From Twenty Grams to Fifty
May 2018 — about a year after I started
I want to own something. In July 2017, a few weeks into my own keto start, I told beginners to set their carb limit and work their way down to 20 (video DoSUgIr2rNo). Twenty was the number. It's the number everybody in the keto world says.
To be fair to 2017 me, I wasn't a total purist. In another video that same day, I said if you're confused, just eat less than 50 carbs and nothing else matters (video xyEZL0HuejI). And a day later I was already picking a fight with exactly 20: show me the source that says a six-foot, 200-plus-pound guy who does combat sports and a five-foot woman get into ketosis at the same 20 grams, not 23, not 18 (video 1vyxuWlxT5M). But 20 was still the target, and 50 was the bailout.
By May 2018 I flipped it. Fifty became the rule.
What changed my mind
A year of watching people. I'd been running a group, answering messages, and reading post after post from beginners. What I said in the video was that there's way too much complexity in the information people get handed, and they don't know what to do with the diet because there's too much going on (video UygKGoP_BtA [0:00]). Net carbs, total carbs, fat bombs, macro calculators, which pink salt.
So I recorded a video for beginners that I meant to be quick. It wasn't quick. I said up front that the 50 was going to be an unpopular answer, and that we'd forget those people and keep it basic so you could succeed (video UygKGoP_BtA [0:00]).
Here's the reasoning I gave, and I still think it's the whole ballgame. Almost every diet works if you stay on it. The problem is staying on it. Every step you add makes it harder to do right and easier to feel like you've failed. People would watch and say, "but what's the harm in also telling them to do this?" The harm is adherence. The more complicated we make this, the less likely you are to stick with it long-term, and long-term is where the real weight loss happens.
The 2018 beginner method
This is what I told you to do, month one:
- 50 g of total carbs a day. Total, not net. American food labels make net carbs a mess to calculate, so we weren't going to try.
- Almost all of those carbs from vegetables, mostly the green ones. Leafy greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, green beans, avocado, kale. Go easy on starchy stuff like potatoes, corn, carrots and yams. Fiber was the thing I thought people neglected most, and the higher carb number was partly so you'd have room for it.
- Protein floors. Women 80 g, men 100 g. Add 20 if you're unusually tall for your sex, and another 20 if you train hard: heavy lifting, CrossFit, marathons. Too little protein is more of a problem than too much.
- A multivitamin. Any common one with some magnesium and calcium in it. I wasn't endorsing a brand, and you didn't need anything special.
- Bouillon. A cup or two a day, the salted kind, to keep your sodium up.
- Light salt. The point was the potassium chloride in it. Salt your food like you normally would.
- No calorie counting in month one. Fat was the variable. Eat until you're full and let the hunger control do its job.
- Expect the stall. Water weight comes off in week one, then weeks two to three (sometimes four) do almost nothing. That's normal. Take photos on day one. One woman taped pieces of yarn on her wall for different parts of her body and watched them get shorter. Steal that.
And because I'm not a doctor and said so: if you take medication for a health condition, go over all of this with your doctor, especially the dosing of those medications (video UygKGoP_BtA [0:00]).
Why simple beat strict
Twenty grams is stricter, and in 2017 strict felt like the point. But the digestive trouble I kept hearing about usually came from people oversimplifying: all carbs are bad, vegetables are carbs, so vegetables are bad, and then no fiber (video UygKGoP_BtA [0:00]). Fifty with a plate full of greens is something you can do for a year without hating your life.
The simplest plan you'll stick to beats the strictest plan you won't. That's not me going soft. That's me reading the scoreboard.
What I'd tell you now
What I can't say is that 50 g gets you into ketosis for sure. None of the evidence I'm working from tests a carb cutoff for that. What the long trials do show is that the gaps between diets are small and sticking with it is what counts. In DIETFITS, 12 months of a moderate healthy low-carb diet versus a healthy low-fat diet came out at −6.0 kg versus −5.3 kg, not significantly different (doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.0245). Pooling 13 trials of at least 12 months, very-low-carb ketogenic diets came out 0.91 kg ahead of low-fat (doi.org/10.1017/S0007114513000548). On the multivitamin: in one trial, women on Atkins were shifting toward too little thiamine, folate, vitamin C, iron and magnesium by week 8 (doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.2010.29468), which is the gap I was trying to cover. But the US Preventive Services Task Force says the evidence is insufficient to weigh a multivitamin's benefits and harms for preventing heart disease or cancer (uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org), so it isn't magic. On fiber, the reference intake is 25 g a day for women 19–50 and 38 for men 19–50 (National Academies, nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/10490), and that's a lot to fit inside 50 total. Hence the vegetables. On light salt, a large trial of a potassium-enriched salt substitute (20,995 people) found fewer strokes and deaths (doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675), and WHO suggests potassium-containing substitutes except for people at risk of high potassium (who.int). If you have kidney disease or take blood-pressure or diabetes medication, ask your doctor before you use potassium salt or cut carbs. Pregnant? Same. More: how many carbs, why 20 grams?, light salt explained, sodium, multivitamins, who should talk to a doctor.
The video: Keto basics for beginners: 50 carbs, enough protein, keep it simple.
Earlier: A black eye and a fight plan · Later: 188, and back to 200