What I Learned From Eating a Keto Diet for One Month
A summary of my experience following the keto diet for the month of November 2017. Includes how I learned about the diet and sources for others to investigate for themselves. Also covered are how the diet was followed, what the results were and my conclusions about the experience.
Background
I first learned about the keto diet from listening to a podcast interview between Tim Ferriss and Dr. Dominic D’Agostino on the Tim Ferriss Show. You can find the link to that podcast here. I was fascinated as I learned about the diet and Dr. D’Agostino, the scientist studying it. One of the big points that I took home from Dr. D’Agostino is that what we eat has a large impact on our metabolic physiology by affecting the balance of hormones in our body. Therefore what we eat can play a role in the prevention/treatment of various disease and human performance. I decided to learn more and see if it was something I wanted to try for myself. I personally find podcasts to be a great way to learn. Here’s a small group of podcasts that I recommend for anyone interested to hear more about the keto diet: 2nd Tim Ferriss Show with Dr. D’Agostino, Rhonda Patrick’s Found My Fitness, and the Joe Rogan Experience #994.
I finally decided go ahead with a month long experiment of eating keto once my wife agreed to do it with me. We just came back from a trip to southeast Asia in October where we ate and drank whatever we wanted to without restraint, so doing keto in November seemed like a good idea.
A little bit about us. We are both in our late twenties. We did not have any official restrictions in our diet prior to trying keto. While we ate foods high in simple carbohydrates such as desserts, the frequency of doing so would not exceed twice a week, more often once a week. In stark contrast, while fruits also contain simple carbohydrates, they are eaten daily in our household. Foods abundant in complex carbohydrates such as rice, pasta, bread, pizza, oatmeal, potatoes, and beans are also frequently consumed. Personally, I would have 1 or 2 servings of at least one of those foods 4 or 5 times a week. We are also daily consumers of green and cruciferous vegetables. That is the summary of the types of carbs we generally ate before starting the keto diet. We never measured our consumption, but with the experience of doing a lot of counting and measuring during November, I can estimate that our carb consumption fluctuated between 150 and 300 grams per day. It was possibly even more if considering days when we ate a lot of desserts (holidays, birthday celebrations, etc).
We used a food scale for the first week and a half to diligently measure out our food in order to hit the macronutrient ratios. Once we got the basic idea of how many calories are in a certain quantity of food we did the measuring by feel. The other tool that we found useful for tracking calories and macros was the app called Fat Secret (available on Android and Apple). It is a free app that is similar to My Fitness Pal which has a large database of information regarding calories and macronutrient breakdowns of food.
What is the keto diet?
The keto in “keto diet” stands for ketone bodies. Ketone bodies are molecules that can be used to produce energy and they arise from the breakdown of fatty acids. That’s perfect because breaking down tissue that stores fat in your body is most people’s goal when they start to diet. There are two ways to make your body produce ketone bodies.
First is through fasting. When you fast, the body’s preferred source of energy is the stored glycogen in the muscles and the liver. Once all glycogen is used, the body starts to mobilize fatty acids (FAs) for energy. The only problem with that is that FAs do not cross the blood brain barrier (BBB) well. That is a big problem because while the brain only makes up approximately 3% of body weight, it can be responsible for 20% of energy expenditure. To solve this problem the body produces ketone bodies (which can pass BBB) via fatty acid breakdown/oxidation.
The second way of producing ketones is via the keto diet. Due to the very low amount of carbohydrates and high amount of fat being consumed on the keto diet, the body can display a metabolic physiology similar to fasting by producing ketone bodies.
So what are the proportions of macronutrients you should eat for your body to start producing ketones (process called ketosis)? Here is what I followed based on my research: 70–75% fat, 20–25% protein, and 5–10% carbs. The ratio of macronutrients is not the only requisite to get into a state of ketosis. The total net carbs have to stay low in general. Most resources recommend keeping it below 50 grams of net carbs. To calculate net carbs you simply have to subtract grams of fibre from the total weight of carbs consumed. Some sources say to go as low as 20 grams to reach ketosis. That just seemed too low for us because we did not want to significantly restrict our total calories. If 20 grams of net carbs (80 cal, 4 cal/gram of net carb) makes up 5% of the total daily intake, the total number of calories consumed in the day would only be 1600 cal. We did not wish to feel like general eating was restricted. We only wanted to restrict certain foods.
My wife and I decided to start the beginning of the month with a more liberal amount of net carbs ranging from 50–100 grams (still pretty low). For the second half of the month we were stricter with carb consumption, keeping the value at 50 grams or less. The reason for doing this was twofold. First, it made the transition a lot easier to handle. We were eating liberal amounts of rice and desserts and drinking copious amounts of beer during our trip. It would have been too difficult to go to less than 50 grams right away. Second reason was that, going into ketosis is not the only thing that needs to take place. You still need other molecular metabolic machinery to produce energy from the ketone bodies, otherwise they are wasted and excreted in urine. There is no point in wasting ketones so may as well adapt to ketosis slowly. That way when you are starting to get really low on net carbs, resulting in more ketones being made, the rest of the metabolic machinery is available to handle the extra amount of ketone bodies for energy production.
Typical food and ingredients
Keto breakfasts can be a lot of fun. One of the most common meals was scrambled eggs with some combination of bacon, cheese, cream, mushrooms and vegetables with avocado on the side. Common vegetables we used included broccoli, spinach, brussel sprout, kale, swiss chard, bok choy, fennel, peppers, onion, and tomato (we used those last 3 sparingly as the carbs go up quickly). For cheeses, we opted for old cheddar, parmesan, feta and goat cheese. In general, harder cheeses have fewer carbs than softer ones. However, I think most cheeses can fit into keto as long as you track the macronutrients closely and follow correct ratios.
The other main option for breakfast that I ate when in a rush was a keto smoothie. It was not the most delicious thing in the world, but it packed a punch and kept me going for hours (more on that later). The smoothie also varied from day to day. In general it was some combination of hemp protein, vegetables, a little bit of frozen berries, avocado, cream and coconut oil. The frozen berries would take a sizeable chunk of my daily carb total but they were worth it for making those smoothies palatable.
For dinners, we would always made sure to make large amounts of food so that there were always leftovers for lunch the following day.
A common dinner meal we cooked was Thai curry. Coconut milk is the main ingredient of Thai curry and is a perfect keto ingredient given that it’s mostly fat. We simply replaced the rice (which is a traditional side dish to Thai curry) with cauliflower rice and voila! Cauliflower rice became a big favourite of mine because of how easy it was to make and how filling it felt (similar to actual rice). There are many ways to make cauliflower rice, I simply grated the cauliflower into small rice sized chunks and fried them in a pan with butter and spices for 10–15 min.
Another carb replacement meal is zucchini noodles, affectionately known as zoodles in the keto community. You basically use these instead of spaghetti pasta to make Italian inspired meals. Again, you have to be careful with how much tomato you use.
The protein component of a lot of our meals was fatty fish such as salmon. We also had pork, ground beef and occasionally chicken filled with cheesy spinach for extra fat. A new source of protein that I experimented with was sardines. Sardines are also fatty like salmon. I tried a several different brands of cans of sardines. The one I liked the most was Club Des Millionnaires. There were several others that I did not like so try several different brands before making up your mind if it’s for you.
Our most prevalent sources of fats eaten in November were butter, olive oil, coconut oil, cream, coconut milk, cheeses, fatty fish, animal fat, nuts and nut butter. I found the easiest way to consume fat was to simply cut up a bunch of vegetables and lightly cook them in a pan with one of the oils/fats mentioned.
I personally enjoy this simple approach, but there are many different ways to enjoy fats on keto. There is no shortage of websites with keto recipes. One that I particularly liked is called Headbanger’s Kitchen. They have a great YouTube channel.
My wife is a much better cook than me. She has a more developed creative side that she applies to cooking. Her best meal creation from November was a keto saag paneer. The recipe can be found here. I highly recommend it.
Another fun recipe we tried was keto pizza made with cauliflower crust (recipe).
Food to avoid
Food we avoided almost completely were grains (rice, pasta, oats) and processed foods with simple sugars (pop, cookies, ice cream, etc).
Alcohol was kept at a minimum because it slows down fat metabolism. The alcohols permitted to drink on keto are dry red wines (small quantities) and clear liquors. We drank a small glass of wine once during the month and stayed away from beer completely.
Fruit eating was also significantly limited. The only fruit consumed were frozen berries in morning smoothies or a little bit of cut up apple with peanut butter as a “dessert” after dinner.
Results
Looking at the numbers on the scale, I started October 31 weighing in at 145 lbs. By November 9th I had dropped to 139 lbs. I think the sudden drop in my weight was due to dehydration. Carbohydrates retain water in the body, thus lack of them in my diet made me lose water weight. I started to consume more salt to reverse the dehydration which brought my weight back up, however by November 21st I was down to 139 lbs again. On December 1st, the final day I weighed myself, I was sitting at 141 lbs. Throughout the month I was also using a Tanita scale from my gym to measure body fat. The Tanita scale is not an accurate tool for measuring body fat, however it has good precision. According to the scale my body fat decreased from 12.4% to as low as 10.6% but came back up to 11.4%. So in summary my weight fluctuated down between 4 to 6 lbs and my body fat decreased by 1 to 1.8%. Take the body fat numbers with a grain of salt.
My wife, Carly, had a similar but slightly different result to me. While she also experienced a net loss in body weight, she did not go through the same yo-yoing of weight that I did. She had a steady decrease in weight that lasted the entire month. She started at 135 lbs on October 31st and ended at 125 lbs on December 1st. A total of 10 lbs lost in one month! We could not measure her body fat with the Tanita scale but we did use a tape measure to record the circumference of her waist. Remarkably her waist measurement went down 2 inches to 28.25. Carly was also able to fit in clothes that she had not worn in a few years.
We were both happy with these results. While our diet was significantly altered, we did not feel like we were severely restricting eating in general. We still got to eat big portions and really enjoyed the different flavours keto recipes have to offer. The main thing I personally missed was eating fruit and drinking beer on weekends. However, it did not seem like an overly difficult task to give those up for one month.
Observations
- Hunger is no longer a factor. It was unbelievable how quickly both Carly and I realized that we could go for much longer periods of time without thinking about food or eating. In addition to the satiating effects of fat and protein, ketones themselves are an appetite suppressant. When hunger strikes on the keto diet, you can easily ignore it and go on with your day focusing on the task at hand. My normal experience when I’m hungry feels like I can’t shake off the feeling and a part of my mind is constantly paying attention to the hunger and reminding me to go eat something. In stark contrast, on keto I would often forget about feeling hungry for several hours after the initial feeling.
- Weight and body fat loss. One of the factors that likely lead to weight loss must have been a lack of hunger. While we were not trying to eat less calories throughout the day, we might have done so unintentionally because of feeling full throughout the day. Some weight loss could also be attributed to loss of water weight, however in my opinion this was a small portion in comparison to body fat loss. In addition to the Tenital scale testing of body fat and waist measurements, the eye test also suggested that significant body fat loss was experienced. While none of those observations were definitive on their own, the combined body of evidence makes me believe that majority of the weight loss was through loss of body fat as water weight could not account for such a significant change (specially for Carly).
- Improved cognitive function. I’m specifically referring to not feeling groggy in the mornings and not getting distracted easily throughout the day. Having a stable level of energy in the morning was much more pronounced and surprising to me as I decreased coffee consumption because of it. An improved ability to focus was also experienced but not so significantly that I was turning into a productive genius. It was more akin to getting a boost from a big cup of coffee but it lasted all day. It makes sense as ketones are a great source of energy for the brain as they provide more energy per gram compared to glucose.
- Maintained strength and endurance. My training throughout October did not change much from what I was doing previously. In general, I have 2 days of kettlebell conditioning, 2 days of active flexibility/splits training and 1 strength training day. I felt that my energy level for the kettlebell class was the same as before. My numbers for the heavy compound lifts (squat and deadlift variations) remained the same or improved slightly.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed doing the keto diet for 1 month with my wife. Doing something like this with a person like your spouse makes the experience a lot more fun and easy to complete. It feels like you share the difficulty of the task with your partner rather than bear it all yourself. Furthermore, the benefits of accomplishing a difficult task are doubled because it is a shared experience.
After a month of trying the diet for myself, would I recommend it to others? It depends. I would have to know a lot more information such as current eating habits and goals for weight and body composition before I can give any recommendation. It might be the right approach to eating for a lot of people but it’s not for everyone. Genetics can play a big role in how well your body can metabolize fat. We are all different, and some people have a genetic mutation in a gene called PPAR-alpha which makes a protein responsible for fat burning. Without PPAR-alpha available to metabolize fat, it would be unwise to increase fat consumption.
The main takeaway from this experiment was that trying something new for a limited amount of time was a positive learning experience. It’s not so important that I tried doing keto, more so that I tried doing something. If you have weight and body composition goals that you are far from, your current eating habits have to change to facilitate the achievement of those goals. A short experiment can be a great way to start adopting a strategy for achieving your goals. You can learn new facts about nutrition and learn how you personally respond to new sources food. You can also have fun learning new ways of cooking and new recipes. This is all in addition to the bonding experienced from sharing the experiment with someone else. Doing it with a spouse can be very rewarding but if that is not an option I would still recommend inviting a friend to join you in your nutritional experiment. Doing it alone can be a barrier that stops you from actually trying for a long time. I postponed trying the keto diet for longer than a year and a half until I finally had the support of my wife. The sooner you can find someone to try something new with you, the sooner you will do it. That is my ultimate goal for writing all this. Find someone who is willing to challenge themselves alongside you and come up with an experiment that changes what and how you eat for a limited amount of time. Have fun and test your assumptions about food.
