Keep Keto Simple: Home-Base Foods, Better Broccoli and an Electrolyte Bottle

2018-04-24

In this recording

A 27-minute weekly broadcast for the Keto Basic group. It started late after a wifi fight and it was snowing outside. Comments weren't coming through that day, so it's a talk with no Q&A. It was never posted to YouTube.

[0:00] I opened with the group: long-term members were helping newcomers, and people were sending me their stories privately.
[2:29] The disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and I don't treat medical conditions. If you've had surgery or have an ongoing condition, keep your own doctors in the loop.
[3:42] Point one, keep it simple. Work out keto for your own life, not for everyone. A truck driver, a shift worker with only a break room, and someone with a full kitchen and a budget will each build it differently.
[4:55] What I saw in every success story: people find their go-to foods. Keto recipe substitutions are fun but take work. Most people need a home base.
[6:38] My grab-and-go options: hard-boiled eggs and pre-cooked bacon chopped into a no-mayo "egg salad", and avocado with sesame, sriracha and cilantro.
[8:42] My current rotation from stall breaker: chicken, mushrooms, broccoli, parmesan or a soy-and-chilli direction, baby spinach, bouillon. Same few notes, mixed different ways.
[10:44] What to look for: a low-carb vegetable that brings fibre, calcium and magnesium, plus a leaner protein.
[11:25] The protein-to-fat math. I said 100 g of protein from ribeye brings about 130 g of fat, while from chicken it's closer to 20 g. That's roughly 1,000 calories of difference.
[12:40] Point two, technique. What people actually do on keto is buy food, cook it and eat it. That gets far less attention than hormones and enzymes.
[14:05] Better steamer-bag broccoli: dump it into a hot dry pan, let the water cook off, sear one side, toss, season, sear again.
[16:41] Point three, support systems. Most complaints I hear are electrolytes: cramps, low energy, headaches, weak workouts.
[17:17] My bottle: one litre of water, one teaspoon of kosher salt and three-quarters of a teaspoon of potassium-chloride salt. I said that's about 2,000 mg of sodium and 1,800 mg of potassium.
[18:55] It tastes like salt water. Halve the salt and drink more if you need to. I said bouillon is the easiest way to make sodium "close to 5,000 milligrams a day" palatable.
[19:57] Get an oven-safe probe thermometer: sear, then finish in the oven to temperature. Most dry chicken is overcooked chicken.
[23:13] Other support systems: a bouillon routine, or a day-of-the-week pill box for vitamins.
[23:36] I said that in the weight-loss stage you want fat about as low as you can comfortably go. Keto is high fat in maintenance, when the fat has to come from your plate instead of your body.
[25:25] Talk less about hormones and more about what you buy, cook and put in your mouth.

Watching this in 2026

This one holds up better than most of my lives. "Home base" and "technique over recipes" are still how I'd teach keto to someone who's overwhelmed. Most people don't fail because they misunderstood insulin. They fail because their broccoli is a wet, sad pile and they're bored by week three. I said the same thing later on a cooking stream (video hHFu6L-yedE).

The fat point holds too. Low carb is what makes eating less fat bearable, because the hunger is under control. During weight loss, the fat you burn can come from your body instead of your plate.

The claim worth unpacking: the electrolyte bottle and "close to 5,000 mg"

The bottle itself is a reasonable, cheap habit. The sodium target needs a caveat, because I said it as if it were settled:

The National Academies (2019) set an adequate intake of 1,500 mg of sodium a day, and advise reducing intake above 2,300 mg. Their potassium adequate intake is 2,600 mg for women and 3,400 mg for men.
WHO (2012) recommends adults stay under 2,000 mg of sodium a day.
The 5,000 mg I gave falls inside the range reported by PURE (O'Donnell et al., 2014). In 101,945 people in 17 countries, 3–6 g of sodium a day was associated with lower death and cardiovascular events than intakes above or below. PURE is observational, and it estimated sodium from one morning urine sample.
Blood pressure is where it matters most. In the Cochrane review by Graudal et al., 2017, cutting sodium lowered systolic pressure by 1.09 mmHg in white people with normal blood pressure, and by 5.51 mmHg in white people with hypertension.
The potassium-chloride half of the bottle has good trial support. In SSaSS (Neal et al., 2021), 20,995 people who used a potassium-enriched salt substitute had fewer strokes, fewer major cardiovascular events and fewer deaths. WHO now suggests these substitutes, except for people at risk of high potassium.

So the bottle is a fine tool for a healthy person who is cramping or dragging. If you have high blood pressure, 5,000 mg is not a number to pick up from me.

Talk to your doctor before copying this if you take blood pressure medication, have kidney disease, or take any medicine that affects potassium. A potassium-chloride salt is exactly the thing not to add on your own in those cases.

Then vs now

Bouillon vs bottle: in my January 2018 electrolytes broadcast the bouillon routine was my main sodium source (video -dHjt_Bpruk). Here the bottle is for gym nights, when I don't want to carry bouillon.
Home base: the same idea shows up in my 2018 basics video as "a few ketogenic-friendly foods that become your home base" (video UygKGoP_BtA).

Key points

Build keto around your real life: your kitchen, your schedule, your budget.
Find a few home-base foods and get good at cooking them. Technique beats exotic recipes.
Leaner protein (chicken, white fish, tuna) gets you to your protein target with far fewer calories than ribeye.
During weight loss, keto can be low carb and fairly low fat. In maintenance it becomes high fat.
An electrolyte bottle or bouillon routine is a useful support system. Check the sodium target against your own blood pressure.