Day 66: Falling for it

           Despite my prior railings about diet religions and nutritionism, I have to confess that during the past year, I’ve tried several faddish eating regimens, hoping, like everyone else does, to find one that’s, you know, magic.

              The 4-hour body, which involved a lot of beans and no carbs except for on a cheat day a lot of supplements,  and insisted on no more than a few hours a week at the gym, was something I followed most of the summer. It might be a great program, but my cheat days got closer and closer together and became cheat weeks, and without a DAILY gym routine, I find myself going weeks without visiting there, and by the way I HATE taking pills, much less multiple pills 3 times a day. Next.

              I became briefly fascinated with something called the Snake Diet, which involves fasting for days or weeks on end drinking only a mixture of water, salt, potassium and lemon juice that the founder calls “Snake Juice”. I never got further than a 48 hour fast, by the end of which I was obsessed with food, and never got used to the founder yelling “Fatty!” and using the F-word even more than I do. Next.

              Several of my colleagues became involved with one of those MLMs that sells “weight-loss coffee”, and I literally heard about it every day or 2 for 2 months from someone or another. I  finally gave in and bought a 30 day supply, and have been using it faithfully for about 5 days, just to see what it’s like; I have no real confidence that the “feel-good nutraceuticals” will peel off those pounds absent, you know, eating less, but who knows? Maybe it’s just as magic as the people who sell it say it is.

              In other words, like most Americans, and despite my own sneering at the impulse in myself and others, I’m something of a sucker for the magical thinking of, “There’s something out there that’s going to be healthy, peel weight off, and be super-easy to follow, and all I need to do is find it.”

We all want these things—whether they’re about insta-wealth, insta-youth, insta-beauty, or insta-gratification, to exist. For the most part, they don’t.

              But there’s one thing I would like to put in a good word for, and that’s the Keto diet.

              Like most ‘popular’ (dare I say, fad?) diets, Keto has spawned a zillion new gurus and a zillion “right” versions (I bought a book on the topic that suggested no fewer than 68 additional supplements, each with no less than 68 letters in the name, which I immediately tossed both because it reeked of nutritionism and  due to the my chronic non-compliance with any pill-taking regimen), but it’s basically an eating plan on which most of your calories (about 60%) come from fat, about 30% from protein, and about 10% from carbohydrates, which all come from non-starchy vegetables and the natural carbs found in meat, those veggies, and so on.

              The basic idea is that the human body uses the most easily available energy sources first. Glucose—which is easy for the body to break down—is the first choice; it’s cheap unleaded gas of the body. Alcohol is the body’s next choice for fuel, followed by ketone bodies, which are produced in the liver from fat.

By depriving the body of easy-to-use glucose, you switch to using ketones for energy.

So what, you say?

Well, there’s the weight-loss aspect: making your body burn fat means that it not only burns the fat you eat, it also burns the fat you’ve stored. But the more interesting thing to me is burning keytones, according to a lot of scientific evidence, might be better for you.

Keto-type diets have been known since the 1920s to help people with seizure disorders. More recent studies have shown them to improve symptoms in Alzheimer’s patients, people with bi-polar disorder, Parkinson’s, ALS, and a host of other brain- and neurologically-related diseases.

I’ve read (as best I can) the actual scientific studies, and sponged up all the Scientific American summaries I’ve found on the topic, and while no one quite seems to understand the mechanism behind the brain-protective aspects of Keto, all the evidence points to it, and there are more clinical trials all the time.

But here’s what I can tell you about my own experience: I feel distinctly more “clear”, mentally, when I’m following this eating pattern. It’s remarkable (which is why I’m remarking on it), and hard to describe, but it I can tell you that when I’m doing it, I feel like a light mist has cleared from my brain. I’m more focused, in a better mood, and more able to make decisions than when I’m not.

Another positive side effect is that, after the first few days (when my body wants to eat everything in sight, I assume looking for some of that sweet, sweet glucose), I’m just not…that…hungry. Instead of wanting to snack all day (and all night), I find myself not thinking about food except when actual hunger pangs hit, which is around 2 pm and around 8 pm. And when they do, they’re easily satisfied with a modest amount of food, and after that, I’m just not that interested in having more.

When I was on my 3 week jaunt around the region promoting that conference I’m always talking about, I noticed a huge change in my usual attitude (it was positive, instead of, let’s say, touchy, as in years past), my energy level, and, most notably, my eating patterns.

These presentations are 3 hours long, and almost always happen from 6-9 in the evening. In the past, I’d eat dinner around 5, be completely exhausted by the time I left the event around 10, and then be desperate for more food. I say desperate, because it’s not always easy to find real food at 10:30 at night in, say, Youngstown. I was always left feeling grouchy and deprived by my food options and, in the past, would end up eating a Double Whopper with fries before bed.

This year, eating Keto, I noticed that at 10:30 p.m. I just wasn’t that interested in eating, and whatever almonds or string cheese I’d brought with me was more than enough to satisfy any hunger I did have.

Given my “food shortage” phobia, this was a real sea change. Huge. And it had to be about the fact that I’d been on a ketogenic diet for weeks at that point.

              It’s not without its side effects, the worst of which is “Keto flu”—a depressed, weak feeling most people get for a few days after starting it—nor its challenges, which include trying to stick to it in restaurants or on the road (even when you ASK whether a soup is thickened with flour, or whether that fish is coated with breadcrumbs, you can’t trust the answer in most places). It’s not a diet that’s well-suited for “cheat days”—eating even one slice of pie will immediately throw you out of ketosis while your body feasts on all that lovely glucose. It’s hard to follow week after week, month after month, because despite the lack of hunger and the clear brain, old habits (Yum!!! Fresh bread!!!) are always waiting to drag you back into the grove of the Standard American Diet. And I’m certainly not recommending it for everyone, because there are health issues that might make it flat-out dangerous for some people.

              But I’m here to tell you, it works for me. I’m resisting the urge every day to be a Keto evangelist—I refuse to be one of those people who, every time the topic of food comes up, tries to convert others to the “right” path—but it does, indeed, have my seal of approval.