In reality, this will be between 1000-1500 depending on the day, but trying to put that in a title isn’t awesome. Before I wrote about a single silver purchase, I was writing health blogs for 3 years where I lost 175 pounds. In this blog, I’m going to lay out what I already started – and how something like this really isn’t terribly hard to do. 

In late 2019, I exited my “keto” way, and went a form of low carb. At the time, my mother was at end stages of stage 4 cancer. My wife then had complications with the pregnancy, and this is all around the time the world shut down with COVID and I had to run an org of 70 people for a $50m contract. Oh – to top it off, I had some sort of issue with driving which led to an impingement with my shoulder. I thought I had torn something, but did physical therapy for a few months and fixed it. AT the same time, I was dealing with terrible back issues. Suffice it to say, in 6 months I put on 50 pounds – and actually had not really changed my caloric intake for the day. Physicists would say I’m lying. But the truth is – weight loss is all about hormones. 

Why keto over any other method?

When I did keto, it didn’t take me long before I wasn’t hungry. Maybe a few weeks. Not hungry? Yes. Not at all. What you essentially do when you start keto is strip out a lot of the crap foods in your diet. All of these things that are made with “seed oils” and “hydrogenated vegetable oils” – etc. When you start to remove fake foods from your diet, and allow your body’s hormones to work the way they are supposed to, a funny thing happens. 

Your body sees the spare tire around your waist and decides that’s a great source for calories. 

Look, if you want to do whatever diet you want and do calorie restriction, have at it. Not going to fight with you. But my personal experience is this – when I had higher carb diets, I’d restrict calories and be starving – ALL THE TIME. How keto essentially works is – calorie restriction. But the difference is, your hunger levels are a LOT different. 

Things that affect your hunger levels – which then sends the hormone ghrelin out to you – blood sugar levels crashing down after an insulin spike (from carbs). Your body sees all of this glucose hitting your blood sugar, and secretes insulin out of your pancreas in order to shuttle the glucose out and keep you regulated. 

No surprisingly, your body, over time – can become “insulant resistant”. Where your body needs to secrete more and more insulin to take the same amount of glucose out of your bloodstream. This, is essentially type two diabetes – and why someone may have to eventually inject themselves with insulin.

But what if you never, ever spike your blood sugar and then spike your insulin? You are well within a regulated range. Proteins have an effect on insulin, but fats really do not. 

So if you have high HbA1C, why are you having a majority of carbs in your diet? Did you know, that you can go the rest of your life without 1 gram of carb and survive just fine? However, you need proteins and fats to live. In fact, fats are pretty damn important for most of your body’s hormones. Makes you wonder how the “non-fat” diets of the 1990s worked out with hormones. 

But some other things that also trick your body with hunger are things like diet pepsi or sprite zero. Things that are sweet can still trigger your hunger hormones, believe it or not. That’s why on keto, it’s probably a good idea to drink nothing but water. If you DO have a sprite zero or the like, have it around a meal time. 

Starting keto?

Essentially – for a few weeks, you want to keep your carb levels around 20-30g of carbs a day. The easiest way to do this is eat a lot of meat and eggs. I tend to eat a ton of broccoli on this. But I’m 8 days in and down 14 pounds, which is very typical of the early stages when you are dropping water. 

Once you hit ketosis, your body then “switches” from carbs as your primary fuel source to ketones – which are made from your stored fats. For the purists out there which talk about your brain needing glucose – you do not need this exogenously. Your body can produce this from protein or break down muscle to synthesize the glucose needed for brain function. The fallacy here is thinking you need a bowl of rice a day or your brain shuts down. 

Maintaining keto

To maintain this a long time, every 3 weeks I will have a 2 day weekend or so to eat whatever I want, within reason. This doesn’t mean I go woof down 5,000 calories at the all you can eat, but it means that if you have a wedding you are going to, a birthday party – you can “go off” of this for a day or two. Maybe you do it every 2 weeks. Maybe every 4 or 6. When you “go off” of it, you will gain 5-7 pounds in water weight rapidly, as you become the thirstiest person in the world. 2-3 days after you go back on keto, the 5-7 pounds drop right off. 

Exercise on keto

Since you are using ketones as the primary fuel source and not carbs – your weight training can suffer early on, as your body gets used to it. It could take 4-5 months, but eventually your body gets smart about how to refill the glycogen stores in your muscles. Early on, these get drained, and you might get 1-2 heavy lifts before you die out, where you could do 10 reps before. 

What I found best for this early on was walking. It’s like your fuel is burning a candle. Carbs are like rocket fuel for high performance, but burn very dirty. When you are walking 5 miles on keto at a slow clip, your body is literally breaking down your fat and delivering a steady diet of ketone fuel for you to use. I now work from home every day, so I like the idea of a nice brisk walk for 3 miles over lunch walking the dog. 

I love to run, bike, swim, hike – but I hurt my back pretty severely from overdoing it. I was running/biking 8/45 miles in a day, and was still 205 pounds. The main issue then was that I was doing a LOT of fasting and I do not think I was having the necessary proteins to keep up. In fact – when I weighed 225, I was benching 225 3 times with ease. When I was 197, I could not bench 95 pounds once. Seriously. That last 27 pounds I used wayyyyyy too much endurance sports and with this, my body ate all of that wonderful muscle I created to fuel my long distance runs and bikes. 

I really did well until I dialed up the duration. The lesson I learned here is this. Let me get to about 13-15% body fat before I want to dial up the duration, and with this – I need to ensure I have plenty of protein and calories. I lost weight, but it was at the expense at the end of muscle. 

What you then learn is about “targeted carbs”. After a year of STRICT keto, I then went to a more relaxed keto with 75-125g of carbs per day. The key here is that these carbs were 1-2 hours before a hard run or bike. What this method does is prevent the “bonk” which I experienced pre-keto at 22 miles of biking. When you low carb train, and do targeting of carbs around specific high intensity work outs – you can literally bike forever at a high intensity. In the flats – the ketones provide you great fuel, and on the hills, those carbs and glycogen stores kick in. This is what I used for my sprint triathlon I did. 

1000 calories?

What I did on keto was – “one meal a day”. Now, many of you have been brainwashed that you need to eat 5-6 small meals a day. Bull. Shit. One of the things that makes you hungry Creating a pattern of eating at specific times. If you eat breakfast every day at 8, your body knows 8 is coming and out comes the ghrelin. But you can train your body to eat OMAD – and I was doing this around 5PM. 

Yesterday, I think I went above a bit and had perhaps 1400 calories. I would typically do OMAD during the work week when I went to the office, and on weekends I would do lunch and dinner. Often, I did “fasting Fridays” 2-3 Fridays a month. I wouldn’t eat on Fridays. I’d be hungry at 5, but by 7PM the hunger then passed and I’d eat Sat morning. 

My lunch yesterday? Two thin pieces of mild provolone cheese with a few ounces of boar’s head oven gold turkey. My dinner? I made up a 2 pound eye round roast (roast beef) and there was about 12 oz left. I trimmed off whatever fat and silver skin was on it before I made it. Roast beef is super lean and you are looking at perhaps 40 calories per oz. That’s roughly 500 calories for that – then I had some 200 calorie broccoli cheddar bake with it. Add in my calories for my half and half and splenda in the morning, and you are looking at maybe 1200 for the day. 

But what I like the most are my salads. I have to wait 1-2 months to do them because I use a lot of cherry tomatoes in them with avocados. My giant salads are made with either chicken (12 oz) or taco meat (12 oz mix of ground beef/ground pork). 

Below is my taco salad – which I later learned to put sour cream on

Above is my chicken salad. Both are constructed similar – with the main difference being romaine for the chicken and iceberg for the taco salad. 

These salads are about 1000-1300 each in calories. But the “volume” here may be in 3 stalks of romaine or a whole head of iceberg – along with about 12 oz of meat. Over time, I usually dial the meat back to about 8 oz if I have other meals in the day with protein. The chicken salad has lean chicken – but fats added with olive oil and avocado. The grass fed/grass finished beef has fats, so no oils added – and also uses avocado. 

Calorie math

The main problem with calorie math, is that unless you have access to a physics laboratory, you do not know EXACTLY how many calories you are currently burning a day, at rest. You don’t know how many calories you burn walking up stairs, walking to your mailbox, walking your dog up a hill – etc. What might surprise you, is over 2 years, I didn’t count one calorie and I lost 102 pounds on keto. 

The secret is – hunger. If you aren’t hungry, because your body can self regulate, it’s pretty easy to consume 1400 calories and go to bed with a full belly. But when I would eat carb heavy diets, I’d struggle to stay below 2300 and be hungry, a lot. 

I’d recommend slower types of activity when doing keto and to talk to your doctor. I completely boggled my doctor’s mind when he saw my numbers. In a good way. I think at first, the medical community was very reluctant to embrace keto, because this is what the mainstream marketing wants you to see it like:

  • fried chicken
  • greasy burgers without buns
  • bacon and sausage – and plates of it

In reality this is what keto is – early on:

After you have done this for months and adapted, this is closer to what it becomes:

So with the calorie math, 3500 calories equals one pound. If you are a 250 pound man, it is reasonable to assume your resting basal metabolic rate is about 2300-2700 calories per day. From here, you then factor in your exercise and activity. Maybe you are on the lower of the activity scale, which might be 250. Maybe you are highly active, and it’s 1,000. So you can see all of the variables. 

Let’s assume I burn about 3,000 per day, with all of my activities. And, I consume 1,000 per day. This creates a 2,000 calorie deficit per day, or 14,000 calories in a week. This is 4 pounds a week of FAT loss. The problem is – none of this stuff works as physicist think it does. Your body may see less calories coming in, and down-regulate your metabolism. This is what happened to me on severe calorie restriction diets when I was doing higher carb and tons of activity. Your body feels a sense of exhaustion, and does its best to conserve calories. 

This is what the difference was for me on Keto – is I never had that down regulation event, because my body got in plenty of fats and protein. I just simply shaved off the carb calories. My body then found those calories on my waist. 

So – every few weeks, I will have a “cheat weekend”. Some days I may do 1,000 calories, some 1,500. I may do fasting Fridays again, which are close to zero (except coffee half and half). I project I can take off 8-12 pounds of fat, per month, with very little effort and exercise. However, I’m an exercise junkie, and when I fully get adapted on this, my body goes out of its skin wanting to exercise and do things. I’m not there, yet. I love hiking for this – put in the tunes, disappear for 2 hours in the hills. 

Autophagy

Your doctors probably never heard of this, but this won the Nobel prize in 2016. Has to do with fasting. When on keto, it’s like a fasted state, in a sense. It takes very little time to “drop into autophagy” – and I can physically feel the switch over. That might be when my brain starts to run low on glycogen and the flip is made to use more ketones – but it’s a half of a second spaced out feeling. 

Fasting is in all religions. Why? Did they know something we don’t? 

Recently, I had been sick for nearly 3 months, and had the shits of it. I recalled the FOUR YEARS I was doing keto/low carb, and didn’t get sick ONE TIME. No – I never got COVID. Maybe I had some mild sniffles once or twice. But I got back from my cruise in mid October and got COVID for the first time. Since then, I have had problems shaking the cough. I was good for 4 days a few weeks back, and just as I was about to start weight training again, another fever hit me. 

I had enough. I had been “full carb” (maybe like a 40/30/30) for the better part of the last year, eating a lot of the food I had stored. Rices, beans, oats, pasta. I think it’s great for emergency food, but damn my body doesn’t do well on it. Makes me lazy, lethargic. I don’t like the sun to go outside in the summer, and the cold crushes my soul in winter. On keto, I was out running in 95 degree temps. I was doing Turkey Trot 5ks in 14 degree weather. 

ENOUGH. On day 9 of keto, and kicked my cold 2 days ago, finally. Saw I was 14 pounds down on the scale in those 9 days, and decided I am going to really lean into this again. I will use the 2 day weekends strategically. For example – I have an event next weekend where I am going to have a few and some pizza at my buddy’s house on New Years eve. It’s carbs!! It’s booze!! I know. I drink like 3-4 times a year, and I will gain 5-7 pounds on that one day, and pee it off a few days later. 

But in those last 3 months – I also lost my conditioning with walking, and hadn’t hit my gym downstairs. Time to get back to it this week 🙂

Oh – the last time I started this venture, I had helped over 30 people lose at least 30 pounds. As usual – talk to your doctor, as many of you have weird conditions that may not respond well to this. What I’m talking about here was based on my n=1, and had successfully lost 175 pounds in 3 years. Your nutritionist or general practitioner want to own this, but the science they are teaching you in 1980s stuff. Ask them about autophagy. See what they say. Then see what kinds of pills they want to push on you so you can keep eating donuts and corn flakes.