Hi friends! My apologies for the extended absence, but I’ve been embarking on a new path and wanted to see how it was going to pan out before I came here to share with all of you!

As you know, I started doing heart rate based training with my runs earlier this year, as I have been struggling for a long time with trying to get the last few pounds off to arrive at my goal weight. This seemed to be working to some degree, and I was definitely seeing some improvement in terms of my fitness, but the scale was still being very stubborn, no matter what I did.

I was expressing some of this frustration at a visit to my chiropractor and running coach. They began telling me about a recent diet change they have both made, to the Ketogenic Diet, AKA the Keto Diet or simply Keto. I was intrigued, so they sent me lots of good info to start my own research.

I began reading and researching and was amazed. This diet has been around for a very long time (sometime in the 1800’s) and yet not well known until more recently. Keto is a high fat low carb diet. It has shown to be very successful for not only weight loss, but also prevention of heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. There has been lots of success shown in folks who have drug-resistant epilepsy, and in women who have PCOS. It’s also supposed to provide mental clarity, and to improve cholesterol levels. Folks with diabetes or pre-diabetes have reported being able to go off their medicines! With so many good outcomes, I decided I wanted to give it a try.

So what does high fat low carb really mean? With a standard Keto diet, you eat about 70% of your calories from healthy fats, 20% from protein and 10% from carbs. That means animal fat, lots of butter, olive oil and coconut oil; a moderate amount of protein each day, and a very small amount of carbs, mostly coming from non-starchy vegetables. The idea is that you are going to force your body to burn fat as fuel instead of sugar/carbs. We eat so many sugars in our society, it’s nearly impossible to find foods, especially processed foods, that don’t have some sort of sugar in them. So that’s what our bodies are trained to use as fuel. When you drastically cut those carbs and eat more healthy fat, it forces your body to adapt and create the enzymes (ketones) to use the fat as fuel instead. It uses the fat you are eating, and then looks around and says “hey, I’ve got some stored fat right here I can use.” It’s at that point that they say you are “fat-adapted”. A wonderful side effect of this is that you no longer get hungry, as your body has a constant supply of fuel. Of course, this doesn’t mean you don’t eat (and I love to eat way too much to ever do that!), but that you need to snack less.

This is a gigantic change from the Weight Watchers method focusing on high protein and low fat/fat free. It’s been quite an adjustment, and having just started week 2 I can honestly say I’ve still got some room for improvement. It can be somewhat complicated trying to balance everything out. But I must say I am loving eating fattier cuts of meat and full fat cheese and salad dressing! And the high amounts of healthy fats most definitely keep you full for a long time!

I decided for the first week I would focus mostly on trying to keep my carbs down, as I anticipated that was going to be the most difficult for me. How was I going to make it without eating fruit (recommendations are that if you eat fruit, only having a small serving of berries as they are the lowest in sugar content)?? And my precious oatmeal? As I am a classic overthinker, by Wednesday I got very frustrated and had a bit of a meltdown, which included 2 pints of Halo Top. But then I got up, dusted myself off, and started again. My macros (the amounts of fat, protein and carbs) each day were far from perfect, but I made it through the week.

Sunday morning came along and I had planned to get back on the scale. I was terrified, as I had not done as well as I had wanted. This whole high fat thing is just so counter-intuitive. And as it turned out, keeping my protein down was much harder than the carbs. But I had limped my way through, and decided to step on the scale and own it. To my shock and awe, I was down 5.4 pounds for the week!! I was near tears. I got off and back on the scale multiple times, but it kept showing the same thing. To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. While I realize that much of this loss was likely water due to my dramatic decrease in carbs, it was very motivating to see that number, and it challenged me to keep going and keep trying to improve.

I feel very conflicted about this development in that Weight Watchers served me so well for so long. After all I made it to 120 pounds down on WW! And I do still like the accountability of the meetings and weigh-ins. So, for now I think I’m going to stick around in the meeting room, but continue this Keto way of eating. I will keep you posted on how things go! I have come across some great recipes that I can share here as well.

If you are thinking about trying the Keto Diet yourself I encourage you to do lots of reading and research. Some of the names I was given to look into were Tim Noakes, Abel James and Dave Asprey. Cronometer has been a big help as well, their website and their app for tracking. I’m by no means an expert, but got lots of good info from these sources. There is a lot of conflicting information out there as well, so it takes some time to sort out the most reputable sources, which I am still working on myself.