Eat less than 20g of carbs a day – simple! A nutrition plan high in good fats, moderate protein and very low carbohydrate intake – the infographic further down the page illustrates this:

Your body starts using fats as energy to fuel metabolism and not carbs – becoming fat adapted. The claimed benefits are your organs are rejuvenated. Carbs and sugar – essentially the same thing – stop flooding your body with sugar and overworking both pancreas and liver to keep your blood and organs from bathing in all the variations of sugar like a  roman emperor (glucose, fructose, sucrose to name the main villains).

Keto nutrition is in the media as if its a new way of eating. Truth be told, like intermittent fasting, eating food high in fat and low in carbs has been around for centuries. Now we have a term which allows people to make lots of money from it!!!!

I decided to try Keto for 6 months combined with 16-8 Intermittent Fasting (note: this was pre-covid19). Very hard when you consider an onion has 14g of carb value – I almost quit there and then as the nutrients in an onion are immense!! One week in and I felt totally amazing. Removing carbs totally and getting my 20g through veg was straight forward just restrictive on ideas of food. What helped is that high fibre food allows you to minus the carb grams. Still two slices of bread or one pitta bread blasts past the 20g barrier.

I joined a few Keto forums and FB groups. Holy cow these guys were warriors. Some were too extreme much like the vegan soldiers patrolling the streets. Let me quickly add Game Changers on Netflix is a slickly produced show that has some fair scientific points but some really far fetched statements about how bad meat is. Do you trust a production headed by a guy who took steroids for years and was also a politician?

I was loading up on nuts and dairy products like cheese, eggs and almonds. Eggs has always been a favourite super good. Protein included any meat. What about cholesterol I get asked all the time? I truly believe that if you exercise regularly and eat clean meat, there is no effect on this figure and in fact cholesterol numbers are now considered a poor indicator of heart health. Sugar is the real demon not saturated fats.

3 weeks in and I started to feel some adverse training issues. When running, my legs were like lead. I was running 5km in 23 minutes where I was used to 18 to 19 minutes. I believed my body was in the state of ketosis (burning fat as energy) and my body was trying to adapt to this. Damn, was I hard-coded from youth to crave carbs and now my biochemistry was giving me a big FU to this change? Can athletes honestly train whilst their body is in a state of ketosis?!

I persisted and after 6 months and I noticed amazing clarity of mind or was my brain glucose starved and delirious? – I don’t have the facts to be certain. I definitely agree a Keto lifestyle can heal the body and certain organs. Where it struggled with me was the fact that training 2 and sometimes 3 times a day – all fat and little carbs was not agreeing with my lifestyle. Add to that the brain needs glucose to function optimally. Also the biochemical makeup of my blood was unbalanced. Lots of keto people have to take supplements to cover sodium, potassium and magnesium. My belief is a nutrition plan should not need a supplement plan. I got kicked off some Keto groups for this belief!

I stopped keto and switched to low carb high fat (LCHF) nutrition which I was close to living  prior to this anyway. This involved a 50 to 80g of carbs a day. Bang – my body was happy in an instant. Apart from treat meals…Still no bread, potato, pasta or pizza.

Takeaway from this experience  – always listen to your body. There are some great benefits – especially the reduction of carbs and how your mind is crazily clear during this…but even with LCHF this is achieved. Some days I just happen to have a keto day – and nutrition like life is about balance and moderation. I am an athlete and train relentlessly so my moderation is probably different to most.

Keto is also aimed at weight loss which i don’t fully agree with. In my opinion, if you want lose weight, it is mostly about calorie deficit (burn more calories than you consume).

2021 Update – Post Covid has seen some wild swings in food intake – thankfully a relentless training schedule kept my health in-check. Future blogs will highlight this including my 4 month sugar bender at the start of the Covid outbreak in March followed by the Summer of Carbs – Wow it was something let me tell you both mentally and physically.

Love Life – Live Relentlessly