Eating a nice turkey sandwich on cloud bread now. It’s a bit tricky to make, but my wife has it down now.
Wow - your wife can make these?! You are set.
Those who are in great shape in life can get away with a whole hell of a lot more than those who aren’t. It’s not just “attractive” women who have life easier - it’s men too. Dunno if that is what I call “terrible”.
Many people, including me, I have gotten into great shape by eating a balanced diet and exercising without being afraid to eat an apple and giving themselves flu-like symptoms. Maybe it’s genetics.
I pretty much only do keto when I want to shed pounds fast, like for this (friendly but still want to crush my buddies) competition I’m in. Overall, I much prefer counting calories and doing cardio. Although, I will say I think my wife and I are sticking with keto a bit longer this time. Though I won’t be nearly as strict with my carb intake. I need pasta/pizza at least once every two weeks to survive.
Not to mention, drinking on keto sucks. You can drink all the hard alcohol you want, and a fair amount of wine, but the hangovers are vicious. With no carbs to absorb all the alcohol it’s rough.
This led me to find out about activated charcoal (from a Russian guy that does keto full time…go figure). It doesn’t cure hangovers, but I’ve found taking a couple pills before I start drinking has lessened them. I recommend giving them a try.
While nutrition science is pretty poor, one of the more consistent findings is the benefits of keto. Depends what you are optimizing for. Keto is not necessary just to get thin, but the diet has other suspected benefits that most of the non weight loss crowd are seeking. Longest stretch for me was keto for 9 months. I recently just got my wellness fx test based on a regular balanced diet to establish a baseline. Now I’m going to experiment with keto and other stuff again and see how it impacts my blood results. Because the things I’m trying to optimize compound over decades but are hard to notice in the present
^^
Thanks rawraw.
My interest are more about the benefits with general health, workout recovery, and the pro/ cons of athletic performance in different kinds of sports on keto.
You guys are a bunch of little girls obsessing over body composition.
I have been looking into the keto diet and athletic performance. These basic articles all say the same thing: that depleated glycogen is not a problem because the body gets better at using fat.
Ok… here is where I get confused. Fat metabolism is an oxygen dependent process. I don’t see how sustained anerobic activity can be maintained on depleted glycogen. I can see short intense bursts… like weight training… because the CP pathway is dominant and fat can be used between burst. I can see how ultra running can be done on depleted glycogen because it is highly aerobic and a very efficient fat metabolism could step in. But what about sustained anerobic… HIIT, 5k, 10k racing? There is no way that is going to be supported by fat metabolism.
What am I missing? In ketosis, do you end up stocking glycogen by converting protein?
Read the link I posted earlier - points 2D and 2E explain absolutely everything. Much better than some janky fitness guru will tell you to just “YEAH BRO, DRINK MCT OIL AND YOU’LL TOTES BE IN KETO”
The below is not my work and I copied it from this thread under points 2E & 2D - the author of that thread deserves all credit.
^^
Wow! Thanks!
In classic exercise phys. they teach you 2 anerobic energy pathways and 1 aerobic. This ketone business is another animal. Still curious how, for example an elite miler, would perform given the classic glycogen dependent pathways or under the above pathways. Thats what I want to understand!
Sure you can work out on keto. We’ve been doing it for millions of years—anytime we ran out of meat, and sat around being lazy for a day, and then it took us another 1-3 days to get a kill and locate some plants…there is your 2-4 days keto (in the form of fasting). Or in the winter when we had dried meat, but no fruit, there is your keto! As far as doing it long-term, there are really no tribes except Inuits who had environments like that (and even they when studied them, they had just enough carbs to not be in perma-keto), so I think that life choice is questionable.
So there is the purpose it serves, why we evolved it. This is important. We need to understand keto from inside the macro theory of evolution, which helps explain the observations, and guess at what the observations will be before they are known.
What happens on say day 3, is that you start to get “keto rage.” An evolved state that makes us more aggressive, more alert (it’s a unique high), and needing less sleep…you are ready to hunt! Otherwise less calories would mean lower energy, and you would just sit there depressed with no food and die like a loser. So yeah, you are pumped and ready to go do something. However this was NOT evolved for running marathons. Yeah, you can lift but you can lift like 75%, you can run but it’s not the same as with carbs. The energy is there for killing something and surviving, not doing slave labor on the railroad all day (carbs are optimal for that). I think Peter Attia ran into this and tried to find work arounds (but I wouldn’t bother, this is the nature of keto, just work with it as nature designed it).
Be ready to pee a lot!
Look up the ultra marathon guy. My limited understanding is that keto is probably a drag on performance of burst activities (this is why people do modified keto with eating glucose right before the workout) but a benefit on endurance, because it ensures a much more constant energy supply. But I’ve never really cared much about the athletic performance part.
I must try that Ketamine diet.
When this happens, by definition, you’re out of ketosis. That’s why you have to eat so much fat. Most people concentrate on keeping their carbs down and end up eating way too much protein.
To answer your question(s), you absolutely can do intensive workouts while on keto. But, based on what I’ve read and my personal experience doing cardio on and off keto, it’s much harder. As for lifting, initially you’ll be way weaker but it comes back pretty quickly. Look into a good collagen supplement (be sure it’s keto friendly). It’s one of the few supplements that actually seems to be worth the money. It helps repair damaged muscles (i.e. rebuild them after an intense workout), and also makes your hair and skin look great.
On an anecdotal note, I happen to work with a champion bodybuilder and he stays in ketosis to keep his body fat next to nothing, but then says he absolutely has to carb load in the weeks leading up to a competition to gain muscle mass. The bottom line is your body likes carbs better. But, unless you want to look like the She-Hulk, you should be able to do fine in keto.
Its special.
Yeah, I can be in nutritional ketosis for a while (fasting) and do quite heavy workouts. I’m at the point where I could wake up on an empty stomach, do 1hr cardio, then at the end of the day (still fasting) do a few hours of cardio and heavy weights. I think it does mimic what hunters and gatherers went through, which represents what our body has endured over the years and shows what we are capable of, in terms of going for long periods and heavy activity searching for food. Yesterday, I did about 30min of cardio in the morning (light to heavy cardio) and then 2hrs of kickboxing at night (very heavy). After the kickboxing I was a little hungry, but not starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. I went to some Mexican place and ordered two large salads (pork and chicken). They were about Chipotle bowl size, maybe slightly larger, probably 1000 cal apiece (maybe more?). Two was fine, but I ordered another chicken salad to total about 3000 cal post workout (I usually get comments from the server about my WTF food amounts/intake). I had another 1000-1500 cal when I got home and that was it for the night. All in all, my intake period for food was about 4 hours. The shorter the intake window, the more time you are enabling your body to be in nutritional ketosis. For intermittent fasting, it takes a bit to get used to it. Maybe a week or two. There is a psychological aspect to it. Hunger is a feeling often connected to our feelings and emotions. In intermittent fasting, you finally get a true sense of what it means to be hungry. At this point, I am confident I can separate true bodily need for intake versus small coping mechanisms in daily life that lead me to snacking to alleviate what I think is hunger, but is only the brain seeking chemicals, rather than the body seeking nutrients. If I’m really hungry in the day, I’ll eat something, but most of the time I don’t need it. In heavy heavy workouts, the number one thing that causes me to stop is hunger. It is a feeling of being so tired and hungry at the same time that I have to stop and go eat food. This happens a few times a month. When I feel that I am in this state of significant breakdown (catabolic), I usually resort to salmon/steak as a post workout protein. If I’m not hurting too bad and feel ok, I’ll stick with a vegan intake for the night. Or mostly vegan. But, on a daily basis there are three things I focus on post-workout: good lean protein initially after workout, lots of dark leafy greens and vegetables, and finally fruit intake. At the end of the night, the last thing I typically eat is a bowl of fruit with some kind of protein with it. Like, frozen strawberries defrosted with peanut butter / almond butter on it or even yogurt stirred in at times on top of it if i’m really calorie deficient. I have a variety of fruits/berries as I need many of these micronutrients to support my body in an anabolic state (building up). If you try intermittent fasting, just start out a few days a week on 16hr fast, 8hr intake and I would recommend eating before and after workouts. It took me a while to be able to go into a workout with an empty stomach and even longer to do 2 / day workouts with zero intake during the day. But the mind and body adjust and get used to it.
I’ll be honest, I liked keto a lot more before that stupid netflix documentary came out. I can’t stand the number of my friends telling me how much they love keto meanwhile they’re downing their fourth mimosa at brunch. The absolute lack of preparation and calculation into exactly how to make it work is par for the course of mediocrity.
make sure you cut out alcohol on that diet though.
Just skip the OJ (or ask for just a splash for color). Champagne is fine on keto. An entire bottle is only about 10 carbs. Realistically you can go up to 50g of carbs and still stay in keto.
On Saturday, I had a few Miller Lites by the pool, and a couple bottles of red wine that evening. Pissed on a couple keto sticks throughout Sunday to check my levels and I was still solidly in ketosis.
I’m more or less making fun of the shock factor behind the logic of “WHO knew you could lose weight by restricting your calories for extended amounts of time?!?!”
Because you can achieve the exact same result on other cuts .