Low is good but lowest is not better. Still need to maintain some healthy carbs. My first keto experience was 20g per day which was good at first but I think to low. 30g per day now. Everyone is slightly different so no way to truly know keto without testing.
Different for everyone. You need to start with a daily calorie number and work off percentages of fat, protein, and carbs. Generally, something above 65% fat will put most into ketosis. The only absolute way to know is testing, but there are common indicators like “keto flu” and changes in breath. Of course loosing weight.
There are some ways to home test somewhat inexpensively, urine strips, etc. I never found the need. Determine your daily calorie goal, use a simple tracker, stick to not going above your carb count. After awhile I didn’t need the tracker either.
September 12
Weight: 88.2 kilos (started at 90)
Body fat: 27.1% (started at 27%)
Some observations: I think having a very light lunch and trying to watch my carb intake the rest of the time (under 150 grams or ideally at around 100 grams) is a good enough way for me forward. I almost puked trying to have McDonald’s eggs, sausage, and chicken nuggets yesterday for breakfast. I really enjoy the selection at the bakeries on the way to work. And I enjoy having my breakfast as I start work every day. I don’t know how you guys do 30, 40, or 50 grams of carbs per day.
I think I can speed things along a bit if I start to exercise like I used to (four times a week with some cycling instead of what I’m doing now of about two swims and one light weight session). I think I need to sign up for a race to get myself motivated again.
I’m exercising at least five times a week now just to make you feel better. Two or three times a week wont make a big impact will it ? At most it’ll keep you from getting fatter I think.
Okay, that’s the kind of thing I need to hear. I’ve slowed down only in the last two months. A trip to the US. A broken toe. Now no more excuses.
Please remember our metabolism slows down as we age. As we deteriorate, we have to increase exercise in all areas, aerobic -for circulation and energy-, weights -to keep muscle tone and slow down muscle deterioration- and flexibility -yoga or taichi.
So you can add variety to your workout, have fun and keep healthy.
If you are going to fail, fail in style. 
Weigh in: 217lbs - down 2 lbs from last week (13 lbs total). Measurements about the same (one or two with a cm less, but nothing major). These results are ok all things considered. This week I have been at a course and did absolutely no exercise. Next week should be better. Still, some progress although slower.
My one cheat meal a week is tonight: chicken wings, pizza, and beer.
Just to let you guys know In a Ursel in Gongguan has a whole new line of low carb brunch dishes.
Salads are also a filling option.
Looks good.
What if we eat like cats?
I mean cats only eat meat, in fact they eat almost no carbs, their body is meant for it. They eat organ meats in order to get the vitamins (which is why cat food often contains liver)
I plan to do pretty much the opposite.
I’ll be maintaining my current high carbohydrate diet but eliminating as much fat as possible, and restricting total calories by semi-fasting. punctuated with occaisional lapses.
Been on this for a couple of months, but only statrted monitoring weight and BP recently.
The keto diet is primarily an epilepsy treatment, though it is effective in reducing weight, at least in the short term.
However, intuitively, it would seem that upping your fat intake is likely to increase the risk of arterial plaque formation.
From a quick look, the evidence, unsuprisingly, seems inconsistent. Experimental diets vary, in particular the fat composition within the diet varies (saturated fats are likely a higher risk factor) the focus is mostly on obese (which I’m not) subjects, and the effects are discussed in terms of short-term blood composition changes rather than cardiovascular disease and mortality.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5452247/
Long term studies on epileptic children (presumably not obese) have shown chronic hyperlipidemia and a slightly elevated mortality has been reported for the general population.
My goal is to limit (or, ideally, reverse) plaque growth and reduce the risk of stroke.
Last check, after a 10 days of slightly relaxed regime"break" in Japan, height was 185.3 cms, weight 69.9 kgs, giving me a BMI of around 19. Body fat measured on a “Karalascan” conductivity gizmo, which I can’t drive since it has a Chinese menu system, was 15.5%. Dunno how accurate that is.
These are fairly low numbers so significant cardiovasculer improvement will be difficult.
What a great article - though it is primarily a summary of studies over the last 20 years. Thank you so much for posting this!
I really don’t want to turn this thread into a “validity of Keto” thread - but long story short, I read the entire article, and I did not come to the same conclusions as you from reading it. Especially:
This has increasingly been shown to not exactly be true - and after reading the article you linked to, it also does not support that view. Personally, as with all things health, I think that it has a lot to do with your genetic predisposition to specific health problems.
You are likely in a very different category than most of us on this thread - you are not overweight, and have very different goals. If I were you, I would likely go low fat vegetarian, or something along the lines of the Mediterranean diet, both of which have been shown to have very positive effects on cardiovascular health.
On a side note, I am VERY interested in something that was mentioned in the article - a vegetable based keto. How would this even work??? I’m off to investigate.
Well, the"ïntuitively" is, I THINK, generally accepted shorthand for phrases such as"at first sight" or “it seems to me”.
I base this on the (perhaps simplistic) assumption that if you eat fat, its going to be in your circulation, and thus potentially deposited in your arteries,
Evidence from studies cited in that review paper seems to go both ways, so its inconclusive, but they do acknowledge it as a potential risk.
Based on that, that evidence doesn’t seem strong enough to reject the intuitively obvious proposition, precautionary principle stylee
Re vegetable keto, I think it was primarily a reference to vegetable sources for the fats, which would tend to reduce the proportion of saturated fats, which has varied in the experimental diets, complicating the interpretation.
I assume/hope trans fats did not feature in the experimental diets. Just learned these have been danned by the US FDA, Long overdue…
As discussed earlier, all fats are not equal, nothing revelatory about that.
Uh? AFAIK nobody said there was. Certainly not me.
September 20 (started on the 1st)
Weight: 87.8 kilos (started on 90)
Body fat: 26.8% (started at 27%)
It’s slow going. I knew that it would be, though.
Intuition is unlikely to get you very far when dealing with incredibly complex machines. If your car engine had seized up, and some amateur said to you, “LOL, well, of course it’s gummed up, look at all that oil in there!”, you’d think they were an idiot, wouldn’t you?
Human bodies use saturated fats (specifically, palmitic acid) as their bulk energy storage mechanism. It seems incredibly unlikely to me that evolution would have decided on this solution if saturated fats cause heart disease. In fact the link between fat and CVD has been repeatedly disproven, and there’s no theoretical reason to even believe that there might be any cause-effect relationship.
I’ve been eating a low-carb diet for nearly 15 years, and my cardiovascular heath is excellent. The same is true of millions of people all over the world doing the same thing; if they were dropping like flies, you can guarantee that the health mafia would have seized on that fact and would be trumpeting it from the rooftops. But they’re not. And that pisses them off no end, because the implication is that the standing advice is, and always has been, wrong.
There has been a long-running study in Scotland which recently released some interesting results: among the cohort of older people with the highest total cholesterol, almost none of them had had strokes; it was something like 2-3%. Of those in the low-cholesterol cohort, about 50% had had strokes. This does not prove, of course, that there is a cause-effect relationship, but it does suggest that the medical profession is wrong in their belief that high cholesterol causes CVD. I’m damned if I can find the article again, but I’ll have another look this evening if I have time.