Doing the ketogenic diet

If you’ve decided to do the keto diet to lose body fat or improve your endurance, here’s a tip: commit to it. It won’t work unless you’re really serious about making it work. The first month is the hardest.

First, read the Kilter guide, prepare your metrics, and understand the basics of how your body works. Read a bit about the ketogenic diet. You won’t see results in one day. It’ll take a week, a month, a year. You can’t get that far if you don’t know how to measure change and recalibrate as you go. This is a lifestyle change, not a quick fix. There is no end date.

Get a blood test and a doctor’s opinion, pick your goal metrics (weight, waist circumference or endurance distance), and set a timeline. One year is generally good. It encourages long term commitment and gives you enough slack to not panic when things aren’t working.

Second, make it public. You won’t commit if you’re embarrassed to admit you’re attempting it. Tell your family. Tell your colleagues at work. Let everyone know the constraints you’re placing on yourself. Set yourself up for embarrassment if you don’t meet your commitments. This is by far the most important thing you’ll do. The diet itself is far easier than the social constraints you’ll be overcoming.

Find a support group, preferably one with a coach catering to you. Go to Facebook or Google Groups, search for keto diet groups, and apply to join. Or come to #kilter on the Friends of HasGeek Slack team. Tell everyone there that you’re doing keto. You’ll need the support group to get through difficult times.

Third, don’t eat out for the first week. Knowing the exact composition of anything you eat is important, so you need control of the kitchen. Get a kitchen scale. You need to be consuming less than 25 grams of “net” carb per day. Net carb is total carb minus fibre. You’ll need to look up nutrition facts for every ingredient to figure out how much net carb you’re eating. Ignore the calorie count and recommended daily value. Those are misleading.

You want to achieve a ratio of 60% fat, 35% protein and 5% carb (hence “low carb high fat” or “LCHF”). Please note that this is not a “high protein” diet that some body builders use, so a nutritionist’s warnings about the dangers of a high protein diet don’t apply here. Unfortunately, too many of them don’t recognise LCHF as being distinct from the body builder diets they’re used to encountering.

Keto food is delicious. If the food you’re going to eat isn’t tasty (without being sweet), there’s something wrong with it.

Do not follow random internet advice on the health benefits of any particular food item. The only truth is in the macronutrient breakdown of nutrition facts. If in doubt, do not eat.

Beware of nutrition facts labels on food items sold in India. There’s no quality control. Look for USDA data available via Google instead.

Over the first few days, you’ll starve your body of carb, depleting your liver’s glycogen store, forcing your body to flip over into ketosis and start burning fat. Here’s more on the science of how it works:

A Guide to Ketosis

You probably believe you won’t feel satiated without eating carbs (rice or chapatis), but fat does fill you up. Consuming fat is easier than you think. Greasy food is good, as long as the inner ingredient isn’t carb (so no butter roti and naan).

Abstain completely from the primary carb ingredients of our diets:

1. All sugars including natural sugars such as jaggery and honey.
2. All grains (rice, wheat, maize/corn, jowar, ragi, oats, even exotic cereals like quinoa) and cereal-based products (bread, chapati, roti, parota, dosa, idly).
3. Lentils and dal. Don’t believe it? Look up the nutrition facts.
4. All fruit. You can get your fibre and vitamins elsewhere, without the sugar and carbs.
5. Starchy root vegetables (tubers) like potato, yam, tapioca and sweet potato. Other roots like carrot and beetroot are fine in limited quantity, as garnishing. Nutrition facts are your friend.
6. Avoid onion-based gravies as they contain a rather large amount of the base ingredient, and the carbs add up. Onion is about 7% net carb. A medium-sized onion is 100g (so 7g of your 25g quota, one third). An onion and tomato gravy (a kadai) could contain several onions, so one meal could easily get you close to your 25g a day limit.
7. If you haven’t realised this yet, “diet” and “low fat” foods, “skim” milk and other such foods marketed as being healthy aren’t actually so. Count the carbs. You want to eat fat, not to avoid it.
8. Beware of sauces and soups. Many are thickened with starch (usually cornflour). If it’s a packaged sauce, check the ingredients label.
9. Alcohols: Beer is liquid bread. It’s high carb. Avoid. Wine too. Distilled spirits (vodka, rum, whiskey, etc) don’t have carbs, but they do invoke a distinct metabolic pathway that takes precedence and inhibits fat burn. Avoid alcohol until you’ve made decent progress on your weight loss goal.

Glycogen requires a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio of water. As your glycogen depletes, so does your water storage. The first 1–2 kg you lose, in the first week, is just this water weight. You’ll lose this on just about any sort of diet and gain it back immediately when you break the diet. Don’t congratulate yourself yet.

If you eat eggs, some people have reported having an easier time getting into ketosis with an egg-only diet for a few days. Eggs contain fats and proteins but almost no carbs, are nutritious, and can be prepared in a variety of ways.

Fourth, get Bayer Keto-Diastix test strips from the local pharmacy. Chances are yours doesn’t have it, but can order it for you. ₹315 for a pack of 50 strips that detect the presence of ketone bodies in your urine, indicating one of two things:

1. Your metabolism has flipped over into ketosis. Congratulations!
2. You’ve been having ketone supplements because you read somewhere this is the way to go. False alarm.

Once your body flips into ketosis (usually taking 2–3 days), you’ll start burning body fat. This is real weight loss now. Some people experience symptoms known as the “keto flu” during this period (symptoms including headaches, nausea, upset stomach, lack of mental clarity, sleepiness, fatigue). Others don’t. It’ll pass. This is not an actual flu; it’s merely your body experiencing carb withdrawal.

At this time your body isn’t used to burning ketones and will kick you out of ketosis if you consume enough carbs to replenish glycogen. If you can manage to stay in ketosis for an entire month, you’ll be sufficiently “keto adapted” and your body will have a greater tolerance for carbs (but consuming carbs will still count against weight loss). Stay there for an entire year and you’ll be so well adapted, you can get into and out of ketosis in a few hours instead of a few days. This is the stage you want to reach, when you can get away with eating anything you like.

After your first week’s spell of keto flu, you’ll see immediate benefits. You’ll no longer feel drowsy after a meal. You’ll be more alert. You’ll feel full on smaller meals. Soon, your hunger will reduce to needing two (or just one) big meal in a day. Your excess body fat will power the calorie deficit.

Depending on how much excess fat you have, how low your carb consumption is, and your body’s metabolism, you’ll lose up to 8 kg per month. That’s at least a kilo per week and 100–200g per day — substantial enough to notice on a day-by-day basis and to stay motivated with. Bewarned some people will see slower results than others. Way too many factors are involved.

Fifth, the big question: what do you actually eat?

1. All non-starchy vegetables, particularly crucifers (cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, etc).
2. Greens (palak/spinach, etc).
3. Mushrooms.
4. The gourd family (bottle, ridge, bitter, etc).
5. Pumpkin.
6. Brinjals.
7. Spices. They’re carby, but they’re spices, not the main ingredient.
8. Some dairy products: butter, ghee, paneer, cheese, hung curd. Full fat milk in limited quantity (milk contains a good mix of carb, fat and cheese, so you could get a carb overdose from it).
9. Eggs, prepared any which way.
10. Any meat or fish, white or red, fatty or lean.
11. Artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose (available commercially as Splenda, Sugar Free Gold and Sugar Free Natura). Use these to transition, but plan on discontinuing these in a few weeks.
12. Lots of water. Your body doesn’t hold excess water via glycogen anymore, so you’ll need to drink a lot more for risk of becoming constipated.
13. (We’ll add to this list as more things come to mind.)

As you make this switch, you may find yourself limiting micronutrient intake, especially if you cope by having more animal fats than vegetables. Compensate with a daily multivitamin pill until your new diet pattern settles in.

If in need of a comfort food, pick any north Indian restaurant and order a gravy that isn’t dal or potato. If it’s a kadai dish, eat the solid bits and discard the liquid gravy (or give it to someone else). Use the blood sugar test method to test suspect foods. Seriously, get that blood sugar monitor. It takes a lot of stress out of figuring out what’s safe to eat.

If you’re in Bangalore, treat yourself to the keto menu at Cafe Thulp (available on Swiggy from outlets spread across the city). Chefkraft has a “nutri gourmet” menu and Smokehouse Deli has a health menu as well, but these are not sufficiently low carb to be keto compatible. You can eat these as your carb tolerance improves.

If you have someone cooking for you, you may have trouble explaining principles like carbohydrates vs fats because traditional Indian cooking classifies foods into categories like “heating” vs “cooling”. Those classifications aren’t a useful reference here. Explain macronutrients to your cook on the basis of examples.

You may be surprised by just how few items on any restaurent menu are edible. This is how messed up modern society’s food choices are. Within a week or two you’ll have a good sense for what to eat on a day-by-day basis. After a month you’ll have an intuitive sense for what you can eat if you need to travel.

Avoid travel within the first month. Disruption to routine can push you off track and be demotivating.

Don’t be misled by labels like “gluten-free” and “organic”. Organic doesn’t mean what you think it does. You don’t need to go gluten-free unless you’re in the 1% of population with celiac disease. In fact, gluten is one of the best choices of protein on a vegan diet. It’s easy to separate from starch in wheat. (You can do it at home by washing dough until the running water is no longer white and becomes clear. Look up recipes for “seitan.”)

Understanding and internalising keto requires having a good sense for what’s in your food, which is why cooking for yourself is important, at least in the first month. We’ll give this particular attention on this blog and in the meetups.

Using keto to improve athletic endurance rather than weight loss is a different matter, requiring cross-domain knowledge. We’ll get to that later.

Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.

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