The Ketogenic Diet — An Introduction

When I publish my next book entitled, The Champagne & Chocolate Diet, it will sit on the best seller list for at least 9 months and bring me millions and millions of dollars.

Ya think?

You see, I’ve written about diets, and I’ve written about diets. I’ve even developed a diet, which, though I made no guarantees, helped people lose a minimum of 5 pounds a week if they followed it rigorously. In fact, I had two people write me telling me they’d lost 9 to 10 pounds per week. It was scientifically designed to maximize calorie burn, and like the ketogenic diet, kept the dieter in a “fat burning” mode most of the time.

However, I’ve reached an age where I cannot even work my own diet. There is a fast day followed by a fruit/smoothie day, and for some reason, at my age, I cannot fast anymore. All my life I’ve gone mainly with one meal a day. I have done multitudes of fasts. I’ve juice fasted for 28 days. But for some reason, at my age (slowly creeping up on 70) I start get hungry around ten in the morning. This is a whole new feeling for me, and I had to find a diet that didn’t make me want to do the first three letters of that word.

What is the Ketogenic Diet?

First, it’s a low carb diet. We’ve just posted the first person to go on a low carb diet and journal about it. His book is online at archive.org and here is our article on him: William Banting and the First Low Carb Diet.

Second, it’s a high fat diet. But it’s a high healthy fat diet. No trans fats, no corn oil, canola oil — let’s stop right here and instead of listing the bad oils, we’ll list the good oils.

Omega-3s & omega-7s: flax, chia, fish, hemp seed; all these. Great oils for your body and for this diet.

Coconut oil: a very healthy oil that kills parasites, fights a few viruses and bacteria, and is (contrary to most of the BS out there) great for your heart. In fact, where it’s found, it’s often called “the medicine plant.”

MCT oil: Medium Chain Triglyceride Oil. It comes from coconut oil and from palm oil, but try to find something that doesn’t come from palm oil because harvesting it is destroying the ecological niches of many animals and is ruining our planet. MCT oil is very necessary to this diet. It is so necessary that sites will sell you MCT pills to assist your dieting. However, we will post recipes here with MCT oil in them (like this chocolate bar recipe).

Virgin Olive Oil: contains Monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) which are anti-inflammatory.

Avocado Oil: contains MUFAs.

Nut Oils (Nut Butters): these contain carbs, but because of fiber, the net carbs are lower, and I’ll explain that soon.

Then there are: Dairy Fats, Butter, and Cheese, but beware: sites will warn you about saturated fats . . . .

Saturated Fat Warnings

Here’s where the bullshit hits the fan. Far too many people buy into the lipid hypothesis, which states that if you eat saturated fats, your arteries will get clogged.

That is bullshit, and we will never back down from calling bullshit bullshit.

Cardiovascular illness begins in your blood vessels by minor inflammation and by nutritional deficiencies. The “fat” clogs your arteries by trying to put a bandage over the diseased blood vessels.

Fats do not cause CVD. They’re trying to save your life. End of story.

How Many Carbs

The upper limit is 50 grams; the lower limit is 20 grams. (But you’ll want to go to the very last section of this page for Tips & Tricks when it comes to these carb numbers.)

Net Grams Carbs

There seems to be no consensus on this among dietitians or nutritionists, but this has been commonly accepted by dieting experts and now the masses.

You have your carbs. And you subtract your fiber. And you get your net carbs.

I bought peanut butter this morning that has 5 g carbs and 3 g fiber. Thus, one serving (one fluid ounce) has 2 g net carbs.

So What is Ketosis?

Let us borrow something from WebMD:

Ketosis is a normal metabolic process, something your body does to keep working. When it doesn’t have enough carbohydrates from food for your cells to burn for energy, it burns fat instead. As part of this process, it makes ketones. [Ref]

Here’s what it means when dieting: you are burning fats for energy, and this is an incredibly efficient process. Burning carbs is very inefficient, and since insulin is needed, you need to know that insulin is a “fat storing” hormone.

Thus, the ketogenic diet keeps blood sugar from spiking, allowing just a minimum of insulin to help clean up a few carbs, while the body gets the bulk of its energy via the ultra-efficient fat burning process.

And which oil is best at keeping you in ketosis? MCT oil.

Contraindications (those who shouldn’t try this diet)

• Type 1 Diabetics (juvenile onset) — an increased chance of diabetic ketoacidosis, which “occurs when the body starts breaking down fat at a rate that is much too fast. The liver processes the fat into a fuel called ketones, which causes the blood to become acidic.” [MedLine]
• Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.
• People with gallbladder problems (or removed) or liver conditions (the liver is worked hard during this diet).
• Type 2 Diabetics who are on medications (perform this only under close medical supervision). [Ref]
• People with eating disorders: They should be monitored closely by a physician. Focusing closely on what not to eat and what you can eat can cause people with these issues to become overly obsessed.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Safe and effective for people who are significantly overweight; has proven to be very successful for long-term dieting (24 weeks, although the study extrapolated that one could do this for an entire year), dropping body weight significantly, lowering LDL cholesterol and raising HDL cholesterol, and lowering triglycerides significantly. Blood glucose levels also decreased quite significantly. [Long-term effects of a ketogenic diet in obese patients]
• Anti-inflammatory: One of the ketones the body produces is β-Hydroxybutyrate and that’s an anti-inflammatory. [β-Hydroxybutyrate Deactivates Neutrophil NLRP3 Inflammasome to Relieve Gout Flares]
• Anti-aging (at least in mice). [Ketogenic Diet Reduces Midlife Mortality and Improves Memory in Aging Mice]
• Anti-cancer: Because cancer loves sugar, cutting carbs is something most cancer diets do, but the ketogenic diet goes further as attested by this paper: “The Ketogenic Diet Is an Effective Adjuvant to Radiation Therapy for the Treatment of Malignant Glioma.”
• Anti-epileptic: Since the 1920s, doctors have been using the ketogenic diet to treat children with epilepsy who do not respond to medication.
• Fat does not cause heart disease: While researching this diet I read a ton of bullshit about how exogenous (coming from the outside, or in this case, “eaten”) fats cause CVD (cardiovascular disease). But it doesn’t. Horrible fats (cotton seed oil, canola oil, trans fats) cause and contribute to CVD. Healthy fats? Like coconut oil or MCT oils? They extend life and prevent CVD. [Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study.]
• You actually feel full. Those of you who’ve hated dieting in the past because you’re always hungry and want to cheat will love this.
• You can beat your type 2 diabetes on this diet. Many have. And the latest information [(Sources: Journal of Nutrition, 2019; nxz058; https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxz058 (diabetes study); The Lancet, 2018; 392: 2288-97 (heart disease study))] that contrary to the notion that fats clog our arteries, concludes that there’s a  22 per cent lower risk of heart disease, a 34 per cent reduced risk of stroke, and people on a diet with high fat were 23 per cent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.

Cons:

• Athletes will not improve performance. Athletes need carbs. They need other things too, such as electrolytes and antioxidants, but the efficient burning of fat will not help their performance.
• Brain Fog: the brain needs carbs for energy. During the transition from your brain getting carbs to getting ketones, you might experience some brain fog. There is a cure, though: MCT Oils. Use it in your coffee, in your recipes, and you can even find dried MCT oils in supplement form. It quickly feeds your brain energy just like carbs.
• Constipation: while researching, I found a few articles on this, and what I remember was something to the effect of: keep those fats coming in and they (your turds) will slide right out. Cripes. Okay, how about a little fiber. I take at least one smoothie a day with Omegasentials (milled flax+), hemp seed, milled chia seed, psyllium husks, and inulin. All provide fiber, and the inulin is a prebiotic feeding the good bacteria in my gut.
• Keto Flu: this is an imbalance in electrolytes. You’ll feel weak, nauseated, and headachy. Your body needs electrolytes; potassium, magnesium, sodium, calcium. I get sodium and minerals from Celtic Sea Salt, and I take 400 mg of magnesium daily. I get calcium in my water from calcium sachets I add to the water (sweetens the taste of filtered water), but I’ve found I’ve had to supplement potassium. Yes, there are foods for all these things and sites galore list them out, but since I’ve stopped putting beet juice powder into my smoothies (too many carbs), I’ve found I’m not getting enough potassium.
• Could trigger kidney stones because of lack of fiber. So again, a smoothie with added fiber, or perhaps adding ground/milled flax seed to your salads. Just keep up the fiber and don’t worry about carbs, because the fiber counters the carb count, and you get nearly zero “net carbs” in all the things I’ve mentioned.

Five Types of Ketogenic Diets

1. Standard Ketogenic Diet: This is the diet most people talk about. It’s low-carb, moderate-protein, and high-fat.  At www.healthline.com, they list it thusly: “75% fat, 20% protein and only 5% carbs.” I love this explanation mainly because it’s useless. How on earth is the average person going to figure out what to eat by calculating percentages?
2. Targeted Ketogenic Diet: This one is for athletes who need carbs after a heavy workout. In the book I wrote (Rapid Safe Weight Loss [currently being rewritten]), I recommended a fruit smoothie within a half-hour of a heavy workout, and don’t use any of those low-carb whey proteins. However, for you folks who are simply active, you won’t want a high-carb smoothie after a half-hour walk. You won’t be staying in ketosis long.
3. High-Protein Ketogenic Diet: Just like the Standard Ketogenic Diet, but with more protein. And do you really need to know the percentages? Is anyone out there going to calculate your meals based on percentages? This is a diet good for people who need to build muscle.
4. Cyclical Ketogenic Diet: This is one in which you stay in ketosis for five or six days, and then enjoy some carbs (usually on the weekend) for one or two days. This is close to the theory behind our book Rapid Safe Weight Loss (currently being re-written). The difference is this: we have cheat days to fake the body out so that it thinks we’re going to really feed it well, and then for the next two days, we fast. Fasting normally causes the body to go into the “starvation mode,” lowering metabolism to a bare minimum so as to make it through periods of famine without starving to death. If your metabolism is kept running high, but not getting food for energy, you’d soon start to waste away and convert your muscles to sugar for energy. So on this diet, we fake the body out, and by the time it realizes you’ve not eaten in a while, you start to re-load foods to keep your metabolism up by not going into the starvation mode. We do what’s called carb loading over the next few days. There’s more to it, but long story short, a day or two of carbs just keeps your metabolism strong and let’s face it, dieting sucks so we enjoy a couple of days off. Have a damn hot-dog and some nachos on the weekend. (Just make the hot-dogs kosher and the chips organic blue corn. Wink wink.)
5. Restricted Ketogenic Diet: This is probably the fastest weight loss you’ll find. You’re restricting both carbs and calories. Again, our book did this. The only thing our book didn’t do was keep you in ketosis. We kept fats to a minimum too.

Exercise

It’s good to move your body. The human animal is not a sedentary creature who thrives in a cubicle. The best exercise for us old farts is walking. It sure won’t destroy your knees like jogging. I play a little tennis once or twice a week, but only because I’m doing prolotherapy for my meniscus in my right knee that’s turned to hamburger. Swimming, boating, canoeing, hiking. It’s all good.

Then there’s your interval training and bursts. I highly recommend these to you younger folks out there; those of you not quite into your sixties. And Dr Alan Sears has the best program in the world. I’ve used it, and I recommend it. It’s called the Pace Program. This is our best affiliate program of all because I’ve received more thank you notes from readers than you can imagine for helping them get this program. It works, and it works well.

You can also do push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks; anything you want as long as you don’t hurt yourself. And as we approach the final third of our lives, weight-lifting is a must. But always keep in mind that you’ll burn up more calories if you exercise before eating. I know I’ve posted this all over our website and in our newsletters. There is a lot of science behind it. Nobody knows why; they just know it works that way.

Warnings (More Hype to Wade Through)

When we test, we really test. We have joined programs and purchased things from at least a dozen organizations to examine, sample, and scrutinize. So here goes.

Meet Kelsey:

Kelsey is a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner.

I did a bit of research and learned that this is an online degree (there are sites that require attendance for workshops) that you can get in about nine months.

Once you receive your degree, you may hang your degree on your wall.

That’s about it. The “rights and privileges” granted by this certification are that you can hang a certificate on your wall. That’s it.

I called a college offering this degree and asked if a person may “test out” of the classes and was met with a resounding “No!”

Dr Sam Chachoua got his MD at the age of 18 by testing out. He proved he knew everything that would be on the exams. I have tested out of many classes, mainly my journalism classes. All you really need to know about journalism was said by Oscar Wilde: “Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.”

This “college” wouldn’t let me test out.

And your author happens to be a student of human behavior/psychology (as well as anatomy, biology, and pathology). I don’t know about you, but that is one huge phony smile.

When a person smiles, they smile with their entire face, not just the mouth. So right off, Kelsey got off to a bad start with me. She has a worthless degree and a fake smile.

I opened the book randomly, found a chocolate recipe, and quickly learned that they didn’t teach basic chemistry in her online degree. We know why it’s impossible to sweeten chocolate. Chocolate is a fat and sweeteners are water-soluble. Sweeteners fall out of a lipid solution. Her recipes never take this into consideration.

So I threw her book away.

I have, I think, six books on the keto diet now, and I’ve purchased a few products and, oh, yes, there’s that tea that some screwy organization thought I’d like the recipe to for . . . $30.00?

Here, you can go read about it: Fat Burning Way to Start Your Day. You can see their hype for yourself without having to visit their website.

The diet industry rakes in $70 billion each year.

From all the contacts and purchases, I’ve received 77 spam emails in the last month. I think I might have deleted a few before I realized I should probably document how many I get. And each day they sweeten the pot. Their programs are now 50% off and will never be this low.

Of all of the programs, the best one I found, the one that actually leaves good things in my inbox (yes, they all want you to buy more, but Louise is really helpful) is the Keto Summit.

It’s the only keto program I’ve liked so far out of six I’ve reviewed. Yes, they all give you a “free” lead and then try to sell you more, and they all fill up your inbox with emails, but this particular one has the best information, and I actually look forward to her emails. When I had a question, I wrote to her and she responded the very next day. So we’ve joined only her affiliate program.

Many of the programs started sending me spam about things other than diets as well as quite a few of those “clickbait” come-ons like: Three Foods You Should Never Eat, or This One Food Will Drop Inches Off Your Waistline. I’m sure you’re aware of these come-ons; once you click you’ll search for hours to find the three foods or the one food and never find anything except a sales pitch. Louise and her Keto Summit is not that way.

If you want to get started with her program, then just click the picture. Louise is good people.

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Tips and Tricks to Help You Drop More Weight

I will be updating these over the next year or so, and I’ll put a date next to each one. You can bookmark this page because it’s here where I’ll be not only posting a few tricks for you, but I’ll point to new Keto Friendly Recipes that we’ve posted or anything new we’ve discovered over the year.

5/9/19 To stay in the fat-burning mode, it’s not the number of carbs that you take in that is the controlling variable, but how much sugar gets into your blood stream. One could get the benefits of maintaining a diet with fewer than 20 grams of carbs while eating 50 grams of carbs if you can keep your blood sugar from spiking. If you’ve been insulin resistant in the past, that will start to go away and your body won’t be flooded with insulin triggering “fat storage” and you’ll keep burning fat. The insulin you do produce will be more efficient.

So look at it this way. We never stop the production of insulin. It’s circulating when we eat, but not in huge quantities triggered by a spike in blood sugar. As long as we’re not flooded with insulin, we can burn fat for energy.

This is why if you want optimal fat burning, you need supplements that are hypoglycemic (they keep your blood sugar low and your fat-burning high).

In the diet book I wrote, Rapid Safe Weight Loss (which is being re-written), I told readers about two supplements that are a godsend: Svetol® & Lowat. The first keeps blood sugar from spiking and the latter assists in fat metabolization. They’re both backed by scientific studies, and I highly recommend them (and use them myself) . . . especially if you are on my Champagne & Chocolate Diet.

And don’t forget: Swanson is our best affiliate program. They always have the best products for the best price. Not even Amazon can beat them.

5/13/19

You should know that I buy recipe books not for the recipes but for the ideas.

And the Keto Sweets books I’ve gotten are all screwy.

First they all seem to chose “monk fruit” as their sweetener. (Also known as Lo Han.)