Keto on Major Hayden

Three years of keto

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written about keto before on the blog, but as we approach the end of 2022 and many people are making resolutions for the new year, I get a lot of questions about it. Hopefully I can answer most of those here!

What is keto?

Ketogenic diets often sound complicated. The TL;DR is:

Reduce your intake of carbohydrates to a very low level (less than 30g/day for most people)
Increase your fat and protein intake to make up the difference

Seriously. That’s it.

But before we go any further:

🩺 Don’t start (or stop) a ketogenic diet without talking to a trusted medical professional. There are certain health conditions that require modifications to the common ketogenic diet.

In my experience, adopting a keto lifestyle helped me to:

Maintain a steady blood glucose all day long (about 100 mg/dL)
Reduce my weight (about 210 down to 170-175)
Sleep better
Exercise longer¹
Balance my cholesterol levels
Lower my triglycerides and A1C
Avoid diabetes

Top three things you should know

I’ve boiled down all of the questions I’ve answered via email, social media, and in person at various dinner parties when people question my unusual eating habits. 🤭

If you have questions that aren’t answered here, click one of the links on my profile page and send me your question!

What do I need to buy?

This is an easy one. Nothing.

You’ll find tons of products online and at your local store with “keto” on the label. If you flip them over and read the ingredients, they’re chock full of artificial sweeteners, flour substitutes, and chemicals. Although many of these won’t spike your blood sugar, many of them will! Some artificial sweeteners, like malitol, have the same effect as raw sugar, just on a smaller scale.

All of these artificial foods push your keto progress backwards.

You do not need keto shakes, keto fat bombs, or keto vitamins. You do not need gluten-free foods as they’re packed with carbohydrates.

You need whole foods. You need high quality fats, proteins, and lower-carb vegetables and fruits.

The only exception I’ll give here is that you need some high quality electrolytes, especially as you start on keto. As your body transitions from burning easily accessible glucose in your blood to burning fat, you’ll find that your salt intake will be woefully insufficient. You can make your own keto electrolytes really easily (tons of recipes available online) or find electrolyte tables/mixes without sugar.

How do I handle going out to eat?

Here’s a big challenge. Your friends invite you to dinner or the holidays have arrived. How do you handle it?

My strategy involves the following:

Get a look at the menu ahead of time. Look through the menu and find items that fit your diet goals. If you find a menu item that fits all of your requirements, that’s awesome! In those situations where the main item is perfect but the sides aren’t right (fries, potatoes, rice), look for alternative side dishes that you can ask about when you get there. Worst case scenario, just ask them to skip the side dish so that you’re not tempted to eat it.
Have an answer ready if people ask about your menu choices. It’s inevitable that someone will say “oh, you don’t like potatoes” or “why are you just getting a salad?” Have your answer ready and be honest.
Never say that you “can’t have” something. This makes it sound like you’re denying yourself something and it makes it difficult to stick to the diet. I remind myself that some foods look and taste delicious, but they don’t line up with my health goals, so I skip them. I tell others the same thing. Often times, I’ll say “Oh, that looks delicious, but it doesn’t fit in my diet.” You don’t want to offend anyone but you also need to be honest with yourself.
Save up your carbs. Going out to eat for dinner? Try to eat only fat and protein all day long and save all of your carbs for dinner. You won’t be able to go wild with your carb intake, but you can enjoy a little more then you would otherwise.

Key takeaway: Your diet is your choice. It’s the same situation with someone who doesn’t drink but their friends keep offering them alcohol. Don’t let anyone pressure you into changing your goals.

What happens if I eat something I shouldn’t?

The holidays are coming! 😱

First off, admit that mistakes happen. That’s okay!

When I’ve eaten tons of carbs, I make a mental plan for the next day to get back on track. Some argue that starting the next day with a fast makes the most sense. I prefer to get back to my high fat and moderate protein foods the next day as I normally would.

Keep in mind, though, that once you’ve done keto for a good while (usually 1-2 months for me), your digestive system has adapted to the new diet. Lots of the bacteria you used to have on a high carbohydrate diet are gone. Flooding the digestive system with lots of high carb food will make your intestines confused. Confused intestines are not comfortable. 🚽

Remind yourself of why you started the keto diet, get back to eating right, and take it as a learning lesson.

Sometimes I see a delicious high carb food, like pizza, and I think:

“That looks so good. But if I eat that, I’m going to have belly problems for two days. Is it worth it?

I make myself think through the consequences before I eat it. Do I still eat it sometimes? I do. 🤷‍♂️

Wrapping up

Going keto delivered tons of benefits for me, but it certainly is not easy. However, the diet is fully open source and nobody needs to buy anything special to get started. You can still go out to eat with friends and recover from dieting errors easily.

At first, exercise will feel more difficult. Be patient and take it slow as you start. ↩︎

Takeaways from The Obesity Code

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I finished Dr. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code earlier this week and it really made me think about how the nature of food and eating have changed over time. At a high level, the book focuses on not only what we eat, but when we eat.

This post includes some of the biggest takeaways that stayed with me after I finished reading it. However, the book has tons of excellent analogies to help you understand complicated systems in the body and their related medical conditions. It also includes results from many studies done over the past 200 years as well as deep dives into where some of our modern nutritional guidance started.

I highly recommend reading the entire book. Dr. Fung’s writing style makes it easy to understand complicated tasks, and if you don’t understand something, he reiterates his points in subsequent chapters to drive important messages home. (Love books? Get a copy of Dr. Fung’s other excellent book, The Cancer Code.)

But before we get into this topic, we need a disclaimer.

Disclaimer

I’m not a medical doctor and I couldn’t play one on TV even if I tried. I’m just a person trying to improve my own health without landing in a fad diet that doesn’t work. I also have nothing to sell to you.

Before you embark on any big changes with eating or exercise, talk with a medical professional to ensure you don’t have any underlying conditions that would worsen with the changes. But, if your doctor tries to get you onto a low-fat, high-carb diet, I’d strongly recommend getting a second opinion. 😉

Why this topic?

I started on the keto diet back at the end of 2019 in the hope of improving my own health. My sleep patterns were terrible, I was on blood pressure medication, and my seasonal allergies really slowed me down. My weight wasn’t ideal, either.

It’s August 2022 and I’m still going with keto. My weight is down from 200-210 lbs (90.7-95.25kg) to 170-175 lbs (77.1-79.4kg) and that puts me in a healthy zone at 6'1" (1.85m) tall. My blood pressure medicine went away a long time ago, as did most of my allergy medications (prescription and over the counter). I’m an active runner and I either run or walk about 3.2 miles (5km) daily.

I feel great.

However, I see constant updates on statistics around obesity in the news and in medical studies. I’m eager to find any details out there that reinforce my knowledge on the diet, question my assumptions, or offer me ways to improve it. This book is just one of many I’ve read to better understand how my own body works.

My takeaways

Just as a reminder, these are only the big things that stuck with me after finishing the book. You should read it to get the full picture since you may be more interested in different topics.

Caloric restrictions don’t work

Many diets focus on reducing calories and they’ve been proven to fail over and over again. Dr. Fung provides several studies in the book that show a few different things:

Initially, you lose weight, but it comes back
Your body reduces the caloric output when you reduce the input
Keeping a low calorie diet going for long periods of time is extremely difficult
Lowering calories doesn’t lower insulin levels over the long term

He provides a great analogy to help understand how the body handles weight. Everyone has a weight point set in their body, much like a thermostat for an air conditioner. If it’s too cold in your room, you could start up a space heater or start the fireplace. The thermostat will notice the temperature increase and turn on the air conditioner. At some point, your space heater burns out while fighting the air conditioner or you run out of firewood.

This is how your body works.

Your body has a set point for weight, like a thermostat, and you must find a way to lower that setting. Dr. Fung notes that insulin levels are a huge factor. If insulin levels remain high for extended periods, the body thinks it needs to take on more fat and store the energy that is coming in. The weight thermostat moves up.

Turning that thermostat down requires lowering insulin levels over the long term. These levels spike every time we eat, no matter what we eat.

How do we lower the thermostat? Keep reading.

Avoid refined carbohydrates

You probably knew this was coming. Dr. Fung notes that nothing raises insulin levels higher in the body than sugars. However, there are differences based on what you’re consuming, whether it’s plain table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sugars.

So much of the wheat we consume today isn’t the same as it used to be. Lots of packaged foods contain hidden sugars or so much processing that barely any of the original nutrients remain. Any keto dieter can tell you that removing these foods will kick the keto diet into high gear.

As stated earlier, caloric reduction doesn’t work. So if you’re removing calories from refined carbohydrates, something must fill the gap left behind.

That’s where an increase in fat and protein helps. Fat and protein do raise insulin levels, like any food, but the levels increase by a much smaller amount. In addition, he cites several studies that show saturated fat levels in the blood remaining relatively steady when people consume high-fat meals.

I can vouch for this myself. My diet consists of fat as the number one source of calories and my triglycerides look fantastic. My A1C is down from where it was before starting keto and my cholesterol numbers are in a normal range.

That leads to another good point from the book: 75% of the cholesterol in your blood comes from what your body makes. Only about 25% comes from your diet. But not all cholesterol is the same. You can break the HDL/LDL into many different types and there are types in both categories that are helpful and harmful.

Think more about when and less about what

Dr. Fung argues that you should focus on when you eat a lot more than about what you eat. (But avoid the refined carbohydrates anyway.)

But there’s one thing I am sure of: intermittent fasting is my nemesis.

Dr. Fung provides lots of study results that show fasting as a critical part of reducing obesity and keeping insulin levels in check. He even cites a study where someone went on a therapeutic (and medically supervised) fast for 382 days and was totally healthy afterwards. Reading things like that makes it seem less insurmountable.

The body knows how to handle a fast and takes many actions to ensure we are performing our best during a fast. Think about early humans. Sometimes they would have a large meal after a hunt but then winter comes and food becomes scarce. When the body goes without food, it begins to think: “Hey, we better be smart and be on the lookout for something to eat.”

Keto dieters who intermittently fast will tell you that during their fast, their focus improves. The body makes adjustments to blood glucose levels and overall blood flow to ensure we’re operating at our best. If we’re not, then we might miss our next meal.

Dr. Fung provides 24-hour or 36-hour fasts as examples. These may be tough for beginners. I’ve found that any adjustments I can make, even if it’s just skipping a meal, seems to improve how I feel.

My current pattern is called the 16/8 because you spend 16 hours fasting with an 8 hour eating window. My window runs from 11AM to 7PM so I can eat lunch and dinner without being tempted to eat late in the evening (which is rough on sleep patterns). If you want to try something simple, try skipping breakfast (which is named as such because it’s a break in the fast you have while sleeping). 😉

Going forward

My ability to resist refined carbohydrates and high sugar meals is superb right now, but it’s taken a long time to get here. I thought this would be the most difficult thing to overcome, but surprisingly, a cake, a dish of crème brûlée, or an ice cream seem unappetizing to me now. (Boy, I never thought I could escape the clutches of a good crème brûlée.)

However, there are two things I don’t do well right now:

I turn to artificial sugars far too often but they raise insulin levels, too (sometimes as much as regular sugar)
I still don’t drink enough water

My plan is to drink more water regularly, especially while fasting, and find a way to reduce my artificial sugar intake a bit more.

Luckily, a friend told me about r/Hydrohomies on Reddit so I can get my water reminder along with hilarious memes. 🤣 💦

As always, if you want any of my perspectives on keto and intermittent fasting so far, ask me anytime.

My experience with keto so far

major@mhtx.net (Major Hayden) — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve talked about some of my experiences with altering my diet on Twitter and many people have asked about my experiences with keto so far. Note that I don’t call it “the keto diet” because it’s much more than a diet: it’s a lifestyle change. Sure, you alter what you eat, but you begin to think differently about how you fuel your body.

Before we start, I’d like to note that:

I am definitely not a medical professional or a dietician. If you plan to make any big changes to what you eat, talk to an expert first. Certain people with certain conditions could be harmed by a drastic change in diet or lifestyle.
Everyone reacts differently to lifestyle changes. Your experiences are not guaranteed to match mine. Yours could easily be better (or worse).
I have nothing to sell you. The keto lifestyle is effectively open source since there’s nothing to buy and no memberships to maintain. There are tons of different ways to start and maintain it, and you can choose the right method for you.

What is keto?

When you adopt a keto lifestyle, you change what fuel is used primarily in your body. It’s a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate approach.

Low carbohydrate diets are not new. They were studied heavily in the early 1900’s as a potential remedy for epilepsy. Doctors noticed that patients who fasted had fewer problems, but the patients couldn’t maintain fasting for extended periods. Once they put the patients on a high fat diet and the body went into ketosis (where it burns fat for fuel), the patients had fewer problems.

These diets are still used today for children and adults with seizure disorders and other brain-related conditions. To learn more about these patients and how fat works in your body, read Dr. Mark Hyman’s Eat Fat Get Thin. He provides tons of easy to understand reasons why a high fat diet is better and he provides links to hundreds of studies and publications about it.

Time for bacon all day!

Hold on for a moment.

As a friend explained to me, doing keto the right way is like getting the right octane gasoline from a reputable gas station. It burns clean and make your car run well. You can choose a different octane or choose a shady gas station and your car will still run, but it might make noise, run slower, or send you to the mechanic more often.

People often talk about “dirty” and “clean” keto. If you focus purely on your carbohydrate target and use any foods you want to fill up your calories from fat, you will end up in ketosis. However, some of these foods will slow your weight loss progress (if that’s your goal) and they may rob some of the additional keto health benefits from you.

I thought it was just weight loss?

There are two big benefits here: weight loss and health benefits.

First, let’s talk about weight loss. You can check Reddit’s r/keto for some amazing weight loss stories. People have loss hundreds of pounds and kept it off!

I started around 195 lbs (88.5 kg) and I am 6'1" (1.85 m) tall. After starting keto, my weight increased (as did my blood pressure). I was frustrated as the food change was difficult and I felt like I was doing a lot of work for nothing. Online forums reassured me that this was part of the process and that I should keep pushing.

So I kept pushing and stayed with it. Around the 3-4 week mark, the weight slowly began to come down. Within two months, I was down to 180 (81.6 kg). Within three months, I was at 174 (78.9 kg) and realized I didn’t want to be that thin! After increasing my fat intake a bit more, I’m able to hover around 180 lbs and that’s very comfortable for me.

Even at 180 lbs, I looked different. Some of the troublesome fat that I dealt with (love handles!) shrank some. I moved from a 36 in most pants down to a 34 (and a 32 in some).

The best part about all of this is that my body stays between 178-182 lbs reliably without needing to take any drastic action. It is easy to maintain.

What are the health benefits?

I’ve had mild high blood pressure for a few years and I was taking medication (lisinopril) to reduce it. The medicine worked fairly well and and kept me in a better range. However, I had spells where I would stand from sitting and I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt tired more often and felt lightheaded after working out.

I’ve also had asthma for years and I’ve taken various medications (montelukast, albeuterol, olopatadine, flonase) to deal with that and my seasonal allergies. My asthma has put me in the ER more than once.

After about four months of keto, my lightheaded spells got worse and my doctor told me to stop taking blood pressure medication. I watched my blood pressure closely and found that I no longer needed medication for it! (That was one medication I was really glad to throw away.)

I’m about 8 months in now and I was able to stop taking all allergy and asthma medications about a month ago. This really makes me think that something was in my diet that was causing me harm.

What do I stop eating?

Looking at keto as a “What do I stop eating?” question will make it much more difficult to maintain. Here are some of the things I eat regularly:

Avocados
Berries (raspberries, blackberries, strawberries)
Butter
Cheese (mostly the harder ones)
Coffee
Eggs (add chorizo for more flavor)
Fish (salmon, trout, limited tuna)
Ghee (butter with dairy removed; goes great in coffee)
Meats (beef, chicken, pork, and yes, bacon)
MCT oil (medium chain triglycerides from coconuts)
Mushrooms
Nuts (walnuts, pecans, almonds, limited peanuts)
Olive oil
Vegetables (lettuce, zucchini, eggplant, celery, many more)

This is just a small subset of what I like to eat. If you want a comprehensive keto grocery shopping list, the experts at Diet Doctor have you covered.

But yes, there are some things that I avoid as much as possible:

Anything that says “diet” on the package
Beer 😭
Chips and crackers
Gluten (difficult to totally avoid)
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
Malitol (used as a sugar substitute but it spikes blood sugar 🤦🏻‍♂️)
Potatoes
Sugar
White wine

To succeed at keto, you need to keep your body in sustained ketosis. Anything that spikes your blood sugar (sometimes called high glycemic load) must go.

Don’t fear: some alcohol is okay! Avoid beer, sugary mixed drinks, and white whines. Red wines from Europe and South America are great, and you can have low sugar liquor like gin, bourbon, whiskey, scotch, tequila, and vodka. Too much alcohol will stunt your progress towards weight loss and other health benefits.

💣 PLEASE NOTE: Hangovers are significantly worse and longer lasting on keto. Studies are underway to figure out why this is the case, but Dr. Hyman speculates in his book that it’s related to how the liver operates in a lower-carb setting.

Okay, it can’t all be perfect.

And you’re right. Getting into ketosis is not fun at all.

Many people talk about the “keto flu”, which is a period that lasts anywhere from a few days to a week where you feel pretty terrible. Your energy level will drop, exercising will be difficult, and you will be irritable. This is the period where your body has exhausted its supply of easily accessible glucose and it’s changing gears to burn fat.

I’ve gone through it three times (more on that later), and it’s not fun. Here’s a list of what I went through:

exhaustion
increased trips to the bathroom
irritability
lack of focus
muscle cramps
temporary weight gain

To make this as easy as possible (and short in duration), do these things:

eat consistently (do not fast)
exercise consistently, but make it lighter than usual
get electrolytes daily (low carb, of course)
keep fat intake high (you need to encourage your body to burn it)
sleep at least 8 hours

The fog will slowly begin to lift and you will feel great when you reach the other side.

What happens when I eat bad things?

This happens to all of us. I was two months in on keto when Thanksgiving arrived. That’s a big holiday in the US where we generally eat a lot, and a lot of what we eat is carbs. Some potatoes, pumpkin pie, and beer tempted me and I woke up the next morning feeling awful. My stomach cramped and I felt nauseated.

Many people suggested getting right back into keto with high fat foods and exercise. I persevered with that and felt better by the end of the day.

If you do make a bad choice and spike your blood sugar, your body will crave more sugar and put you into a keto-busting spiral. Your digestive system biome that changed to work with a high-fat diet will get confused with a sudden influx of carbs and it will cramp. However, if you get back on track quickly, those problems will subside.

People make me feel guilty for not eating things.

I’ve heard things like these a hundred times:

“It’s not like one piece of cake is going to screw up your whole diet.”
“She spent a lot of time cooking that and now you’re not going to eat it?”
“You’re thin. Why do you need to do keto?”
“I’ve eaten bread all my life and I’m just fine.”

Remember that this is a choice you make for your body. Don’t ever say “I can’t eat that” because your brain will see your lifestyle change as limitation. I usually say “Thank you, but I don’t eat that” or “I love what you made, but that’s not something I eat.”

What do I do when I get invited out for dinner?

This is probably the toughest part. What do you do if you get asked to go to dinner or if you’re on the road and you need to get food? You don’t really notice how much of the American diet is made from carbohydrates until you start avoiding them. They are everywhere.

Vegetarians and vegans have a similar problem here. Try to look at the menu ahead of time and figure out the things that you can eat.

There are two approaches here:

Choose something you want to eat and ask the server if you can substitute anything you don’t want to eat.
Order something and eat what you like. Leave the rest.

I’ve had lots of luck by asking for different vegetables to replace potatoes as a side dish. There are some of those times where I can’t substitute and I end up leaving food behind. I feel bad about wasting food, but I’ll choose that option if it’s the only one I have.

When everyone starts to order dessert, get yourself a low carb treat! Sometimes I’ll ask for a cup of coffee or some scotch as a dessert. Everyone does dessert differently

I have more questions!

Great! There is only so much content I can put into this post. Send me a message on Twitter or email me at major at mhtx dot net.

Here are some great resources that I use:

Bulletproof produces a diet that is similar to keto but it may help people with digestive disorders. It aligns with the FODMAP diet which may help you if you suffer from conditions like IBS and you want to lose weight. Their products are also top notch.
Diet Doctor has tons of useful information on various diets that benefit your health and their guidance is easy to understand.
Dr. Hyman is an expert on low-carb diets and their health benefits. He has a great podcast and lots of free resources to guide you.
Reddit’s r/keto has inspiring stories and plenty of guidance for you if you get stuck.

Photo credit: Pexels