Why Low-Carb/Keto/LCHF is a Lifestyle, not a Diet

I believe it was Dr. Atkins who started off the idea of not talking about this way-of-eating as a diet. In popular usage, a ‘diet’ was something temporary. You went on a diet, lost weight, and then went off the diet. 

The problem is that we know that this cannot be just a temporary thing for us, even if we do lose weight. Weight gain was not our problems, just a symptom of a bigger thing called Insulin Resistance. Insulin Resistance is a disease that can cause many health problems— diabetes, kidney failure, Alzheimers Disease, as well as overweight/obesity.

The medicine for our disease does not come in a pill bottle. It’s eating in a way that doesn’t trigger our Insulin Resistance. And we can’t just do that for a little while. We have to keep it up for the rest of our lives.

And that’s hard when we live in a culture that doesn’t support our lifestyle. In our culture, eating processed food is the norm, and that means food that is stuffed with carbs. McDonald’s doesn’t make a living by selling meat— it sells buns, french fries, and soda pop, with a little bit of meat to flavor the buns. They are ‘drug pushers’ of an addictive drug: carbohydrates. And so they don’t want to start giving their customers an alternative menu item that meets Low-Carb or Keto standards.

The hard part of the Keto lifestyle for me is the cooking. Our culture actively discourages home cooking. How can the food processors make any money if we buy fresh meat and some fresh veggies and cook it up? And I live alone, which means that if I make most low-carb/keto recipes, I have to eat the same thing for days.

But I must adapt. I make the most simple/basic low carb meal— a serving of meat plus non-starchy veggies— in a simple way. I make a ‘bullet-proof’ beverage in the morning. I make my low-carb ‘breads’ and freeze some for later use.

And I’m thinking about the long term. What happens as I age and can’t do for myself any more? I need to simplify my eating life. Since one of my biggest problems with home-cooking is the cleaning up after, I am making plans to get a dishwasher, since my old one went defunct years ago and I’ve been hand-washing ever since.

One of the co-hosts on a Jimmy Moore podcast likes to call those of us on a keto lifestyle ‘ketonians.’ Like we were a separate foreign culture with different ways. That may be a helpful way to look at it. When we first learned that keto was the way to help our health problems, we joined the tribe. And we are going to stay in it until we die— because going out of the tribe and becoming a carbivore again will make us die quicker.