Keto

Keto. Sounds to me like a cute name for a dog. Kai, Rosie, Kira, Keto…but no. It’s actually a nickname for a diet. I first heard of the ketogenic diet years ago, when I was researching autism and read that it sometimes helps with autism symptoms. I believe it was originally primarily used as a last-ditch method to help control severe seizures.

Back in the day, when I first heard about it, it was characterized as “difficult” and even “dangerous”, so I was reluctant to consider giving it a try. Plus, we didn’t used to know that migraines might be a form of seizures. So I didn’t have as much reason to try it.

Recently a friend of mine was talking about being on the keto diet for seizures and it got me thinking that maybe I should look into it. Apparently it’s now used not only for seizures and autism, it’s also used for auto-immune diseases and diabetes. Well, hmmm. Given that ALL of those things are in my family, maybe it is worth a try.

Wikipedia says, “The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that in medicine is used primarily to treat difficult-to-control epilepsy in children. The diet forces the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.”

That info is a bit outdated. (And why only children?) After doing a little bit of googling, I discovered that a lot of adults are on the keto diet for a variety of health reasons. And keto is now a fad diet for weight loss. There’s a few horror stories out there, but it seems safe enough if you know what you are doing and don’t go crazy with it. I consulted with my sister, Emily, (who is a doctor), and got the thumbs up. So here I go!

My goal is a limit of 25 grams of carbohydrates per day, plus enough fat to maintain my weight, and not too much protein. Just a quick check – I think you all know the difference between a carb and a calorie. Calories are energy units, and I don’t intend to cut down on calories because I’m not trying to lose weight. Carbohydrates (carbs) are organic compounds (sugars and starches) that can be broken down to produce energy. Fat can also be broken down to produce energy (and so can protein). In this case, I want most of my energy to be coming from an intake of fat, rather than an intake of carbs.

There are a couple of reasons why I will be trying to avoid too much protein as well as strictly limiting carbs. The first is, protein can be hard on the body, starting with constipation and moving on from there (or not moving on from there, as the case may be, lol). Also it’s easy to accidentally eat excess protein when cutting out carbs and increasing fat because it’s hard to get enough fat without too much protein.

Eating lots of fat sounds easy until you think about how we tend to eat fat in our culture. We eat fat with sugar (ice cream, mmmm), with grain (cake & donuts! cheese and crackers! peanut butter & jelly sandwiches! grilled cheese!) and with protein (hamburgers, steak and bacon, yum, yum.)

With keto, you can’t eat your fat with sugar or grains, so that leaves eating it with proteins or…vegetables! (Buttered spinach! Whoo-hooo! – or maybe not so much.) Do you see now why it would be easy to quickly end up eating tons of protein? Because it’s hard to eat enough vegetables! Most people like proteins better than vegetables. I sure do.

My objective in life has become figuring out new and exciting ways to eat fat-on-vegetables. I’m not going to bother tracking my fat intake. I’ll just eat as much as I reasonably can. I also won’t track protein. I’ll just try to keep my protein intake down to roughly to where it used to be (realistically, it will be somewhat higher, so I’ll be pushing down on the amount of protein, trying not to eat too much of it). It’s the carbs I’ll be tracking and strictly limiting.

25 grams of carbs per day. This does not mean I can actually eat a little sugar or grain or potato or beans. Nope. I’m going to be struggling to stay under my carb limit just by eating my vegetables and fat. Did you know there are 6 grams of carbs in a single carrot? You actually get to subtract out the grams of fiber to equal your final carb count, but still, carrots have a surprising amount of starches and sugars.

And for example, my favorite kind of jerky has zero sugar. It’s just meat, red chile, salt and garlic (a lot of red chile, it’s the best!). But it still has 1 gram of carbs per every oz. Not a lot, but where does that carb even come from?

Here’s what I won’t be eating on this diet:

• grains of any sort (bread, rice, pasta, tortillas, etc.)
• beans and legumes
• tree nuts
• root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, etc.)
• sugar of any sort (this cuts out fruit). A caveat – I can eat very small amounts of low-sugar, high-fiber fruits, like berries. But I mean SMALL amounts. Like 5 blueberries.

I’ll also have to carefully track the carbs in foods that aren’t usually considered carb foods. For example, there are 8 grams of carbs in 6 oz of plain yogurt. Like, why? I think it would be from the sugars naturally occurring in milk? Or maybe most plain yogurts are sweetened. Time to read the labels!

Here’s what I’m eating today:

Breakfast was shredded cabbage with coconut cream and pepitas (shelled pumpkin or squash seeds). I’m estimating 8 grams of carbs in breakfast. Where? Well, there’s a trace amount of shredded carrot in the Trader Joe’s package of shredded green cabbage (along with small amounts of purple cabbage). The little bits of carrot and purple cabbage are presumably for color. Total carbs for the shredded cabbage is 6 g. The pepitas are lower carb than tree nuts, but they’re still 34 grams of carbs per cup. So I used just a little sprinkling of them. And then I topped it with what I thought was a generous amount of coconut cream, but I’m realizing I need to re-evaluate and significantly increase what “generous amount of cream” means.

Lunch is a large amount of  raw baby spinach-chard-kale mix, with my choice of fatty stuff on top (olives, avocado, sausage or bacon, etc.). Cheese is good, but constipating (see earlier paragraph about too much proteins). The salad is then doused with generous amounts of olive oil. I’m also re-evaluating upwards my concept of what a “generous” amount of olive oil is.

Today’s snack was unsweetened cream cheese wrapped in lettuce (3.5 grams carbs per 85 grams cream cheese, not bad). Except I didn’t actually eat that much cream cheese. I’m quickly getting to the point where I’m tired of fats. Unfortunately I forgot to bring to work my snack of “pancakes” I made last night with coconut flour, with which I’m hoping to trick myself into thinking I’m eating carbs when I’m not. Coconut flour has some carbs, but not much. It’s mostly fat and fiber. I figure I can get away with 2 tablespoons of coconut flour per day.

There are test strips available to test whether your body is in ketosis or not, which I plan to buy. My friend (and others on the internet) say they can tell by feel when they switch to ketosis, but either I haven’t switched yet, or I haven’t learned how to tell. I only started on Friday (sort of) and yesterday for reals. By “sort of”, I mean all except the cantaloupe (Wait, is that really how you spell cantaloupe? That’s nuts. Apparently I’ve been spelling it wrong on my grocery list for 30 years until now the right way looks wrong.)  Anyway, right before I decided to start my new diet, I had bought an expensive, organic, perfectly ripe cantaloupe. And darn it if I wasn’t going to eat that thing!

As you’ve probably figured out, this whole project is a big nuisance and a lot of time and effort. I’m also still trying to eat mostly organic. So I’ve got to find, and pay for, and figure out how to cook with, gourmet foods such as organic coconut flour.

John has agreed to go on the diet with me when we’re together, which is usually just the weekends. So it shouldn’t be very hard for him, except I’m not up for going out to restaurants yet. I can’t even think right now about eating out or traveling. One thing at a time – I’ll give it a try and see if it even helps at all.