Why I started Keto

Let me start by saying I think having an optimal health is really paramount to living a good life. What’s the point to live a long life if its in pain and you are limited by your body? I heard multiple persons saying the 30s is when the body start to ready feels older and not as sharp as before. What if it didn’t have to be this way?

This is why at the beginning of 2020 I really started looking into nutrition and training. I first started looking into traditional ways with the canadian food guideline and by consulting some free class and a nutritionist. I did at least three months of portion control and consistent training with great difficulty to get to the physique and health that I wanted. I didn’t get there, but did loose some weight. It was difficult and didn’t feel natural.

At this point I was believing in what the society use or used to tell us about nutrition:

• Eat your portions of vegetable and fruit
• Don’t eat red meat more than once per week
• Don’t eat saturated fat or fat too much
• Eat everything in moderation
• Eat each group of macro-nutrient (protein, carbs and fat)
• Carbs are needed in an healthy diet
• Don’t eat processed food or fast food
• Try to eat fish at least once a week
• Trans fat is bad

At this point, I felt like having stomach problems was my destiny and that obtaining the perfect fat percentage was only possible for celebrity and person that had cook and nutritionist following them all days. I was a bit reticent to try new diet, because I though that the traditional diet was backed by science and all the other diets where just fad.

Its only when one of my favorite climber and master graduate in both sport and nutrition Dave Macleod did a 4h video on keto with a 150 scientific paper references, that I though I will learn a bit about this, although I was telling myself it was not in order to actually try it but just to learn something new.

I though I would only watch the video for 20 min. My intuition were wrong! I end up with a rabbit hole of more than 60 hours of looking at science backed video, articles and book around low carbs, keto and carnivore diet. This has changed my previous belief a ton! Now I only belief in the last three points from my previous belief list.

After this change of my beliefs, I decided to try and make an experiment to see if this was really something that could help my health. Here are the reasons and the result for each of aspect I tracked.

IBS (irritable bowel syndrome)

Before starting keto, I was bi-weakly in stomach pain. Where I had to pause activities such as working with co-worker to take breaks. I also had frequent diarrhea and couldn’t tolerate spicy food.

I wanted to know if this could be fixed. In the last months and a half, I can say that I had no stomach pain episode so far nor other bowel problem. I seem to still have a problem with spicy food though. Other honorable mention are that I feel less bloated and have less gas.

Why would the keto or a low carb diet make this better? Thats a good question with not a lot of scientific evidence behind. It could be because of change in the gut microbiome or the elimination of trigger foods, such as FODMAPs or gluten.

Craving, feeling not in control and guilty

I heard keto help with sugar craving and eliminate the need to portion control because the satiety signal are way more accurate. I wanted to try to see for myself.

As you might have read in my other blog post, 2021 was challenging on the emotional side for me. I really wanted to be at my peak health with a good fat percentage, but emotions got in the way and I started going to the convenience store more and more to “feel better” by eating comfort food like chocolate and chips.

This was troubling, because I really didn’t want to eat those and see my full week of effort go to waste by binge eating on non healthy stuff. This made me feel guilty and without control over myself and my mood. When trying to limit calorie by a small amount, I still felt some huge craving and it was difficult to portion control all the time.

I felt angry that I couldn’t control myself on this aspect of my life when I am usually better at this. I can say that I really have no control when there is sugar in the house, I won’t be able to eat it in moderation.

The results from keto where pretty nice! Eating fat felt really nourishing and made me forget about sugar, starch, pasta, etc. I just don’t crave these food anymore. I still have a small habit of snacking from time to time even when I am full. Some habit die hard 😅 But overall, I actually got to my best weight and fat % in over 8 years without restricting myself at all! I sometime though that I might be eating too much with my snacks, but the result were still good.

Another positive note is that I no longer felt like eating every 2 hours. Weirdly, I can fast for around 36 hours without too much difficulty and even go training without any apparent performance impact. I am not saying I do that often, but its now not uncommon for me to eat twice a day and do a 18h fast. I don’t force myself though, fasting is not really in my objectives.

For me, not having cravings is a really nice quality of life bonus! Here are my results, take the % of fat with a grain of salt. Smart scales aren’t that accurate for this measure.

For reference, I was around 140 lb out of highschool.

Energy level

Some keto-er were reporting great energy level that didn’t fluctuate too much during the day. I can say that I seen that too! In the standard diet, I use to crash around 15h and a bit after each meal. I would say that I feel better and don’t nap as often as before. I will continue monitoring this in the following weeks though because it might just be placebo or a streak of not having to nap because of the winter vacations.

Mood and depression

I am really curious about the relationship between one diet and mental illness. Multiple studies have found a correlation between a diet high in refined sugars and impaired brain function.

From this paper:

When we take a close look at the diet of depressed people, an interesting observation 
is that their nutrition is far from adequate. They make poor food choices and selecting 
foods that might actually contribute to depression [...]
Deficiencies in neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, 
and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) are often associated with depression.

Junk food which usually has a ratio of carbs to fat rarely seen in nature except for milk cause dopamine changes which encourages susceptible individuals to eat even more unhealthy foods. This cycle might damage our dopamine 🤷 There is still much more experiments to be run in the future to understand this, but it doesn’t seem far fetched to say that specific food influence multiple variables (including dopamine) which have been proved to be involved in depression and other mental illness.

On my side, I stumbled out of depression when I started keto. I cannot say with certainty that this is because of the diet. It might have been because I was feeling passionate again by something 😄 But! I think trying a diet like keto for a few weeks could be an awesome tool for people with mood disorder and depression because of how easy it is to do and you can just stop and revert to your diet if it is inconclusive.

Trying keto might not be easy for everyone. It was for me and I had no side effects like the “keto flu”. I did put some emphasis on my electrolyte the first week though.

In conclusion, diet could affect mental illness and trying a new diet might be a good way to experiment and see if it helps your syndrome.

But what about cholesterol and saturated fat? This can’t be good for the long term

I will keep it short. Fat as a rep, but there is no causation link between fat and diabetes or cardiovascular disease (CVD) This 2020 study which re-assessed 126 sources says it all:

The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acid (SFA) intake has persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses of randomized trials and observational studies found no beneficial effects of reducing SFA intake on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke. [...]
Whole-fat dairy, unprocessed meat, and dark chocolate are SFA-rich foods with a complex matrix that are not associated with increased risk of CVD. The totality of available evidence does not support further limiting the intake of such foods.

I could put even more links to other source, but I don’t see the need. Let me know if you want more information on this! There is an excellent video that explain how the nutrition policies came to be against fat. Big Fat Nutrition Policy | Nina Teicholz

Overall, it doesn’t seem that fat is the main culprit for CVD. Maybe inflammation, oxidation of LDL and insulin resistance could be the cause of CVD? I am really looking forward to more science discovery on this area!

Conclusion

I will continue to follow a low carbs diet because of the obvious benefices! I really want to reach optimal health and will continue to educate myself. Its a bit hard though, because many doctors and scientists disagree completely with each others. I think that everyone body is different and because of the low cost of trying out different diet, everyone with some problems should keep an open mind and try out whats best for them.

I think our society made food too much of an entertainment and just like watching the tv all day, munching all the time will decrease the quality of your life. Maybe not today nor tomorrow but give it a couple of year and you will wonder how you got there.

My next experiment will be with the carnivore diet. I might do a post about it! Don’t worry I do care about the environment 🤞