Ketogenic diet

I wanted to share my experience with a Ketogenic diet. About 7 weeks out from my show with my body not responding to the macros I was on at the time, my trainer decided to try a ketogenic diet with me (Keto).  Ketogenic diet is a high fat low carb diet.  Protein is also kept pretty low.  I went from having protein be 40-50% of my diet to about 20% and fats going from 20-30% to 65-80%.  Carbs dropped to 0-5%. 

Obviously this was a MAJOR change to my diet. I’m generally pretty capable of switching things up and keeping my diet interesting while keeping it within certain macros. But honestly, the first couple days I had NO idea how to put together a decent meal on this type of macro split.  I literally ate ground beef with ranch dressing on it.  My coworkers would wait for me to heat up my lunch just to see what kind of random stuff I was eating that day. (Before they left to go enjoy taco bell or burger king or Gates BBQ)

After a few days of trolling the internet for Keto recipes (thank you internet), I was able to actually put together something more resembling a meal. I happen to enjoy braunschweiger (liver sausage) and found that it was a perfect food for this diet.  Also I could eat lots of cheese, pepperoni, salami, make mini no bake cheesecakes. It seemed awesome.. for the first week.  To be honest eating mostly fat gets pretty icky after a while. Though I managed to find some low carb “bread” and muffins, mainly used to deliver butter to my mouth, they weren’t very flavorful and eating butter isn’t as great as it sounds.

We followed ketogenic diet for 2 weeks. Then we reintroduced carbs into my diet. It was kind of like a really big carb cycle, 2 weeks low, 2 weeks high.  We finished my prep with 3 weeks low carb. By the final 3 weeks I had become pretty proficient at making high fat meals but I was getting really tired of eating them.

At the end of the process I don’t even feel that this diet was all that effective.  The first 2 weeks we saw decent change, after that it leveled out and stayed that way for the duration. 

Following my prep, my trainer attended a seminar where ketogenic diet was discussed. It’s shown that the long term health risks of this type of diet far outweigh any short term benefit.  The thing with this type of diet is, it was first developed for short term use in morbidly obese patients in order to get them down to a weight that offered less risk for gastric surgery.

My personal opinion after being on the diet is, it cannot possibly be healthy. Eating mostly fat it’s really hard NOT to eat a bunch of high sodium processed foods.  To keep the protein and carb in take down you can’t eat a lot of whole, close to nature foods.  I love cheese as much as the next person.. but I don’t believe that should be a major part of a healthy diet.

Of course there are people who would disagree with my assessment that a balanced diet is better than a ketogenic diet. There will always be differing opinions. I feel like carbs always get such a bad rap. As I study to get my personal training certificate and eventually a nutrition certification, I look forward to learning more about how the body responds to certain macro splits and different theories on nutrition. Fitness and healthy lifestyles are always changing, there are new developments all the time and you have to constantly change and push yourself to continue to be successful.  As I near the beginning of my next prep, I am anxious to see how this goes the second time around. I plan on documenting more thoroughly how my body responds to the process and how you can get lean on a balanced diet that includes carbs.