Waking up every morning used to be dictated by the kitchen. Either I would wake up insatiably hungry - Toast! Juice! Peanut butter bar! Rawr! - or irrationally nauseous at the thought of food. Instead, I woke up one morning, looked around at my neglected toaster, packed my lunch without feeling ravenous nor feeling weird about food, and walked out the door. Lunch would usually be some form of sandwich or salad, encored by a snack around 3 p.m. My body would jump from mildly hungry to hangry so fast that I’ve been a living Snickers commercial more than once. Now, I have a solid hour to two hours of leeway between the first signs of hunger and when my energy drops. Keto isn’t some miracle diet, but the emphasis on eating high-fat foods and practically no carbs worked surprisingly well for me. Not every diet or eating style works for every person, of course, and the ones that didn’t work for me are numerous: low fat, soup based, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, all whole grain, and only eat what my fitter mom was eating. Are all those real diets?
There are several versions of keto, short for ketogenic, but the plan I opted for is eating mainly fat and limiting carbs to 15 to 20 grams (g) a day. This dietary approach sets in motion ketosis, when your body begins to get its energy from fat rather than carbohydrates. Because your body burns all available carbs before burning fat, eliminating carbs is essential if you’re going to see a benefit from increasing your fat intake. The entire process went against what I had been taught about nutrition since childhood. Suddenly, I was encouraged - mandated, really - to eat fatty foods with high salt content. Food like bacon, eggs, and organic butter were regular items on my grocery list, and apples, bananas, and whole grains were gone. The biggest mental hurdle was allowing myself to indulge in forbidden fat. Butter? Encouraged. High-fat cream? A new staple. Lard? Surprisingly, yes, I even splatted lard into my sizzling pan of mushrooms. The idea is that your brain craves fat.
More fat means your brain gets the energy it needs, and the lack of carbs means your body doesn’t have that source to pull from first. It took a while to layer full-fat mozzarella on my lettuce wrap, all slathered in mayo, without feeling judgmental of my own dinner. I gradually released my apprehension as my hunger waned and the scale dipped. When I started, I didn’t really understand how my body reacted to fatty foods, and I didn’t understand how it would adjust once quick-burn carbs were out of the picture. Yet despite what I’d read about keto, the results surprised me. RELATED: How Do You Tell the Difference Between Good and Bad Carbohydrates? By eating more fat, I stayed full longer, which means I ate less. Cooking with coconut oil and butter surprisingly made me want to eat more vegetables - a good thing because leafy greens are a big staple on keto. I also didn’t snack nearly as much as I used to, and usually I ate only during an actual meal.
I often stress eat, but I haven’t accidentally downed an entire bag or box of anything since I started and ended keto. In my mind, this is where keto makes sense. Because weight loss is about net calories (or the calories you consume minus the calories you burn each day), keeping myself from eating more than I was exercising off meant I could get my weight under control. Dinners might’ve been turkey-veggie chili with sour cream; lunch might’ve been salad with nuts, veggies, and ranch dressing; and breakfast might’ve been eggs with kale cooked in butter. I usually skipped breakfast because my dinner kept me feeling satisfied until noon, but I always kept macadamia nuts on hand, just in case. Eating well has been a priority since I graduated college, but for years my diet consisted largely of grains. Every meal had a carb - whole-wheat pasta with pesto and roasted vegetables, coconut brown rice with veggies, salmon with sweet potato on the side.
0 Comments