Some thoughts on keto

I thought it might be interesting to talk a little bit about keto. Both me and mr Igor had some success with it. 

I didn't have any desire to try keto to begin with, but ended up backing mr Igor up because he wanted to try it. Mr Igor wanted to try keto for weight loss purposes, and I was shocked because he really loves bread. I followed because it was too much trouble to cook and eat separately, and I wanted to support him. It turned out I really liked it!

I'm currently back on keto again, but mr Igor had too much of a struggle without bread, rice and pasta, so he is just going for a general "low carb but not keto" diet. 

I even think this is pretty hair related, since keto must be a pretty good diet for growing your hair! 

Well, obviously you absolutely need to take a vitamin with it, but still... The amount of protein I've eaten on this diet is amazing. My hair doesn't fluctuate in growth rate unfortunately (Only for 2-3 months during summers) which is too bad, because it would have been fun to see if the keto diet could speed up hair growth. It would have been interesting to see if someone whose hair is sensitive to such things could actually gain more length during diet changes. 

What we liked
I loved how easy this was! The keto diet in a nutshell is basically this:

1) Memorize these approximately 50 foods/food groups 

(I have made a list in the bottom of this post for those curious)

2) Get creative

3) Eat!

It was honestly pretty easy. No calorie counting, no macro counting, as long as you stick to the allowed ingredient list or the rule of maximum 5% carbohydrates in any and all ingredients. 

Obviously you have the option of making things more difficult (And accurate) for yourself if you want to, by using a macro calculator. I used this one. But I found that just sticking to the allowed food list and keeping under 5% carbohydrates worked just fine. Besides, we both really struggled with the fat intake, but I'll get into that in about 20 sentences. 

The restrictions also made it pretty fun to cook, because it requires you to be more creative if you want to eat something more interesting than just eggs, meat and avocado at every meal. And on days where you don't have the energy to be creative... Well, that's pretty easy to know what you can eat.

I personally really enjoy cooking and wish I had more time for it, so I had a lot of fun playing around with recipes. The rather strict list of ingredients you can use somehow made it more fun.

Here is my favorite recipe so far:

Chicken crust pizza

I had expected it to be a problem when eating out, but it turned out it was pretty manageable. There were keto options to be found, but then again we didn't eat out a lot because 2020. 

I lost 4 kg in 6 weeks without even trying. I went in just wanting to keep mr Igor company, and had lots of fun with cooking, and yet the weight just fell off. Granted, I gained 2 kg back in water weight from day to day after we broke the keto right before Christmas, but still. Maybe if I had gone into the keto diet with the intention of losing weight, I would have felt different about it.

We also loved how full this kept us. Several times, we asked ourselves "Wait, when did we last eat?" some time in the evening, just to find we hadn't eaten since breakfast. The high protein content really, really keeps you full. I liked freeing my mind from thinking about food.

So I'm obviously not a nutritionist, but I think the keto diet might be good for healthy hair, skin and nails. Hair, skin and nails seems to like both protein and oils. You get a whole lot of that, and from so many sources. But I think you should definitely add a multivitamin to make up for how few vegetables you can eat. 

What we disliked
We both really struggled with the fat intake. The vast majority of your calories are supposed to come from fat (Like 75%), and neither of us could do it. Neither of us particularly like the taste of fat, or the feeling in your mouth. Yuck. 

You're actually supposed to pick the fattier meats when you can. But I have a really strong aversion to lumps in food (And strangely my older brother has identical triggers to me, so we suspect our parents have traumatized us with something we can't remember any more) It's a little hard to explain, but I guess more like... Unexpected texture changes? I can't eat yoghurt or marmalade with fruit lumps of a certain size in it. It needs to be smooth or have lumps of a specific, small size. For instance, blueberries in blueberry yoghurt is fine, but whole strawberries in strawberry yoghurt makes my stomach flip. The same goes for fatty parts in meat. Like fat in salami and other meat products like that. The fat parts need to be a certain size for me to tolerate them. For instance, fat in bacon I can usually accept, but fat in the  thicker cuts of pork belly triggers me. It's weird. I know. 

Mr Igor missed bread so much. And pasta. And rice. And potatoes. Like, so, so much.

For me, the hardest part was at a certain time of the month, when there were just no sugary treats available for me. I set out to try making keto cookies and cakes, but kept running into problems with the fat content. So many keto treats are basically coconut oil and something nutty, rolled up into the appetizingly named (Not) fat bombs. Hell no. I just can't eat it. Nuts, oils and peanut butter can only get you so far on desserts...

My search for a keto friendly treat got me into another problem: The weird Frankenfood ingredients. I draw the line at artificial sweetener. Everything else just won't be let into my kitchen. All those weird, meatfree "sausages" and carb free "chocolate" and artificial flavorings and what have you are simply banned from my kitchen.

I only found one single recipe for cakes/treats/cookies that I honestly thought was good:

However, I use a liquid sweetener and half protein powder with vanilla flavour and half almond flour instead of all almond flour for mine. Still a good cake. You can also add some nuts to it.

Igor's attempted list of keto approved foods

As a general rule: Under 5% carbohydrates is good. You can of course always do the math, but I found that I generally couldn't be bothered. A single exception is protein powder, which I learned to cook with and appreciate, but often needs to be mixed with another "flour" to keep the carbohydrates down.

Meat and seafood
Beef, chicken, duck, pork, wild boar, turkey, shellfish, salmon, pollock, shrimp, tuna...
So far I haven't found a non keto meat.

Meats, processed
Bacon
Beef jerky, chicken jerky, turkey jerky, pork jerky, fish jerky, Biltong (Check label though)
Pork rinds
Prosciutto, coppa, chorizo, pepperoni, salami... (Check label)
Some meatballs and sausages (Check label)

Dairy
Burrata
Butter
Cheddar
Cheese pops (Cheese pops in the Gouda flavour is seriously yum!)
Cottage cheese
Cream cheese
Goat cheese
Greek yoghurt
Heavy cream
Mascarpone
Mozzarella
Parmesan 
Sour cream

Eggs, any kind

Oils
Animal fats (Save your bacon fat for cooking)
Avocado oil
Coconut oil
Extra virgin olive oil
Macadamia Oil
Sesame oil

Nuts
Almonds
Brazil nuts
Macadamia
Peanuts
Pecan
Walnuts

Vegetables
Asparagus
Avocado
Broccoli
Cabbage
Cauliflower
Cucumber
Eggplant
Fennel
Iceberg lettuce
Kale
Mushroom
Olives
Scallions
Spinach
Tomato

Fruits
Blackberries
Raspberries
Strawberries

"Flours"
I found a few protein powders that are keto approved. But even if they aren't, mixing it with another "flour" 50/50 or so bumps the carbs down enough to work, and it's really good for using as flour substitute. We bought unflavoured, with vanilla flavour and with chocolate flavour and have used all three.

Almond flour
Coconut flour
Peanut flour
Psyllium husk (My undisputed favourite. The fiber content is awesome and it has no taste)

Canned and pickles goods etc
Please check the nutrition labels, but here are some I have found:
Guacamole 

Hot sauce of various kinds

Kimchi (Check label) 
Mayonnaise
Peanut butter
Peppadews stuffed with cream cheese
Pickled artichokes
Pickled cucumbers (Check label! There is a shocking difference here)
Tzatziki