I am taking a day off from my voluntarily restricted eating plan, and that combined with writing about the chocolates reminds me that it’s a good time for an infrequent-as-promised (I haaaaaaate constant diet talk, but I like periodic check-ins) diet update.
I have been on the keto eating plan (very very low carbohydrates, plenty of everything else) since July 2017. I have not increased exercise; it’s been an eating change only. Here are previous posts on the topic:
• Keto Grocery Shopping List (not just a shopping list, but also telling you about the diet for the first time, and talking about Diet Talk in general)
• What I Eat on the Keto Diet
• Cholesterol Report After a Year on the Keto Diet
I have never before stayed on a restricted food plan for this long. I lost about 60 pounds in about a year plus a month or two, and since then I’ve been maintaining. With experimentation, I have found that I can take one to two days off per week and still maintain my current weight.
It was odd to get to a point where I felt like I was done losing weight. That has never happened before with a diet: I always go off a diet before I’ve lost as much as I want to. I’ve never been in maintenance mode before. I’ve heard it can be way harder to maintain than to diet, because it’s still most of the work of dieting but without the motivating thrill/reward of seeing the numbers go down. I will say more about this in a minute.
It is also odd to realize that my chosen stopping-point would be a Nightmare Weight/Size for someone else—in fact, for many, MANY someone elses. It is impossible to escape the culture: we thoroughly receive the message that thinner is always better, and certainly if you CAN be thinner you SHOULD be thinner—and even if you CAN’T be thinner, you should STILL be thinner. People much, much thinner than I am are struggling hard to lose more weight. Much-thinner friends talk about how they hate their bodies and feel like they’re wearing a fat suit, and I can be sympathetic even knowing that at my current size (the smallest I’ve been in over a decade) I still outweigh the friends by fifty pounds or more. I know that weight gain/loss is relative (on the way up, my current weight appalled me, whereas now it contents me), and I know how it feels to get away from what feels like your own normal weight; and I know we tend to look more forgivingly/lovingly at other people’s bodies than at our own; and I know that when people talk about their own weight they’re rarely talking about anyone else’s. (I originally put “they’re not talking about anyone else’s,” but sadly I think we all know of people who drop hints about other people’s weight by talking about their own weight. It’s just that I am fortunate not to have any in my regular circle.)
I wasn’t sure, when I started out, how much weight I was trying to lose. For one thing, I had very little hope of accomplishing any stated goal: I’ve been on so many failed diets, it felt stupid to have hopes/goals. For another thing, I didn’t know how much I COULD lose, even if the diet did work. But what it came down to eventually was figuring out where did I feel RIGHT, and I wasn’t going to know that until I got there. And sure enough, there was a point where I just started to feel Right, and I gave it some time to see if I would get restless to lose more weight, but I didn’t, and so I decided to attempt to stay there.
I am just barely out of plus sizes. According to the BMI chart (may it rot in hell where it belongs), I am obese (may that word, too, rot in hell where it belongs). I feel cute, and most of the time I like the way I look now, and I don’t mind as much having my picture taken, and I have a much easier time buying clothes. It’s much, much easier to walk, and to cross my legs, and to get down on the floor and back up again, and to sit comfortably, and to climb stairs, and to do things like crawl into the back of the minivan to vacuum it. There has been a significant uptick in Male Attention, which is so irritating/infuriating I can hardly express how much it makes me want to start screaming and strangling, while at the same time it’s queasily gratifying in a way I hope you just immediately understand without me having to unpick it further, because I realize it’s gross and yet I feel like you will nod cringingly, knowing what I mean even as your hands form the strangling position and a scream rises in your throat.
Do you remember that 80%/20% thing, usually applied to grades, about how you can get 80% of the result with 20% effort, but getting the last 20% result will take the remaining 80% effort? (A professor once used this as, apparently, a way to motivate us to work much harder to get an A; my absolute take-away was that it was obviously way more sensible/efficient to get the B.) I feel as if I’ve applied that concept nicely to this diet, though I wouldn’t say I put in only 20% effort. But still: same KIND of thing. I did not want to get to the point where I was working hard all the time to lose another half-pound or whatever. I didn’t want to have to exercise hard for hours a day, or think about calories constantly, or be hungry all the time, or feel wrong for eating food. I wanted to be happy at a place that was easy to maintain, not stuck feeling like I’d stretched the slingshot as far as I could and would be rocketed back to my old weight if I relaxed at all. I didn’t want to have to put in constant, unrelenting effort to achieve/maintain small results.
I was worried that maintenance mode would be too hard: as I said above, I’d heard it was difficult to stay motivated without the reward of decreasing numbers. But I have found that the reward of increased treats is plenty for now. We’ll see how long that lasts, but right now I find “numbers staying within a certain range on the scale” plus “yay, one to two days of non-dieting per week!” is plenty motivating, and more pleasantly peaceful than when I was hoping for the numbers to go down. I like the feeling that it’s no big deal if I need to take a day off for a get-together or special occasion. I like the feeling of coasting instead of pedaling. I like the feeling of looking at the scale just to check, as opposed to hoping and/or feeling disappointed.
It also helps that I am now completely acclimated to the keto eating. When I started, everything felt so upside-down from what I was used to, and sometimes I would get stuck, feeling like there was NOTHING I could eat, NOTHING! and that this was IMPOSSIBLE! I vented about this to a friend who had been on keto longer than I had, and he told me he didn’t feel that way anymore: that he felt like keto was Just How He Eats Now. I found that news dismaying: I didn’t WANT it to be normal, I wanted it to be a weird fad diet that then I could go OFF of when I was done losing weight. But then more time passed, and now on my diet-following days my food feels normal/familiar. And then on my days off, I eat everything I want, and it’s like a holiday. Everything tastes so good, and there are so many choices! On my on-diet days, if things feel rough, I just think ahead to my next day off. And now that I’m maintaining, that day is never very far away, so I’m never telling myself “No,” I’m always telling myself “Yes, just wait a little longer.”
And I want to make sure you understand that a “day off” or “day of non-dieting” is not a day of Sensible Non-Keto Eating. Like, it’s not as if it’s five or six days of keto weirdness, and then one to two days of eating grilled chicken and fruits/vegetables and milk and a piece of whole-grain bread, maybe a half-cup of vanilla ice cream. No. The days off involve things like pizza, french fries, potato soup, bagels, doughnuts, ice cream, candy, fast food, snack-cakes. Whatever I pine for on the keto days, I eat on the non-keto days. Candy/chocolate used to be the most important thing to me, so it’s interesting to me that what I most want on days off are things like breads, rice, potatoes, and cakey things. I think it’s the texture as well as the flavor: keto doesn’t have much with the texture of bread/potatoes/cake. I also want grapes, grapefruit, and those little Dove Mini ice cream bars. My long-term goal is to have more days off but with less extreme party-food eating on those days, or maybe to be off the keto thing entirely and just be eating well with reasonable treats, but we’ll see if that ever happens. The current “all on or else all off” seems to work with my temperament better than moderation.
Anyway, that’s how it’s going. I realize this story could still end in me ditching the diet and gaining the weight back. That is true of a statistically enormously large percentage of diets. But FOR NOW, this diet is working better for me than any diet ever has, and also it feels sustainable for now.
Okay, that’s enough diet talk for awhile. (I mean, YOU can talk in the comments section, though I recommend re-reading this post first; it’s hard to talk about diets. But I mean that I will now wait a fairly long time before doing another post about diets/dieting.)
Now…read up on and consider integrating Intermittent Fasting. Combined with keto, it’s pretty much magic. And the science is sound. I read and read and read before I started.
And – funny thing, or not – come to find out, lots of my ‘naturally thin’ friends IF without even knowing they do.
I was going to suggest the same thing. A great book is “Delay, Don’t Deny” (which seems very similar to the mindset you already have!) and it’s a nice easy and encouraging read but still has links to data and articles to back up the reasoning. I’d looked into IF before and felt like it was a really intense concept with a lot of rules (I think a lot of people who like really intense workout and diet regimes also write a lot about strict IF methods) but the presentation in this book is a LOT simpler (as in, “Eat when it’s your eating window, and then don’t eat anything when it’s not!” No other rules except an explanation of clean fasting, and the eating window thing offers a lot of flexibility for what works for you and your life at that moment). But if you’re totally happy right now and don’t want to change anything, ignore this completely! ;)
Congratulations on going someplace you’ve never been before. I’m happy to hear about your NSVs: non-scale victories. The ones related to mobility are pretty great; the happiest old people are the ones who can still move like they need to in order to take on their day. You are doing a great thing for Future Swistle, is what I mean by all of this.
This post came at the perfect time for me. My endocrinologist just told me last week that my glucose numbers are back up in “diabetes is staring you in the face” territory, and so I’m tracking my food again and trying to stay low carb and what not. And I always find it easier to do this for the sake of glucose numbers rather than weight numbers. I really actually like my body right now (I’m 4’11” and 30 pounds heavier than my son who is 5’9), so losing weight is so much not the goal and my welfare is.
Anyhow, I’m using an app called Cornerstones 4 Care (C4C) to track my food and it’s got almost everything I eat already in it. Including Korean BBQ and the steamed egg side dish I ate there. Which means tracking is not the absolute disaster it was the last time I did this.
Here is a dieting thing that I would like to talk about. Over the weekend I was at a gathering of 6 two year old + my 5 year old daughter + parents. Among the moms, there was much talk about dieting, exercising, and eating or not eating the bagel. I didn’t want my 5 year old to hear/internalize this, but also didn’t speak up. These are not people I know well.
A point where you can maintain weight and eat treats some days is awesome!
I think the good part is that this is happening when your daughter is still young enough that she will listen to you, whenever you choose to address this. I come from a diet-/weight-/appearance-fixated family, so I’ve had to do a bonus amount of unpacking of the things my kids hear. But! My kids have learned to listen to their bodies and to notice messages that there is something wrong with you and we have a product to fix it.
So have those conversations knowing that it can pay off.
I’m really happy for you, Swistle. It’s good to hear from someone who maybe didn’t have a lot of faith in things in the beginning who’s now in a happier place. And is good with herself.
Can I just say what drives me crazy in my own weight stuff? I’m currently trying to approach weight stuff via working on exercise first. My husband decided that he needed to lose weight, and his method consists of riding his bike in the basement for a couple of hours every night. Which is great, but he comes up and wakes me up to tell me the number of calories he burned that evening. And he tells me his current weight at least 2-3 days a week. I am trying so hard to be supportive and cheerful for him, separate from how I’m doing. I KNOW that if I tried to do what he’s doing, it would be a setback– I had an injury last August and the comparatively low-yet-growing level of exercise I’m doing is approved by a PT and planned so that I don’t re-injure myself. But I have to say that the last thing I need in my life is to be awakened at 1 or 2 a.m. to be told that he just burned 800 calories. Or to hear that he now weighs less than I do. (Which he doesn’t know. He took a guess at my weight on something a couple of weeks ago, and his guess was 30 pounds less than what I actually weigh. I am absolutely not telling him.)
I am so tired of being the tortoise to his hare, and of feeling like I can’t even get to the starting line. I’m holding steady at my current weight and at least not gaining, but I would feel a lot happier if I could start to lose weight, too. And to hear from him in vaguer terms. The exact numbers he reports are not helping my brain.
Offering some solidarity- I understand and I’m sorry. I am 5’2” and my husband is 6’2”. I joined Weight Watchers and in a year I lost 40 lbs and have kept it off. I am really happy with that! Like Swistle my BMI still says obese and I’m certainly not where I “should” be by lots of measurements but my body is comfortable here. My husband saw my success and decided to join WW too. In 4 months he lost 50lbs, and it looks like 80 on his tall frame. It was so discouraging to watch it practically melt off of him while I had to work SO. HARD. He was also able to put in a lot of running miles and I was mainly diet focused. I think you should chat with your husband about this and maybe lay down some ground rules where you could check in with his progress when you’re ready to ask, and that he not word vomit it all over you. :( I found a better place to be was just asking my husband each week on weigh in day, “how’d you do this week?”
As a personal trainer I can tell you men always lose weight faster than women. They also naturally have more muscle than us, which burns fat faster. I just accept it and move on. My husband weighed more than me for 10 years. Finally FINALLY after 15 months I weigh less than him but his thighs are still smaller and aint that some shizz.
One thing you are doing that I LOVE is exercising first. One of the great weight loss failures I see is people who get their diet on point, then add in exercise, get more hungry, and end up eating more to account for the new calories burned, and gaining more. I think it’s really important to get your body used to exercise, to get used to the new eating and hunger patterns that come with exercise, and then tackle food. I also recommend starting one meal at a time. Spend two weeks focussing on breakfast. Once you have that slam dunked move on to lunches. Then snacks and dinner. If you try and change it all at once, plus exercise you may find yourself hiding in the closet with a bag of Lays because that’s less overwhelming than cooking one more healthy meal.
Good luck on your future journey. I highly recommend learning to use the weight machines at your gyms. Women will see a faster rate of weight loss if they build muscle. I used to sit on the elliptical and see no results. I tracked my calories one on the elliptical with a heart monitor, and they were sad. I hired a trainer, and tracked the same hour of weights and almost tripled my burn. Women are conditioned to believe we belong on an elliptical but the opposite is true.
June, I don’t know if this will be helpful, but your husband’s approach seems like the perfect illustration of the HAES reminder that if a thin person did what a fat person is told to do, it would be considered disordered eating. I mean, good for him if he’s enjoying exercise, but it doesn’t sound like he is. He’s just glorying in the numbers.
Can you throw away the scale, at least?
Solidarity. My husband even says he’s starting a diet and loses ten pounds. Tremendously frustrating.
Oh, I would not like this either. Paul is a talkie dieter/exerciser, too (though does not wake me up to tell me, omg), and I would rather NOT discuss it, and certainly not multiple times per week, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to feel like we’re COMPETING. Have you seen the new Mary Poppins movie, in which one of the kids asks Mary Poppins her weight and her eyes fly open? That is the face I would make if my husband tried to guess my weight.
I would say, “Ground rules: YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO WAKE ME UP for anything less than an emergency.” WHAT EVEN.
NO.
Also, sleep is important for health, and a lack of sleep tends to trigger food cravings for me.
Oh ugh — I am with Swistle on the “Wait, he … Wakes You UP to tell you …”?! bit??? That is outrageous (not in a good way).
As a middle-aged woman I’ve realized I have at least 2 superpowers — I am invisible, and I can subsist on virtually no calories. I figure these will be useful, post-apocalypse.
There has been a significant uptick in Male Attention, which is so irritating/infuriating I can hardly express
how much it makes me want to start screaming and strangling, while at the same time it’s queasily gratifying in a way I hope you just immediately understand without me having to unpick it further, because I realize it’s gross and yet I feel like you will nod cringingly, knowing what I mean even as your hands form the strangling position and a scream rises in your throat.
I am nodding along, totally. It seems ridiculous that feeling attractive or sexy (we aren’t brains-in-jars after all, but animals built to reproduce) is subject to the beauty standards of men. Bleck! I hope our daughters and sons will improve on this somehow.
Aw so happy for you, Swistle! I am 5 months pp with #5 and about 20pounds heavier than normal but I always lose it a bit closer to the year mark. Once I reach my normal weight (and actually I have a whole decade of weight that I am happy in 🤣 – less in summer, more in winter) I take weekends off and maintain easily. It’s just hard to get started on the actual losing, you know?!?! I always love reading your “diet” updates!
I love reading this update! I’m so happy you found something that works for you and that you are happy with your body. I am 5’2” and lost 40 lbs on WW and have kept it off for over a year now. I’m still 30 lbs from my own original goal weight, but I’m really proud of myself for maintaining where I am for now. Like you, my BMI still says obese and I’m certainly not where I “should” be by lots of measurements but my body is comfortable here. Even at my own chosen goal weight (if I decide to try for it after I’m done being pregnant), I will still be labeled “overweight” by the BMI. Sorry, this frame is just not ever going to weigh 120. Not happening and it would be really stupid and frustrating to make that my goal.
I find this all fascinating. I seem to remember thinking, when you first explained this, how hard it would be for me because of all the eggs. It seems a very egg-centric diet. And you are, I think, a carb lover like me. Nonetheless I find this eating plan super intriguing. How long did it take you to acclimate to no foods? And how often did you have a treat day, in the beginning? And what is it like in a household where others are not (I am assuming) doing the same type of eating? Does that make it hard, or does Paul cook for himself and the kids and you cook for yourself? I imagine it could be as simple as planning lots of “meat, veggie, carb” meals and then just avoiding the carbs but also would be hard (for me at least). What do the kids think about it and how do you explain it? I ask this because my kid wants to know whenever I am deviating from my norm and I never know what to say about dieting without getting into sticky areas about WHY which I am not fully clear on myself. (The whole thing is v. complicated.)
* acclimate to no carbs, is what I was going for.
I’m not sure how long it took me to acclimate; it seems like it was a long, long time. Like, if I were to look back and see that it took me a year to feel settled with it, I would not be shocked by that. But I’ll bet it was more like a number of months before I stopped feeling consistently sorry for myself. Like, six months.
In the beginning I went several weeks between treat days, because I was Very Worried that I would have a treat and it would knock me totally off of the diet and I would never go back to the keto eating. Then I gradually narrowed the gaps as I got less worried about that, but still was taking days mostly only for REASON days: holidays, or occasions where it would be really difficult or awkward or embarrassing not to be eating normally. Then when I started maintaining, that’s when I started having days off just for the joy of having days off.
It is kind of hard to do keto in a house where other people are not eating keto, but I’ve gotten used to it. At first I was resentful about cooking things I couldn’t eat, and sometimes I still am. Sometimes it’s hard to have a cupboard of chips and cakey things that everyone can have except me, but other times it’s just like “Well, I can have that on Saturday!” Some meals I can take out a portion for myself before adding stuff that I can’t have: like, when we have tacos, I can take out a scoop of the meat before I add the pureed legumes/carrots to it; or, when Paul makes pizza, I take some of the toppings to add to my scrambled eggs. But mostly I just make my own food separately.
I told the kids I was trying something I’d read about a diet that could alleviate joint pain, which is the truth but not the whole truth. I DID read that keto could reduce joint pain for some people (something about carbohydrates causing inflammation which I don’t know if it’s true), and I WAS having a lot of joint pain (enough to make walking difficult). And my joint pain HAS lessened, quite likely because there is less weight on the joints—but also when I take two or three days off in a row, I DO notice (or possibly IMAGINE I notice) more joint pain, so maybe there’s something to it.
Unrelated to keto- can you tell us more about the carrots/legumes in the taco meat? Is this a meat stretching method, or hiding veg from the kids? Or both?
Yes! It’s an attempt to get a larger variety of foods into my picky children. They won’t eat legumes if they see the shape of the beans, but they WILL eat them ground up and mixed with meat. They spend twenty minutes choking down a single baby carrot (and right now two of them have braces and can’t eat carrots that way anyway), but I can puree two handfuls of carrots and add them to the meat.
Male Attention, I get it. And BMI… haven’t there been enough doctors pointing out how very flawed BMI is? Why is this still used as a measure of health? It feels like it is going to be one of those things that everyone knows is BS, but is used regularly anyway until people 50 years from now start saying to people, “Um, you know that measurement went out when Pluto lost its planet status, right?”
A couple weeks ago I went to the doctor with an achy chest, like really sore muscles at the beginning of a new exercise regimen, except I hadn’t been exercising. The doctor said it was acid reflux and put me on a bland diet – no spicy foods, low fat, no caffeine, so very, very boring. All my husband heard was “diet,” so after a week he asked if I had lost weight. He had stopped drinking beer around the same time and already his jeans were noticeably looser! So how was my progress? Not one pound lost. I almost cried. But my chest feels better….
BMI is a joke. I’m 5′ 1″ and when I weighed 200 pounds, yes I was overweight. When I weighed 131 it decided I was obese. But 130 was okay. 118 was the ideal weight for my height. I got there once and it felt like an eating disorder. I workout a lot so I’m pretty lean, 118 was not a good fit. Now I’m 1301-132 and BMI tells me I’ve overweight. But I’m a size 2-4 o4 xs-s, and have visible lean muscles, and look not too shabby for 37 years old. So personally I think the BMI can fuck right off. No way can I be both a size 4 and obese. Now I just measure if my pants button or not!
I’m 5’2” and yes UGHHHHH THIS.
This is going to sound crass, but if the difference between me being “obese” and “normal” is a good poop, then their entire system is flawed. I can leg press 270 pounds, wear a size 4 at Lululemon (I wouldn’t walk into that store for 10 years because of my weight, and my body images, even when I got down to 118), and fit into youth clothes at target, but the CDC/government wants me to believe I’m fat. No thanks. How about we measure body fat, muscle, and pants that fit…not an arbitrary scale weight you rude ass CDC.
It’s so great you have a system that works. I am 46 (I feel like this is approximately your age? but I remember someone somewhere on the internet once saying we all just assume everyone on the internet is our age, which is funny and true) and I’ve had to devise a new system in the last few years. So I don’t know if it gives you any comfort, but even if you had successfully dieted in years past, once you hit middle age (ha I hate that phrase) it likely would have changed ANYWAY so it’s just great you have a system now!
For around the past 9 months I’ve worked on a system to try and get me back to what I call a “mentally comfortable” weight. It could be Really Skinny to some people, and Really Overweight to others, is has no independent meaning to anyone but me. I’ve been moderately successful — not quite to what would be my Mentally Optimal weight but in the ball park, and it is interesting how after a long enough time, a new diet can be just The Way I Eat Now.
If you are ever interested in mixing things up — I (like another commenter) have been messing around with intermittent fasting. For many years (like my whole life until last year) I was a breakfast person, but I have pretty much eliminated breakfast (except for a big cup of coffee) in the past year and try to eat dinner a little earlier. It is a change that has worked for me along with some other tweaks, as my system for my middle aged self is much different from what it was when I was 30 or even 35!
I really enjoy your Keto Updates! And great job with all you have done. It is quite impressive!
My husband and I have been eating low-carb for about a month. We both want to lose weight, of course he is losing it much more quickly than me, as usual. One thing I would be interested in knowing is whether your family still eats the same suppers, do you eat separately, or is there an extra side for the kids?
We all eat together, but different foods. I generally make one main meal, and if Paul doesn’t want to eat it he makes his own dinner, and if I can’t get enough to eat from it I add my own stuff, or if there’s NOTHING I can eat from it (like, it’s soup and toasted cheese) I make my own separate quick thing.
Do you have specifically scheduled days off? Like one particular day? I don’t particularly have a weight problem but I have a sugar problem in that eating too much sugar makes me feel terrible the next day and when I feel terrible all I want to eat is sugar. I am incapable of moderation- once I start, I finish the whole bag. So maybe I just need to accept that when I go to Aldi once a week I’m going to binge on peanut butter cups (SO GOOD) and then try to avoid sugar the rest of the time? Hmmm.
Generally there are things on the schedule that help me pick which day to take off: like, a get-together with friends, or a lunch out with a friend, or a big family thing, or a holiday. If there’s nothing coming up, I just pick a day.
I love these updates, in part because I just love everything you write and the way you break it down, and in part because I just find it really interesting to know what works for different people. And of course, because you’re you, there is not a SHRED of grandstanding or judgment in anything you have to say — it’s all purely in the purely well-intentioned vein of “here’s what works for me” with no presumption of what might/might not work for others.
Like Carla (above), as I’ve entered my 40s, I have figured out what tweaks I have to make from time to time to feel good and right (by my own standards). Recently I’ve had some injury and illness that upended my usual exercise routine and I’ve had to adapt to that. It’s a pain to have to think about, but at the same time, I can take bits and pieces of various ways to do things, and figure out how they apply to me. Hearing you walk through that whole process is a way of seeing into someone else’s tweaks and methods and I enjoy that so much more than the latest daily article about how everything we think we know is ALL WRONG and everybody has to do it ONE WAY or else WE WILL ALL DIE.
Hi Swistle, I hope this doesn’t sound weird – but your initial posts inspired me to give it a go myself. I’m down 28 pounds since September (plus a bit extra correcting the effects of a complete and enthusiastic Christmas hiatus!) which is astonishing to me. I feel as though I’m mostly in a groove with it now, and like you have never managed to make a diet stick for so long. Like I said – astonishing.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience – it has been hugely valuable to me!
Oh, nice! I’m glad it’s working out for you! Wasn’t Christmas DELICIOUS? I found I got way more in the holiday spirit because the treats were so extra-TREATY!
Oh Swistle, I am asking for advice! I have been watching my weight rise with dread. But I was too paralyzed to start anything. You inspired me with your Keto. I thought for a LOT of months, finally decided on a Jan. 1 start. I looked at your Keto posts, checked Keto books out of the library and….started. I have cheated exactly two meals. I have eaten wayyyyy less than usual. I have lost….1 pound. In five weeks. Now, I didn’t have a scale for the first two weeks, so I might have lost more, but I am getting discouraged. Yet it has worked so well for you and I want it to work for me! Any tips? Did you have discouraging times?
(Keeping in mind that I am no expert and not a medical professional, and everything I know about this is from library books, searching online, and friends who do or have done keto:) The most important thing in the beginning, I think, is diligently counting carbohydrate grams and keeping it at 20 grams or fewer per day. It’s a total pain, and it makes the first few weeks a lake of despair (one gram per stick of SUGARLESS GUM?? one gram per SUGARLESS BREATH MINT?? three net grams in a cup of frickin’ BROCCOLI??) but it surprised me how many carbohydrates are in things I didn’t even think of as having any (like pre-sliced/grated cheeses). Check the labeling on every single thing—and weigh stuff for awhile, if you have a kitchen scale, to get an idea of how much spinach is an ounce or whatever. I’m now at the point where I don’t usually have to count grams, but in the first few months until I got the hang of it I used a kitchen scale and MyFitnessPal.com to help me keep track, and it was depressing/invaluable.
Another possible tip to try, oddly, is to eat MORE. Eat enough to make your body feel full and secure. Eat whenever you’re hungry. Make sure you’re getting enough calories, and enough fat, and enough protein, and enough water. I think of this as an upside-down diet, and one of the ways it earns that description is that, at least for me, it seems to resent calorie restriction. If I hit a plateau, I increase how much food I’m eating.
Or try taking a full day off and eating whatever you want, and then going back to keto. For me, it seems like this resets my system. Sometimes it results in an alarming jump on the scale (like, five pounds up after only one day off), but then it goes quickly down again.
But also: keto for whatever reason doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Some people it works INCREDIBLY WELL on: they drop 100 pounds in 6 months or whatever. Some people it works QUITE NICELY on, like it did for me: slow loss, but steady and so far sustainable. And some people it just inexplicably doesn’t seem to work well for at all. One of my friends actually steadily GAINED weight on keto, which as you can imagine was incredibly discouraging.
This is only semi-related to your post, but I just learned this past week from a family member who works with special needs children that the keto diet has long been recognized as a treatment for those on the autism spectrum, and those with epilepsy. I found this fascinating.
Yes! I think it was initially researched and documented as a treatment for treatment-resistent, severe epilepsy! I was so fascinated to read that.
Ugh, my husband gets a sniffle and loses 5 pounds. I can be on death’s doorstep for a week and not lose an ounce!
I am a fitness instructor, so when I gain weight I can’t just start exercising – I have to cut back on food, which I hate because I live to eat!
I am not going to comment much about husbands losing weight quickly with no effort because it causes deep feelings of resentment, and also he doesn’t have a good metabolism just to spite me, though it feels like it. But I just want to say that my husband once lost 5 kgs (which is over 10lbs I think) just by going from three sugars to two sugars in his coffee (has does have quite a few a day). I don’t think that nice, hardworking spouses (me) who count calories and join exercise classes and gain weight anyway should have to put up with stuff like that.
I would like to ask anyone who feels comfortable commenting about Keto and anxiety. I have a long running battle with anxiety that I have mostly under control. I have tried Keto twice and both times I hit ketosis and lost weight but within two weeks I was a raging lunatic who just could not cope with the world. I had such deep feelings of anxiety and dread that I could not function. Both times I went off the diet and I went back to my normal level of existential dread within 24 hours. Has anyone had this experience? Did it pass (maybe if I had stuck it out just that extra couple of days?), Is there a known workaround for this? Is it just not for me? I have asked my doctor but I have found that when you have anxiety doctors tend to blame every symptom on …. anxiety. Sigh.
I haven’t experienced this personally, but my cousin, who has restarted a keto diet twice has experienced a marked uptick in her anxiety symptoms each time. It did go down again after the first couple of months, but the second time around she had updated medication waiting in the wings for her in case it hit. When it did, she started her anxiety medication and that kicked in after about a week. I don’t know if she plans to stay on the medication long term. I hope you find whatever works best for you!
I also appreciate the updates because I’ve been trying low carb too. I have a hard time with sugar cravings but otherwise the change in eating is helping. Definitely harder to deal with traveling and work dinners/parties. I need to strategize more ahead of my next work trip because the last one messed up my eating.
I’m happy for you Swistle. Lol at the bit about BMI rotting in hell. My youngest is nearly a preschooler and I just got back to what used to be my out of shape max. But I feel good about it and will keep gently working at it. Just trying to be active, and self accepting. It makes sense for the season of life I am in, and one day it may change of course.
So happy you linked to this post. Like everything else, you have written about something that is really, really hard to write about in a completely non-judgy, non-obnoxious, fascinating, tell-me-more manner. I am so happy I get to read your writing.