Today I started the keto diet. This is a low carb, high fat diet designed to make your body burn more fat. Originally it was invented to stop seizures in epileptics and nobody knows why it works for that. Lately it has become a popular way to lose weight. The purpose of the diet is to make your body produce ketones, because ketosis is how your body converts fat into energy. When you eat carbs, you are basically eating sugar because this is what your body turns carbs into. Apparently it can also turn protein into sugar. However this is not the case for fat. Here is a good article on the subject.
After speaking to my doctor I am eating less fat and more protein than the standard keto diet recommends, but it's still an extreme diet. My current goal is to eat 5% carbs, 50% protein, and 45% fat. That means every day I'm striving for:
Calories: 1690
Carbs: 21 grams :shock:
Protein: 211 grams
Fat: 85 grams
21 grams of carbs is almost nothing, and it is a huge shock to go from my previous diet where carbs were 50% of my calories (over 200 grams) to basically nothing. My head hurts just thinking about it. I quickly learned just about everything contains carbs. The good news is you can subtract the fiber from the carbs so it's only the net carbs that matter. So for example, one cup of avocado has 12 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fiber. This means it only counts as 2 grams of carbs.
For breakfast I basically ate a bunch of cheese. I also ate peanut butter (pure ground peanuts, no sugar), some blackberries, and... more cheese. Then I saw my weight doctor and she told me to stop eating so much god damn cheese. After that I had a small Caesar salad (lettuce, cheese, dressing) with some broccoli sprouts and some tea with stevia. That really helped curb my hunger even though it was just a few vegetables. Later I made TVP meatloaf so I would have something to eat for lunch tomorrow at school. Eating out on this diet is really difficult. Even a place like Whole Foods doesn't have many things made without sugar or carbs. I wish they did. It would be easy to make candy and replace sugar with stevia, but no, they have to use coconut sugar or something.
I'm going to be using this thread to talk about my progress on this diet. I will do it for at least 4 weeks because it takes that long to get results. If anyone wants to use this thread to discuss similar efforts you are welcome to as well.