Keto Means Doing This for Life

The very first popular Keto diet, Original Atkins, didn’t call itself a diet. It’s a Way of Eating or a lifestyle. Because it isn’t a fad diet that you go on for a few weeks and then go back to eating carbs. Shunning carbs is just what you do now.

But doing it for life means going through easier times and harder times. Some times you go for weeks and months on strictly Keto-acceptable foods, and are not even tempted to stray. When you think ‘chocolate’ you go for a Keto hot chocolate. When you are jonesing for a bread-like food, you go for Carbquik biscuits.

Other times, every darn time you go to a grocery store you come back with carb foods. Not just a little snack for that day, but a couple of cheap frozen pizzas and a bag of sugar-laden chocolate candies. And even though you KNOW it will make you feel bad and sleepy and not get much done, and that it will give you carb cravings that will keep you from getting back on track, you eat the food. If you are like me, you just can’t afford to throw away food you’ve paid money for.

Some people think ‘going on Keto’ means following a menu plan with complex recipes for every single meal. Each one calling for loads of exotic ingredients that you have to go to exotic grocery stores for, or buy online. Well, if you lack energy sometimes (if only because of your most recent carb binges), just THINKING about that makes you tired, much less doing it.

You need to get simple. And have food on hand for simple meals. Meat is the key. Buy some steaks or pork chops or chicken parts and freeze most of it. These are simple things to cook— easier than driving out for fast food.

Don’t feel you need a lot of side dishes. That’s not the Keto way. In Original Atkins induction, you’d have your piece of meat and a salad. No breads or bread substitutes, no fancy desserts…. Just those two items. You can buy bagged salads, especially if you live alone and hate having to throw out a lot of wilted salad material. Or you can buy cabbage instead of lettuce for a salad base. Cabbage seems eternal in the refrigerator. You can also use certain frozen veggies as a substitute for cold salads.

Another thing to to when you don’t feel much like cooking is to make yourself bulletproof beverages. They are as filling as a meal. If you ‘need’ a mid-afternoon snack, a bulletproof beverage may save you from the temptation of running out for chips or tacos.

If you buy Keto recipe books, try the simple recipes first. If there is one you like, you may make it over and over, and make a point of keeping the ingredients in the house. All you need, really, are a few simple recipes, easy to make, with ingredients you keep on hand.

For senior citizens, eating Keto is more important than ever, as you may have multiple health problems that are improved by it. But it’s harder to cook regularly, and you may be discouraged cooking for one or two when you used to cook for a whole family. Simple recipes are a way to keep going and stay healthy. Also, if you get to the point that you need someone to help you make your meals, it’s a lot easier to train a family member to make something simple.

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.