Ketogenic Diet for Entrepreneurs in the Philippines
My biggest gains in productivity in the past year surprisingly came from this weird diet.
I say weird because everyone I explained it to had WTF written all over their faces.
After I explain it, I normally send links to reinforce the explanation. What has been lacking are tactics to apply this diet in the Philippine environment. I attempt to remedy this with this post. I share the easiest way I found to go Keto with Philippine cuisine. For those who want to master the principles, and not just know the rules, I share some resources I used.
Applying this diet can look slightly different depending on your objectives. I am writing this for people who are mainly seeking gains in mental performance (thus the title) — rather than weight loss, or athletic performance, or fixing various health conditions. It also has a bias for efficiency (in time, cost and complexity).
In a nutshell, the Ketogenic or LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) diet activates a metabolic state where your body uses fat rather than carbs for fuel. In this state, my brain has amazingly been near its cognitive optimum the entire day, and I get a second wind of mental energy late in the afternoon. This has given me at least 2 more hours of productivity per day.
For 60 days, I recorded each of my meals, to compute whether I follow these two targets:
- At least 70% of my calories must come from fat
- I don’t consume more than 50g of carbs per day
(The balance — around 25% of calories per day — is protein. It seems tracking and keeping this high is important only if you have serious muscle-building or -maintenance objectives.)
I’m assuming that the normal Filipino meal consists of:
- A viand of pork, chicken, fish or beef
- Rice
- Some vegetables
Google image search agrees with my assumption:
After 60 days of calorie-counting, the easiest way I found to make Filipino meals Ketogenic is to replace each cup of rice, bread or pasta with 2 tablespoons of coconut oil.
And stop eating or drinking sugar. That’s it.
Month 15 Update!:
Month 22 Update!:
Month 28 Update!:
OK, now some details:
- Eat vegetables
- How strict should you be with the carbs?
- How to transition from being carb-fueled to fat-fueled?
- How much fat to consume per day? How do you consume that fat?
- Where do you find coconut oil?
- Resources
Eat vegetables
If you slather coconut oil over your meals, you’d want some vegetables on your plate. Otherwise, you’ll always be eating meat swimming in oil. Plus, vegetables are good for your health. They’ll probably prevent downtime from sickness.
How strict should you be with the carbs?
Just experiment. I found this question to be the easiest way for me to decide:
What’s more important —mental sharpness in the next few hours or having this cookie/beer/burger/pasta/cake/bread right now?
I am normally a sugar is evil puritan on workday breakfasts and lunches (I found I function best with sugar/simple carbs close to zero, and keep veggies below one cup during work hours).
For dinner, I am more liberal with fruits and veggies.
For me, [carbs now] > [cognitive function later] when:
- It is someone’s special day (alcohol, it turns out, is carbs)
- Friends or family prepared the carbs
- The carbs is too delicious (I don’t have a cheat day; I only have a threshold of deliciousness)
How to transition from being carb-fueled to fat-fueled?
My formerly-chubby-now-Jiu-Jitsu-instructor brother did this cold turkey some years ago and said he had a couple of weeks of misery.
I transitioned to low carb seamlessly I think because I practiced this other diet for quite a while: Don’t eat starch with protein in one meal. Either eat rice/pasta with vegetables. Or meat with vegetables.
This is not just some psychological thing. Your body actually adapts to your nutritional intake. For instance, the different kinds of microorganisms in your gut change in proportion, and your gall bladder starts excreting more bile, to process your wonderful new abundance of fat.
How much fat to consume per day? How do you consume that fat?
The target is to have at least 70% of your calories from fat. If you want to be exact, you can calculate what your daily calorie intake should be using a calculator like this one (it changes with age, activity level and target weight).
For a 2,000-calorie daily intake, the target is to get at least 1,400 of those calories from fat. There are 100+ calories per tablespoon of my go-to fats: coconut oil, butter, olive oil, avocados, peanut butter, peanuts.
In most days I take 6–8 tbsp of coconut oil, 2 tbsp of butter, 2 tbsp of peanut butter and 50g to 100g of peanuts. With fats from viands, I more or less get to hit 1,400 calories with this.
I put 2–3 tbsp of coconut oil on each meal (olive oil is only for special days; it is expensive here since we need to import it from Europe). I take butter with my coffee (delicious, it turns out). I just like peanut butter and peanuts. When available, I eat avocados as salad or dessert.
I used to make this super simple Keto Mousse for dessert using coconut cream to cover some of my fat calorie target, but I eventually chose efficiency over dessert.
Where do you find coconut oil?
When you ask for coconut oil in supermarkets, they point you to virgin coconut oil (VCO) in the skin care section. Coconut oil turned out to be hiding in plain sight. These are the three that I normally find in Philippine groceries. None of them is labeled “coconut oil.”
They are probably all the same, but I normally buy Marca Leon, because its bottle has good ergonomics and copywriting.
It turns out coconut oil is one of the best fats in the world. Since the Philippines is one of the biggest producers of coconut oil, it is super cheap here. On a per calorie basis, coconut oil costs less than rice.
Resources
We touch on this in an episode of the 3rd World Startup podcast:
Here’s the podcast that introduced me to this diet:
Simple reading:
Explanation written by a doctor:
I used this app to track what I ate. It computes the fat, protein and carb for each meal, calories from each, and totals for each day.
I used this to compute my what my target fat, protein and carbs should be per day:
I might as well mention nutritional fasting. This seems to give me a longer period of that 2nd wind of mental energy from ketosis.
