirty kitchen. I'd just gotten back from the gym and I was making a lazy dinner, tuna salad and pork rinds, and I figured I'd take questions while I cooked. It didn't go to plan, which is kind of the point of this story.

The group got big

By then Keto Basic had passed 6,000 members. For a while it had been adding 20 or 30 people a day. Then something shifted in the algorithm and it dropped to five or six a day, and honestly, that was fine by me (live RFTC2543). At that size I was starting to miss people. The members I'd been working with got shouted down, or Facebook just didn't show me their posts. Spam showed up. And people with questionable information started answering each other, and I'd walk into a thread and think, oh my god, what is going on here. The pause in growth gave me some time to catch up with the people who were already there.

And I was behind

I told the group straight that I was disappointed in the quality and the pace of my videos. People were kind about it. Almost every message I got started with "I know you're really busy." I was, and that's a good problem, but it's still a problem I had to manage.

There were three things I'd promised the group and hadn't done (live RFTC2543):

They weren't done because I was still trying to reduce the number of things I had going on, and I'd decided I could maintain the group but couldn't pile more on top until other stuff came off. So I asked for help. If you'd had success and wanted to give back, those three projects were the place: source recipes, put together a staple pantry they could all be made from, help with the troubleshooting threads.

I freewheel more than I tell you to

While I was making that tuna salad I talked about tracking, and I caught myself. I hadn't weighed or tracked the mayonnaise. Mayo is a real source of calories. Right there, I could have introduced exactly the problem I tell people to look for (live RFTC2543).

My weight was doing what I expected, so I wasn't worried about it. But I admitted that I freewheel a little more than some people, and definitely more than I recommend. If my results ever stalled, the first place I'd look is whether I was tracking and weighing accurately.

The trick I gave that night: track the whole package. If you eat a three-ounce bag of pork rinds over three days, you didn't eat half an ounce three times. You ate one ounce three times. Log the whole bag. My dinner was a can of tuna at 20 grams of protein plus two pouches at 16 grams each, so a 52-gram protein meal after lifting, and I planned to log the full bag of rinds an ounce at a time over the next three days.

The comments broke

And the whole time, I couldn't see a single comment. People were joining. I was getting the "watching" notices. No questions showed up. I'd had this happen before, and about a third of the time my comments broke on these lives (live RFTC2543). My best guess was it had something to do with posting to the group as a page instead of as a person. So the Q&A turned into an educational video by accident, and I promised to come back and do it again where the comments actually worked.

That's a pretty good picture of November 2017. The group was a success, I was behind, I was being a little loose with my own rules, and the tech was flaky. What I did about it was ask for help, in public.

What I'd tell you now

The "track the whole package" trick is still the best tracking advice I've got, and the tracking chapter and hidden calories that stall keto cover the rest, including the condiments I didn't weigh. I'd also be more honest up front that freewheeling works when things are going well and stops working when they aren't. That's not a moral failing, it's just when you go back to the scale. For the stall thread I never finished, how to break a keto stall without crash dieting is close to what I had in mind, and how much protein on keto answers "what counts as adequate." None of this needed new studies. It needed time, and help.

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