Restarting Keto After a Hard Year: Everyone Is on a Diet, So Start With Drinks and Whole Carb Portions

2021-01-07

In this recording

A 52-minute Facebook Live from January 2021, sitting on a rowing machine. It was my first broadcast back after an unplanned Facebook break, and I assumed most people watching were restarting.

[0:16] Most people come to a diet with shame. "I've been bad." There's no such thing as not being on a diet.
[2:48] If regaining weight proves diets don't work, losing it again proves ice cream doesn't work. Neither is true.
[3:29] "I didn't mean for this to happen" usually means your focus was split. Something else was on fire.
[7:39] How a producer makes a sandwich: buy it, store it, transport it, open it. A diet needs the same logistics. "Eat better" isn't a plan.
[11:35] Look back at 2020 as a year of priorities, not failures. If you have more than three priorities, you have none.
[15:28] What a diet is: the foods an animal habitually eats. Brown bears eat salmon only during the run. You'll always be on one.
[17:41] Control what you have access to. Your own cabinet, your own fridge shelf.
[19:19] Motivation: intrinsic reasons (my knees hurt, my gut feels bad) tend to last longer than extrinsic ones (to impress someone).
[21:55] My own year: training stopped in March, some comfort eating, and I'm OK with having some work to do.
[28:23] The plan, step one: find keto foods you actually like. Deli meat, charcuterie, shrimp, steak, eggs.
[29:52] Step two: calories in drinks. Alcohol, soda, juice, milk, smoothies, sugar and cream in coffee.
[34:11] Step three: remove whole carb portions. The bun, the fries, the rice under the stir-fry. Leave hidden sugars like ketchup for later.
[37:21] "Is keto dangerous?" The word covers anything under about 20 g of carbs, including starving or drinking only olive oil.
[46:08] Adaptation takes about three to eight weeks, and ketone drinks don't speed it up or help weight loss.
[48:25] No pitch, no sponsor, no coaching for hire. Then: share a good thing from 2020.

Watching this in 2026

The first half of this Live is about guilt, and it's the part I'd keep. I said to look back from a forensic standpoint: what happened, and where were the problem areas? Not to hate on yourself (live UYGW3421). Was it stress, time, grazing, eating out, or living with people who eat differently? Each one has a different fix. Stress eating needs a different stress outlet. A time crunch needs convenience food that's on plan. Self-blame fixes none of them.

I was talking to myself too. I said I'd gained some weight through comfort eating in a stressful year, and that with sparring off the table since March I'd lost one reason to eat well (live UYGW3421). Boxing better had been an intrinsic reward. When it went away, the cookies got easier.

The claim worth unpacking: "keto" is too broad to be dangerous or safe

My argument was that "keto" describes an outcome, under roughly 20 g of carbs, not a menu. So someone eating only olive oil is technically keto, and would end up with deficiencies (live UYGW3421). A doctor who saw that patient would be telling the truth about "keto" and still be wrong about yours. My fix was a multivitamin and not getting extreme with food choices.

The evidence pages agree with the first part and complicate the second:

In the A TO Z trial, women on the Atkins diet had shifted toward inadequate intakes of thiamine, folate, vitamin C, iron and magnesium at 8 weeks. The other diets had shortfalls of their own (Gardner et al., 2010). So food choice inside "low carb" matters, which was my point.
A menu-modelling study found that none of four popular plans, one of them Atkins, met the reference intake for all 27 micronutrients from food alone (Calton, 2010).
On multivitamins themselves, the US Preventive Services Task Force calls the evidence insufficient for preventing heart disease or cancer (USPSTF, 2022). That's a different question from covering a gap on a restricted diet.

The clinical reference on ketogenic diets also stresses monitoring and how nutritional ketosis differs from diabetic ketoacidosis (StatPearls). If you take insulin or other diabetes medication, or blood-pressure medication, involve your doctor before cutting carbs hard. Doses can need to change quickly. If you have a history of disordered eating, start with your care team. See keto and eating-disorder history.

Then vs now: start loose

In 2017 I'd started recommending a taper: drop the obvious starches first, then tighten (video qfy0IBkPF4A). A year before this Live, I told the reboot group to count carbs only in month one (live UIKT6147). This Live goes further. Ignore hidden sugars at first, keep the ketchup, and just take the pile of mashed potatoes off the plate (live UYGW3421). My fast-food example made the same point: skip the fries and the Coke, and two double quarter pounders with cheese a day, bun and all, came to under 100 g of carbs and over 90 g of protein by my back-of-the-envelope count. I called that close to low carb, said myself it isn't how I'd recommend doing it, and said it won't get you all the way to ketosis.

The no-gimmicks line is unchanged from 2017 (video DWI8qQl5BbY). You don't need keto brownies, almond flour, butter in your coffee or ketone drinks. Some people, I said, enjoy learning more than they enjoy the work of losing weight (live UYGW3421).

Key points

Everyone is on a diet. Restarting is adding focus back, not punishment.
Find where it slipped: stress, time, grazing, eating out, other people's food. Fix that cause.
First changes: keto foods you enjoy, then liquid calories, then whole carb portions. Hidden sugars can wait.
Alcohol is calories you get nothing back from. Clear spirits carry the least extra sugar.
"Keto" covers good and bad versions. Eat varied whole foods, and ask your doctor before a big change if you take diabetes or blood-pressure medication.
Ketone drinks don't start adaptation or cause fat loss.