The keto diet, sometime referred to as a “high fat, low carbohydrate diet,” was very helpful to me in my initial stages of weight loss. But I’ve come to think of keto as a transitional diet rather than a destination or steady state, which you must maintain indefinitely after achieving your desired weight loss. No.
That’s good news: the knock on keto diets argues that most people won’t be able to maintain keto—too restrictive. More people might get the benefits of keto if they knew it was designed to be a transitional stage. And if keto is transitional, then you can skip all those manufactured concoctions marketed as aids to staying on a keto diet indefinitely. That’s also good.
The goal is to eat well, during and after weight loss. Not to eat new and different kinds of crap than you ate before, out of a misguided belief that carbs per se are somehow bad.
This post explains why keto can powerfully assist a person’s initial efforts to lose weight. It draws on the arguments advanced in Dr. Fung’s book, the Obesity Code. His thesis can be summarized as: “it’s all about the insulin.”
Anyone contemplating keto as a destination diet should carefully examine Dr. Fung’s explanation for why the Adkins diet, after the initial excitement, proved disappointing. Dr. Adkins said to cut out the carbohydrates, too. So how is keto different? And if it isn’t, why should its low carb approach fare any better than the Adkins diet over the long term? Food for thought.
My thesis: keto helps you transition to intermittent fasting, and it is better at helping you make that transition than Adkins or other approaches. But the destination is intermittent fasting. Once fasting has become part of your practice, you can eat well, and eat a wide variety of delicious food, free of keto-style restrictions, while maintaining your weight loss. There are still foods you have to minimize, but the restrictions are fewer.
A proposition: most sedentary suburban folks, middle-aged or more—i.e., a large portion of the I’m-reasonably-healthy-but-damn-it-I-weigh-more-than-I-want-and-it’s-getting-worse group—will never succeed in making the transition to intermittent fasting without keto. That’s what makes keto so important: it helps you transition to intermittent fasting.
Following keto prescriptions for a period of time will make intermittent fasting dramatically easier for you. But intermittent fasting is the goal. Keto is but the means.
How keto helps you transition
- It gets you off sugar
I drank orange juice for breakfast every day for 50 years. Of course, as my affluence and sophistication increased, I evolved from powdered Tang to refrigerated Tropicana to artisanal, fresh-squeezed juice. Nonetheless: I was mainlining sugar for breakfast, every day, all those decades. I had to ditch orange juice, to get my carb count down. Score one for keto.
Next, over the years I transitioned from a small glass of apple juice for lunch, to those incredibly delicious Odwalla strawberry banana smoothies. Not a whole 8 oz serving, of course, but still … read the label: so-o-o much sugar. No can do on keto.
And then I’d follow lunch with a hyper-natural, organic fig newton-style bar—made with whole grains!
Sugar, sugar, sugar. And the worst kind of sugar: fructose (see Dr. Fung’s book)
Keto extricated me from mainlining sugar. Huge.
- Keto backs you off fruit
You know the drill: “follow a diet filled with fresh fruits and vegetables.” Now, read Dr. Fung: fructose is one of the worst things you can put in your body, from the standpoint of weight loss. Can you say “high fructose corn syrup?” Was that a bad thing because it had corn, or because it was a syrup, or because … it was high fructose?
Under keto I can, maybe, justify six raspberries and 12 blueberries for breakfast; maybe one third of a banana. Yeah, it’s a big chunk of my daily carb allowance, but this amount of fruit has compensating benefits. After all, it’s fresh fruit, with all its probiotic, vitamin and mineral benefits.
To reiterate the point of this post: imagine a diet that said you could never eat raspberries except on Xmas. Is that a sustainable, destination diet?
- Keto helps you zero out grains and starch, especially wheat flour, but scourging corn flour, potatoes, and rice as well. Correctly interpreted a la Dr. Fung, it comes down hardest on finely pulverized wheat flour. Doesn’t matter if it’s labeled “whole wheat.” Grain flour is bad; wheat flour is worse; pulverized starch of any kind ain’t good.
Find a white suburban person over 35 who desires to lose weight. Ask them how many eating occasions they had over the past seven days. The answer might be 35, or even 42: three meals per day, plus snacks in two or three of the intervals. That’s the post-2000 norm in this part of American society.
Next, ask them to tabulate how many of those meals contained wheat flour, corn of some kind, potatoes, or rice, or quick cook oats. Typical answers will be 30 of 35, 40 of 42, etc.
And here is where keto really helps: if you are going to get your carb count down, you will probably have to cut out 80% to 95% of the components of what had been your ordinary everyday meals. During the keto transition: no bread. No pasta. No pizza (crust). No crackers. No chips. No tortillas. No rice, white or brown. No oatmeal. No french fries, hash browns, country potatoes, or baked potatoes. No new-fangled cassava chips or tapioca pizza crust. Gluten-free will be irrelevant. Whole grain is still grain, is still heavy on the carbs. Nada, zilch, none of the above.
Whoa, you say—what am I in for with this keto thing? And indeed, we’ll come back to this point under the heading of transition, not destination.
But to begin with, if you are going to pursue a ketogenic diet, you do have to eliminate everything named in the paragraph above: bread, pasta, pizza, potatoes, yada yada.
And of course: no dessert. Ever. Except maybe Xmas or your child’s wedding—regrettable but acceptable setbacks in your dietary progress, in the name of a higher good: celebrating life.
- But keto, except as a transition, goes too far
Beans and lentils, full of complex plant proteins and an assortment of essential amino acids, have lots of carbs. By definition, not keto!
Whole milk plain yogurt has beaucoup carbs; so does brie cheese. Not keto!
Carrots have a regrettable amount of carbs, as do cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. Not keto!
Carbs are everywhere in foods you were told have other health benefits …
Then again, some folks, told they can never eat broccoli again, except at Xmas, might cheer instead of moan. At least, until they were told that kale was the new thing …
If the goal is to reduce insulin levels …
Then as we social scientists say, the relevant metric is the “the area under the curve.” Let me explain. Dr. Fung includes two stylized graphs of insulin response on a grazing pattern, assuming five eating occasions per day: three meals plus two snacks. (See his Figures 10.1 & 10.2)
The simplest intervention, consistent with historical eating patterns before 1975, would be: cut out the two snacks. That will remove about 30% to 35% of the area under the curve. No keto diet selection involved, no dietary restrictions in terms of “what” or in terms of how many “calories,” “carbs,” whatever—just a restriction in terms of when you eat, and more specifically, how many eating occasions you choose.
So this is the first bracing message for keto partisans: do you accept the “area under the curve” metric? If you do, then the very first step in weight loss must be: no snacks. Minimize your eating occasions. Snacks are bad, keto snacks no less.
It’s the simplest possible intervention: regardless of what you eat, don’t eat too often. And build in at least a 12 hour fast every day. How hard will that be, when overnight, asleep in bed, gets you 8 hours toward the goal?
But right here, we see the essential contribution of keto-as-transition: just how easy will it be, for the person on the standard three meals plus two snacks schedule, to eliminate those two snacks?
Have you heard the word “hangry”? When you’ve been on the glucose economy forever, to prolong the time between meals, makes you … hangry!
My graduate school buddies can tell you stories of waitresses who were too slow to BRING ME MY WINE! Gaddammittahell.
When you pump glucose into your body every day, all day, woe betide you when one day, you are stuck in traffic, or had to skip lunch to continue the meeting, or the airplane was delayed … or any similar event that produces an unexpected 4+ hour gap between eating occasions. Hangry!
The glucose economy: regular, repeated doses of ready-to-be-blood-sugar foods, with never a gap.
My downfall, my last twelve pounds that took me to the top of the BMI “normal” range, was not just the orange juice and fruit juice described above: it was the nightly snack of pita chips, pure wheat flour, at 10:00 pm each evening. Glucose injection! Only 9-10 hours remaining until the morning’s dose of orange juice, sugary granola, and fructose-loaded fruit. Oh, but those pita chips tasted good!
The transition
I remember the first time I replaced one of my normal wheat-heavy, carb-heavy dinners with a mostly fat and protein, keto-style dinner, followed up with a handful of pistachios. It was an odd feeling…
When I had emptied my plate I was sated, in the sense that I felt no urge to eat anything more. But I didn’t feel “full” in the customary, just stuffed myself with starch sense—no climbing insulin levels hooting like a siren.
And that is the beauty of keto: fat satisfies. Fat made it easy to skip the pita chip snack four hours later. Fat makes it easy to let six entire hours elapse between lunch and dinner. Fat makes it easy to go 12 or 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.
Now to be honest: keto or no, I often feel something that might be labeled hunger by 4pm or so. But I work at home with full control over my schedule. So at that same hour, I am also so done with staring at my computer screen. Time for a walk. Uphill at pace.
That timely exercise doesn’t eliminate the subjective feeling that might be labeled “hunger.” But under a general keto regime, that feeling becomes re-stated as “guess my body is going to have to consume its own resources, because external supply has been used up and exhausted.” Ooh, there’s that funny taste in the back of my mouth again.
And once you see the needle on the scale start to drop, it becomes even easier to relabel that feeling, which you might once have labeled, “I need a snack,” and that distinctive taste in the back of the mouth, as “burn, baby, burn.” Yeah, eat up that stuff that’s hanging around my waist. I ain’t feeding you nothing for a few hours yet.
Moral of the story: if there is a long enough gap between eating occasions, your body goes ketogenic on its own—without any change in what you consume. The goal of keto is to help you install and institutionalize those longer and longer gaps between eating occasions, without the debilitating experience, after three or four hours, of feeling so hangry that you’d kill for a Twinkie.
The destination state
The modified keto diet just described worked great for me, as described in my post, “I lost 26 pounds.” I lost those pounds slowly and steadily over 15 months. I kept them off through the second Xmas holiday season. I kept them off after a few business trips back east. I kept them off even though I baled on the weight lifting program (but continued my afternoon walks).
But then 22 months in, after a first class air trip with my aged Mom, I looked at the scale with horror: +3 pounds. I’m pretty sure it was a random accident that the corner of that glass scale thing shattered when I was taking it down from its perch to re-measure… But d—n if the new scale didn’t give the same result.
What to do?
My spouse had been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and she shared a discovery that for me was absolutely crucial: you can fast and still drink coffee! And per Dr. Fung, if you have a tablespoon of pure cream with your coffee, that has no implications for fasting whatsoever (but huge implications for my comfort zone, as I like b-l-a-a-a-c-k coffee, aka “motor oil” as my spouse is wont to describe it).
So one Monday morning, after Sunday dinner as usual, I had a spoon full of cream for breakfast. And coffee. Then I had a spoonful of cream for lunch. And coffee. At the end of my workday, I got on the weight machine, and then I walked uphill at pace. Broth with a tablespoon of butter for dinner (that’s the keto insight, pure fat doesn’t count in the weight loss calculation).
I wasn’t that hungry. But it was so-o-o-o boring. No food prep in my beautiful kitchen. No languid tasting of the delicious meal. No sipping of wine as the sun went down. But hey—I got a Ph.D. I got tenure. I have the discipline to try this fasting thing.
More cream and coffee for breakfast and lunch the next day, and then … a most delicious dinner, to conclude my 48 hour fast!
The three pound weight gain disappeared, to be replaced by a one pound further decline from my previous best level, and then two pounds. See below.
* * *
I did that fasting protocol one more time, but then decided that I could get 80% of the benefit, for 20% of the experiential grief, by doing cream/coffee for breakfast and lunch on Monday, and cream for breakfast on Thursday. In the language of fasting, a 24 hour fast to start the week, and then an 18 hour fast in the middle of the week. Turned out, to sit in my office chair, and do my fascinating research on screen at the keyboard, all I needed was a tablespoon of cream and a cup of coffee. I wasn’t pushing a plow behind a pair of oxen from dawn to dusk. I was moving a mouse an inch in each direction while sitting in an ergonomically superior office chair. Energy demands: infinitesimal.
But to go without the rituals of food preparation in the evening, and the delicious wine, and the whole panoply of the evening routine—that was too high a cost relative to any benefit I needed to gain.
But here’s the moral: if I had not first got off the glucose economy, courtesy of keto, it is inconceivable that I could go 14 hours between dinner and breakfast each day, and never snack, and on Mondays and Thursdays, skip some meals altogether.
Keto taught me how. Keto allowed me to re-fashion the subjective feeling of “I’m hangry!” into “burn, baby, burn” and “feel the burn,” feel the fat around the waist melting away.
* * *
I still find it necessary to minimize my sugar consumption. I still avoid wheat flour, except on special occasions. Potato or rice is a luxury.
But I can eat a tablespoon of steel cut oats with my chia seed soaked in yogurt in the morning. Hulled barley, two dry tablespoons worth at a time, is a nice substitute for grain in stir fry or similar meals. One square of dark chocolate after lunch with my coffee seems to be fine. Red wine with dinner every day, I don’t care if it’s costing me a few pounds or not.
Regarding the oats and barley (I’m Scots-Irish), you read that right: the metric going forward is table spoons, not cups or fractions of a cup. Grains are super foods, and desk workers dare not eat very much, and only those grains with the highest fiber count, consistent with ancestry.
Pulverized wheat flour is the equivalent of white sugar. That part of keto is not transition, but destination. Avoid it like the plague–of weight gain.
Summary
In short: if you have dinner at 6pm, and don’t eat a thing until breakfast at 8am, you are close to ketogenic at 8am. Doesn’t matter what you ate for dinner, except insofar as it allows you not to snack after dinner. If you were also to skip breakfast, you would definitely be ketogenic by lunch. Ketogenic means your body starts feeding on itself, because there wasn’t any other food source on offer.
But if lunch is a whole mess of carbs, followed by a chocolate chip cookie at 3:30, followed by a carb heavy dinner/dessert from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, and maybe some potato chips by the TV at 9:30pm, then from a weight loss standpoint, you just pissed away all the benefits of your night time and morning fast.
The promise of keto is that eggs and sausage at lunch will enable you to skip the afternoon cookie. Cheese and salami for dinner will enable you to skip the chips at 9:30. And now ketogenesis, the natural results of prolonged gaps between eating occasions, aka intermittent fasting, is working for you once more.
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