Intro Into my Keto Journey

My keto journey was sparked by two main things. 1 – my curiosity and judgements about the diet and 2 – my quest for more ab definition….heh

As a professional in the health and fitness industry, I’m constantly reading all about the latest and greatest in the industry. I try to stay current the best I can and I view it as part of my job to sort through the commercial crap, fad diets and quick fixes and bring only what I think is of value to my clients. I also will never ask anything of my clients that I haven’t done myself. So….keto.

I had seen and heard so many people talking about the keto diet. I’m personally a pretty die-hard fan of paleo (80/20 Style – meaning 80% clean paleo, 20% other foods that I personally choose to add to my life) and the thought of missing out on fruits and veggies in place of so much meat, dairy and fake sweeteners – much of which looked pretty processed (which is what the keto diet looked like to me) seemed absolutely ridiculous.

People kept asking my opinion, and I more or less said, “I don’t know much about it, but anything that tells me I can’t have fruits and vegetables leaves me feeling skeptical.” That was as much thought as I had given it up to that point, but it kept coming back up. People in the industry that I really respected seemed to be on board. So I started to look into it a little deeper.

I discovered that “not all keto is created equal.” There seemed to be 2 camps – the “dirty keto” camp and the “clean keto” camp. (sounding a little better) I also read a lot about not only the physical results that people were seeing, but that much like the Whole30, people also reported better sleep, less stress, sustainable energy throughout the day with zero crashes and many cases of people reporting improvement with inflammation, auto-immune diseases and chronic health issues across the board. (Ok..I’m listening…) When I read the “science” behind the diet, it was explained (the simple version) that by cutting your carbohydrates down, your body then has no option but to burn fat for energy, and that this was a normal and healthy function of human metabolism. (seemed pretty cool – especially if you have stubborn fat covering your abs – which I do…haha)

YOLO bitches. I’m a sucker for an adventure and my curiosity and vanity was peaked enough to give it a shot and see what it was really all about. For me, the best way to learn is to do. I wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it right, (learn the why and how) so I signed up for Robb Wolf’s Keto Masterclass. I’ve been following Robb for years and am always so grateful for his humble approach to exploring nutrition and honestly feel that he’s a decent human being who exists to help others find health. He openly states that “the keto diet is not for everyone, but is a great tool for many.”

Here were my opinions of the keto diet before actually doing the keto diet:

• Anything that limits fruits and vegetables just doesn’t seem like a great idea – those are the healthiest foods in our diet….right?
• The super rapid weightloss results scare me :/ Some of these people look gaunt…not healthy…will their skin recover? Is it healthy to loose so much weight so quickly?
• Maybe keto makes sense ancestrally to get through winters where plant matter wasn’t available and meat and fat was, but that seems like something that should be done temporarily…like 3 months max…
• Following keto for more than that would lead me to think people would start seeing vitamin and mineral deficiencies long term I feel like
• It occurred to me that many of the people doing keto seemed to be coming from very nutrient deficient, high carb, high calorie diets full of processed foods and were looking to keto for weightloss…and I assumed that after the weight was lost, they would go back to their previous ways of eating…so unless you went into keto with a pretty clean diet to begin with that you would then return to…it didn’t seem like a sustainable weightloss tool for most

So that is what “I think I know”…or…my assumptions rather.

I’m currently 30 days into my keto adventure. Stay tuned for what I’ve learned so far, and subscribe to my blog for updates!