n=1
This post is part of my
n=1 series where I outline all the self-experimentation I've done over the decades. What worked and what didn't. These posts are special because they're more like continually updated articles. It's unlikely I will make new posts to notify you of when I've updated these articles, so keep in mind that they might change in the future.
Intro
Eat to live. Don't live to eat. Those are words I abide by. My twenties were a decade of gluttony and a complete misunderstanding of healthy food habits that reusulted in obesity bordering on morbidity. The fat acceptance movement would likely have called me beautiful at any size, I called myself dying.
It was all rooted in exceedingly poor advice I had been given about carbohydrates and the vilification of fat that had been taking place since the 70s. Add to that two wonderful parents that were blissfully ignorant of exactly everything related to health and I was on a collision course with a casket.
At the age of 29 I had enough of what I was being told. Carbs weren't making me healthy, they were making me diabetic. I changed to a ketogenic diet against the advice of everyone. And lost 36 kilos in the first year. An additional 30 kilos in the following year. And I was
still told that my new diet was unhealthy and that I should return to what was killing me.
I had followed carb heavy diets before to lose weight and they never got me anywhere. With keto the weight loss was immediate and overwhelming. So I was told that "you must not have done it right" or "you weren't counting calories". At that point I had been programming for 23 years. I can count in binary. I had been self-employed and done the taxes for my companies for over a decade. Obviously I can do basic math as evidenced by the fact that I lost weight on keto. I didn't suddenly learn basic math when I switched to a ketogenic diet. Yes, the phrase "calories in, calories out" is correct. Nobody is arguing that. But it's the "calories out" bit that makes a world of difference because it takes hormonal health into account.
I have now followed this diet for 15 years. This is what I've learned and what I eat on a daily basis.
Carbs aren't dangerous
Before we continue with what will basically be a long love letter from me to the ketogenic diet I must note the following. Carbs are completely neutral. They're an extremely efficient fuel source for the body. Nothing more, nothing less. The gross generalization of health advice we get today where we're told to "eat more carbs" or "eat less carbs" mean absolutely nothing if you don't actually
n=1 series (ie, test it on yourself). There's so much genetic variability, for instance my ancestry is deep nordic so we're eminently suited for eating high fat low carb. Yours might be from india like my fiance, she can handle ungodly amounts of carbs without a problem since that's what her ancesters diet consisted of.
My point is that you'll never know if you're more suited to be fueled by ketones or carbs until you try it. And you need to give it a proper try, stay in ketosis for at least three months since that's how long the adaption period will take if you've been a carb junkie for your entire life. Decades of being run on glucose won't change overnight. You will notice many of the benefits in as little as a week but the major cognitive and physical adapation doesn't fully take place until months have gone by.
If you give up after a week and say keto isn't for you then you're cheating nobody but yourself. But on the flipside if you do it for months and just feel like shite then don't listen to the keto bros on reddit that think the entire geopolitical landscape can be fixed by "up your electrolytes bro". Keto truly might not be for you, and that's ok. It's due to the genetic layout your ancestors blessed, or cursed, you with.
Electrolytes
Electrolytes are important though. You're going to need a ton more sodium than you did when you ate carbs. To balance this out you'll likely need tons more potassium. If you cramp during exercise you'll need more magnesium. Keep that in mind. But it's really not as important as it's made out to be on keto. If you get headaches and you eat relatively little sodium, increase it until the headaches go away. If you eat a lot of sodium and still get headaches then reduce sodium. It might also just be a bloody headache. Everything doesn't revolve around your electrolytes. I'm much more prone to get headaches when I cut weight, doesn't have anything to do with my electrolytes.
That said I needed
a lot of sodium when I first started on keto, as in I ate up to 12g of extra salt a day (around 5g of sodium). And this was in addition to what I got from cheese etc. That drastically dropped the longer I was on keto. These days I can stay at the mainstream recommendation of 2g of sodium a day and feel perfectly fine. For a while at least. I know the feeling of too little sodium all too well. I get sort of spaced out, hard to focus, not so much a headache as a head pressure. Then I just take a gram or or two of salt with some water and I'm perfectly fine again 20 minutes later.
If I can give a single piece of advice then simply keep in mind that your body isn't static. What might be too much or too little can change wildly depending on circumstances that are unique to your life. Don't blindly follow the amounts given out by keto bros, experiment and find out what works for you. And change the amounts as your life changes.
Pre-requisites
Before we dive into the food we need to clearly list my health conditions since this will explain a lot of the choices I've made.
I gave myself type 2 diabetes in my twenties. Type 2 diabetes isn't a disease, it's a condition, and it's not really related to type 1 since type 2 is an entirely optional state. You can decide to not be diabetic by simply ceasing to eat more carbohydrates than your body can produce insulin for. This isn't true for type 1, there's nothing optional about type 1 since their bodies cannot even produce enough insulin to move amino-acids broken down from protein into their cells.
Type 2 diabetes is something you give yourself by refusing to change your habits. You earn it, so to say. It's absurd to think that our society has come to the point where doctors would rather give people insulin than tell them to change their eating habits. Every type 2 diabetic produces plenty enough insulin to move amino-acids into their cells, we just can't produce enough to cover our gluttonous desire for carbohydrates. Thus we have no need for insulin and injecting it will only make us even more insulin resistant, worsening the condition.
As previously mentioned my heritage is deep nordic. The type of nordic where 100% of us have lactose tolerance for our entire lives. The inflammatory markers that spike for other people when they eat dairy is quieter than a grave for me. My body is completely adapated to eating dairy from centuries of genetic fine-tuning. That said you might not be, you might want to look into the difference between casein type A1 and A2. A1 is generally found in cow's milk and can create stomach upset and inflammation in some. There's a good chance that the lactose intolerance you think you have is in fact an intolerance to casein A1, not lactose at all. If you find that you can eat dairy from goats, sheep, etc then you might be tolerant to A2 but not A1.
Why vegetarian? Is it because of ethics? No. Let's be clear, the way we treat animals with modern factory farming is absolutely revolting. It's a black stain on the collective soul of humanity. If we treated a dog or cat that way we'd go to jail, yet it's ok when it's a cow? No, it isn't. If I can refrain from supporting that industry and only reward ethically sourced dairy with my money then so much the better.
But no, I do eat meat every now and then. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't make that clear. I just feel good on a vegetarian diet, the main protein sources are egg, casein and whey which are literally the proteins so suited for muscle building that they isolate them and sell them as protein powder for body builders. The fat to protein ratio is perfect by default in most dairy (more fat than protein, but high amounts of both). And, being a work-a-holic, most dairy is no-cook. You just plop it on a plate and eat. No reason to turn on the stove and waste an hour you could spend working.
My family has a propensity to form kidney stones. I've passed several. I never. Ever. Want to do it again. There's a lot of misinformation out there (seemingly from vegan sources) that oxalates are nothing to worry about and it's all just some sort of low-carb conspiracy theory. Likely due to the fact that they eat absolute mountains of oxalates, and if they do it then it must be healthy, right?
No, it's not a conspiracy theory. The main form of prevention for kidney stones is a low oxalate diet, or even an oxalate avoidance diet in extreme circumstances. My doctor, as in a medical doctor who deals with kidneys and kidney stones primarly (nephrologist) put me on a low oxalate diet. I wasn't told to do so by a forum, or reddit, or the low carb mafia. I was told to do so by a mainstream medical doctor in our socialized healthcare system in sweden.
Kidney stones are calcium oxalates. When they bind together and form stones in your bowels you don't even notice, you just poop them out. But when they form in your kidneys.. My single source of oxalates is the kale I eat, but kale is very low in oxalates and since I eat it with kilos of dairy containing calcium they either don't form at all or form in my bowels. I've gone from terrible risk to remission to no kidney stones at all from my diet.
Fiber
I consider the fiber craze currently surging through the world to be infantile. It's epidemiology of the worst sort. To say that swallowing indigestible plant matter will improve your health is silly and the only arguments I've heard for it that bear any relevance to reality at all are;
1. It feeds certain gut bacteria. Yes it does, and I do perfectly fine without them. 15 years on, never felt better in my life.
2. Those bacteria can create butyrate. Great, when you're on keto your body will be absolutely mass producing β-Hydroxybutyrate. If you want even more, eat butter. You know, butyrate.
3. It helps with bowel movements. Absolute nonsense. I'm writing another
n=1 series post about how I cured anal fissures by water fasting. I've never had constipation nor diarrhea with my extremely low to no fiber diet.
The only plant matter I eat on a daily basis is kale due to its extremely high content of vitamin k and its very low oxalate content. In addition I eat two heaping teaspoons of psyllium husk with breakfast and dinner. This is to make my poop gel together which makes enemas much easier to perform. If you're not routinely performing enemas, nor understand why I would want to do so, then just skip the psyllium husk. You do not need it. In total I consume 0-3g of fiber a day. And have been for 15 years. I'm perfectly fine. That said for this post I've included broccoli since it's the "classic" keto food and likely what you'd want instead of psyllium husk.
Supplements
I will list all supplements I take for the sake of transparency. But this is a topic that is too large to fit in this post. I will have another
n=1 series post specifically about my history of trying just about every supplement under the sun. And how I've come to the conclusion that it's just about entirely a crock of bullshit. It's an industry that preys on people's insecurity and poor health, their dreams of finding "the one" supplement that will make them feel good. That will fix them. Yet they never will. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Except for the gold in the hustlers' bank accounts. The gold you paid for.
That said, nutritional deficiencies must be taken seriously and if you know your diet is deficient then you must supplement to make up for it. Just don't believe the hype and bullshit. You won't double your testosterone. You cock won't grow an extra two inches. You won't get perfect skin. Your hair won't start growing back. It's all bullshit.
For the sake of clarity I haven't included any supplements I take beyond the most vanilla ones. It'd confuse the fact that this is a nutritionally complete diet by rattling of my list of supplements. Thus for that, check my post about bio-hacking.
Diet
There are many things I consider healthy that I've stopped eating since I just don't need them. Berries for instance, absolutely keto, absolutely delicious. They also go
great with dairy. If you enjoy them, go for it. I've also normalized the diet to 2500kcal. I eat 3000kcal for maintenance but figured that would be overkill for most. At 2500kcal it results in around 165g of protein and 170g of fat.
That's a 1:1 ratio of protein to fat, but the caloric content is 4:9. I'm guessing that's the ratio most are going for if they're trying to lose weight. If you want to lose weight even quicker then simply dial back on the extra fat sources like butter, peanut butter, etc. Just make sure you get proportionally more calories from fat than from protein, or you're going to feel really lousy. If you need to reduce the protein just replace the quark with even more yoghurt. If you need more protein for whatever reason there's always whey protein powder.
If you're lifting weights make sure you get 2g of protein per kilo of your target body weight (ignore the lean body mass stuff, it's too complicated, if you want to weigh 80kg then eat 160g or slightly less of protein a day). The 50g per day nonsense is to prevent complete and utter muscle loss in populations that are starving. It's not a goal, it's the absolute minimum to prevent death.
For a long time I only ate cottage cheese. The quark and turkish yoghurt is a recent replacement since there's just so much salt in cottage cheese. When my need for sodium reduced I had to cut it out of my diet and finding low sodium varieties is just about impossible. If you need more sodium consider just eating more cottage cheese, it's delicious.
That said, yoghurt and quark are also bloody delicious. Yoghurt additionally contains a lot of vitamin k2 which cottage cheese does not. All of this for less than 10g of fiber.
Breakfast
2 mugs of coffee
500g of quark
50g of melted butter
1g of sunflower lecithin
Cardamom and cinnamon to taste
2500iu vitamin d3
Snacks
2-3 Green tea
Lunch
1 mug of coffee
500g of turkish yoghurt 10% fat
2tbs of toasted wheat germ
Any type of seasoning or herbs or sauces to taste
Dinner
500g of cottage cheese 4% fat
25g of peanut butter
1g of sunflower lecithin
5g of creatine
150g of broccoli spears
35g of kale
15g of olive oil
10g of flaxseed oil
French herbs and a pinch of salt
Afternoon
A mug of rooibios tea
Evening
A mug of hibiscus tea
Nutrition
Charts are courtesy of cronometer.com. It must also be noted that cronometer lists several of these foods as being a lot higher in carbs than they are in sweden. In reality I eat less than 50g of net carbs per day, but there was no way for me to achieve that with cronometer.
Nutritional defiencies
Copper - Considering the vast quantities you're getting from your building's water supply it's all good. Add tahini if you want more copper.
Iron - I do perfectly fine with 4mg per day, despite
my heavy workout schedule. But this could, again, be due to my nordic heritage. We're prone to retain iron to a much higher degree than people from other regions. You'll want to monitor this one, closely, and potentially supplement. If you're a man and you're coming off a meat heavy diet then you likely want to reduce your iron stores, buildup reduces testosterone and creates a whole host of health issues (including erectile dysfunction). But long term you
must ensure your iron level doesn't drop too low.
Magnesium - I don't need the rda, you might, refer to the electrolytes section.
Omega-6 - The fact that we've come to a point where people are omega-6 deficient is bonkers. Omega-6 fatty acids are essential, ie your body can't make them. Let's take linolenic acid for instance. It's turned into dihomo-γ-linolenic acid, which is turned into gamma linolenic acid, which is turned into prostaglandin e1, which is a driver of healthy erections. Do you enjoy having erections? Get that omega 6 sweetie. I add 10g of sunflower oil a day to meet the amount of omega-6 where I feel comfortable. I'm not fond of any seed oil but sunflower will maximize the amount of linolenic acid you get per gram. I do wonder how many paleo health champs and casual seed oil avoiders have given themselves erectile dysfunction. Google it, you'd be surprised how many posts there are along the lines of "I totally fixed my diet, I eat 100% clean, now my cock doesn't get hard anymore" or words to that effect.
Summary
Vegetarian keto feels like a bloody cheat code. It's cheaper than meat. It's no cook, thus saving time. It has the most bio available proteins of any type, far exceeding that of meat. And the meals are outright decadent. A bowl of quark absolutely swimming in melted butter with cardamom and cinnamon on top.. my god. Every meal feels like a dessert, and I get to eat it day in and day out. It's not for special occasions, it's for
every occasion.
I have no doubt that the casomorphin is the reason I love this diet. It's rewarding me with dopamine. "Morphine is a helluva drug." And that's a good thing. Great thing even. Every time I eat I get the feeling that make you loll your head backwards and go "aahhhh.." Every smoker in the world who has had a mug of coffee and a smoke after dinner knows exactly what I'm talking about. Every non-smoker is going "what the hell is he on about?" It's pressure release. It's the reward your body grants you when you fill a need, a desire, a want, a craving and (ultimately) an addiction.
Most addictions are terrible and should be avoided at all times. But if you're eating a nutritionally complete diet that is improving your life then you're addicted to health. If every healthy diet rewarded you that way then adherence would be 100%. People wouldn't drop off due to it being "too hard" or "I can't live this way long term". Casomorphin is a bloody shortcut to long term healthy living. Abuse it. Enjoy it.