Two Years on a Ketogenic Diet

It’s been more than two years since I started doing keto.

The ketogenic diet (keto for short) is a high-fat, moderate-protein, and low-carb diet. This means no grains (refined or whole), no sugar, no rice, or anything high in simple carbohydrates or starch. This also includes refined grains, such as noodles, cookies, crackers, cakes, and other things made with flour, etc. With this diet, your body is forced to burn its own fat instead of carbohydrates, while producing the optimal amount of glucose for your brain via gluconeogenesis.

Keto has had such a big impact on my life that I decided to move to a house with a bigger kitchen. Before, I lived in a very small house, and I was mostly prioritizing eating out, but with keto I switched mostly to cooking for myself, and only eating out when I’m travelling, eating out with somebody, or during days when I’m very busy away from home.

How Sugar Affected My Health

For most of my life up until my early thirties when I started doing keto, I was low-key addicted to eating sugar. This had a tremendous impact on my health, but it’s not easy to notice compared to, for example, someone who is obese or has a significant disease. In my case, I had several but seemingly unrelated symptoms, such as difficulty falling asleep, itchy skin, physical and mental fatigue, awful skin, among many others.

The worst symptoms I remember having are the bad skin (constant acne) and cravings that simply didn’t stop all day long no matter how much I ate. All these symptoms have stopped completely for good, and I have the best skin I’ve had in years, not to mention I constantly feel much more energized than even before turning twenty.

I’ve known the concept of ketosis since my late teenage years, but I only knew how to get into that state by doing prolonged fasting. I had practiced one-day fasting several times in the past, and I felt really great every time, especially the increased mental sharpness, but I never really knew I could tap into this state almost 24/7 by changing my diet until several years later.

For many years I had a small sign written on my Evernote scratch pad saying “sugar detox” as a reminder to stop eating so much. The idea was to remind myself every time I opened Evernote to stop eating so many carbohydrates. Little did I know, trying to lower carbohydrates wasn’t going to work, instead, the solution was to completely cut them out of my diet, otherwise, the cravings would never go away. Suffice it to say, this reminder never really worked, but I think this was essential in continuing to broadcast the intention to stop eating sugar. Eventually, this intention grew bigger, and somehow was able to materialize into starting keto. In general, every big change ends up being materialized because you sometime in the past put out an intention into the universe, even if it started as just a small thought or desire, it was still that seed that eventually grew into the material world, even if initially you had no idea how that would happen in practice.

Main Benefits of Doing Keto

Here are some of the main benefits I experienced with this diet:

• Stable blood sugar, and being able to avoid symptoms from high insulin or toxic amounts of sugar.
• No cravings for food in general (not just carbohydrates). The main exception is perhaps when I’m very tired.
• Being able to do intermittent and prolonged fasting.
• High mental energy, no mental fatigue.
• It makes it easier to stop consuming other toxic foods such as vegetable oils. Since cravings disappear in general, I also don’t feel tempted to eat these things.

Another great benefit is that I can finally focus on nutrition when I go to the grocery store, instead of just focusing on fulfilling my sugar needs. When a person goes to the supermarket, they are usually automatically drawn to the foods that they feel they need to eat because of their sugar cravings. People rarely choose a food product over another because it’s healthier, or because it may have a nutrient they may benefit from. Instead, the deciding factor in many cases is just how palatable the food is.

Without the cravings, you gain a level of mental freedom that allows you to choose foods in a more deliberate way. Every time I go to the supermarket, my main focus of interest is exploring what else I can add to my diet to make it healthier, very rarely caring about whether it tastes good or not. I often ask myself things like “I’ve had too much vitamin A lately, how can I now prioritize K2 intake instead?”. A person who hasn’t got off sugar yet will be much more impulsive in their decisions and won’t have this kind of strategic decision-making.

Finding Perfect Solutions for Problems

When trying to find solutions to problems, it’s often the case that one would come up with a solution that “sorta” works, and may need some hacks or workarounds in the long run to fix issues that arise. It’s a very rare situation that you solve a problem in such a way that the problem dissolves completely.

The keto diet, however, completely solves the sugar addiction problem. It completely obliterates all the issues related to sugar, and destroys any and every desire of going back to eating sugar.

The low-carb content makes your cravings completely disappear, while at the same time the high-fat content gives you lasting energy. It’s fairly easy to regain control over the way you eat and stop eating impulsively. It simply flows perfectly with no resistance.

What would it look like to be able to find such solutions to other challenges one faces in life? Things like acquiring new skills, improving or healing negativity/depression/mental disorders, becoming more productive, making meaningful connections with other human beings, etc. Do these areas have a keto-like bulletproof solution lurking somewhere waiting to be discovered? Doing keto doesn’t give you a formula to find such solutions, but now that I have experienced doing keto and fixing the sugar issue completely, at least I know what such a solution looks like, and I have a frame of reference that I can use next time I’m evaluating a different area of my life. I know I’ll be able to detect the inconsistencies and/or partial matches much faster.

In order to improve your health through diet, you’ll need to learn several concepts, such as hormones (e.g. insulin), minerals, vitamins, macronutrients, etc. When a person doesn’t know these things, their minds will still try to fill in the gaps with a simpler version of this knowledge, such as “counting calories”. However, calorie counting is a very poor way to model health, and it will rarely work properly, and trying to improve your health through this concept is more like a brute-force hack rather than a subtle, smart solution. Sometimes having a deep understanding about how things work gives you an edge on how to find better solutions for various challenges. From a mathematical optimization perspective, we know that the optimal global solution isn’t always found right away by looking at the local vicinity. Similarly, it may look like the keto diet’s fat content is too high to be healthy, but knowing more about how different fats work will help you deal with this belief.

What About Coffee and Alcohol?

Turns out the keto diet has virtually no impact on caffeine consumption. If you have a caffeine addiction and you start doing keto, you’ll most likely continue being addicted to coffee. This also means that chocolate addiction can continue even after starting keto, but the difference is that it’s easier to choose the low-sugar bitter ones, and avoid the ones with margarine or other garbage ingredients.

When it comes to drinking alcohol (which I only do once or twice a week) or eating out with friends, it’s also perfectly easy to eat carbohydrates and then go back to keto. One meal doesn’t seem to kick me out of ketosis, and I can go back pretty easily the next day. One interesting thing I found is how clearly my health temporarily deteriorates after even one non-keto meal. When I go out with my friends to eat noodles (ramen) or meals with white rice, I noticeably feel like trash for the next few hours. I also drink alcohol sometimes, which temporarily kicks me out of ketosis and gives me headaches and other nasty symptoms. However, my hypothesis is that drinking alcohol a few times a week is still a much better lifestyle than eating refined carbohydrates daily and frequently. I choose to believe this, since it’s what my experience has been showing so far.

Sometimes Life Feels Empty Without Sugar

Going sugarless greatly improved my life. However, somehow I feel some things in life lost a “punch” that used to exist before quitting sugar.

When travelling, for example, one of my favorite activities was to try local restaurants (usually full of carbohydrates) and then go to a café and have a sugary coffee drink and a cake or whatever. Sometimes this would be the highlight of the day and in some cases, the food was the main and only reason why I’d travel somewhere in the first place.

Since I started doing keto, I know that if I travel I won’t be doing any of these things, and therefore the amount of travelling I do nowadays has also decreased a lot. If I go to the same places I used to go before, I feel a sense of emptiness that must be filled with something else. This means I no longer enjoy doing those activities or going to those places.

While this may seem like life has become more empty in some sense, it also serves as an honest feedback signal regarding a lack of fulfillment that was already there to begin with. Instead of using sugar as a way to avoid noticing that lack of meaning or satisfaction, I prefer to acknowledge the fact that life will feel different, presumably less fun, and then start to find new meaningful ways of living from that blank slate, and maybe discover that doing so without the sugar will prove to be more effective and valuable overall.