- Cut the carbs.
Cutting carbs could mean gradually reducing them over weeks or months or cutting them all at once. An important step is to become aware of how many carbs are in different foods and to become skilled at tracking your carb intake. A good starting place for keto is 20 grams of net carbs per day. Net carbs are simply total carbs minus fiber (both of which are listed on food packaging in the United States). Keeping that number under 20 grams per day will put your body into a state of ketosis. Reducing your carb intake is essential to your success on keto and should definitely be the first line item that you address.
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Develop a rotation of five to seven staple meals. Doing so allows you to easily know the nutrition of those meals; plus, you get really good at making those dishes after a while.
- Brace yourself.
The first week on keto is tough. Your body is doing something completely new and is trying to rewire circuitry that has been in place for your entire life. Learning to run on fat is worth it, but the transition is a rough one. Most people feel extremely fatigued and low on energy for the first three to five days. These symptoms can be mitigated with supplementation, but even then you’re going to feel a bit different. We promise that this feeling will pass! Around the five- to seven-day mark, “keto clarity” will hit and you will feel like a new person.
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Supplementing with electrolytes is important on a keto diet and can help mitigate some of the adaptation symptoms. Make sure to get sodium in the form of salt; potassium from avocados, broccoli, spinach, and supplements; and magnesium from nuts, spinach, dark chocolate, and supplements. Drinking lots of water also will help.
- Add some fat.
Eating high-fat is counterintuitive for all of us who were raised during the low-fat boom. Our underlying fear of fat will need to be conquered in our quest for health. When starting a keto diet, most people are good about cutting carbs, but they fail to add fat. This results in a high-protein diet, which is going to leave you with low energy and wanting to run back to your carbs. Actively seeking out fat will result in much better energy levels, better hunger control, and an overall more sustainable diet. Fat is your new energy source. Don’t be afraid of energy!
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Butter coffee and tea are a huge help for adding fat to your diet. So are fat bombs. Fat bombs can be eaten in place of dessert or as a side at meals to increase the fat content.
- Time your meals.
Once you’ve got the first three steps down, it’s time to do some fine-tuning. Ditching the standard breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert paradigm can be liberating! Don’t confine yourself to the typical eating windows. Experiment with different schedules that match up with your lifestyle. Skip breakfast one day. (“But it’s the most important meal of the day!” said the cereal company.) Eat just one meal a day. Try eating nothing but fat until 2 or 3 p.m. Don’t be afraid to stray from societal norms around meal timing. After all, early humans didn’t enter starvation mode if they didn’t get their potato chips every two hours!
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Most people are not hungry when they first wake up. Listen to your body and eat in accordance with what it’s telling you.
- Continually improve.
Three years into our keto diet, we continue to improve and change things up almost weekly. We view it as a challenge: add something new, see how our bodies react, adjust the next week. View this as a never-ending process, especially if you’re coming straight from the standard American diet. If the Big Mac wrapper from last night is still on the passenger seat of your car, it’s probably not feasible for you to switch to a completely whole-foods diet today. Baby steps. Maybe switch out the Big Mac for a Big Mac with no bun. That’s easy, right? Get yourself some low-carb ice cream from the grocery store. Do the best you can. Tomorrow you will be able to do a little bit better. Think of where you’ll be in a year!
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Perfection is often the enemy of improvement. If you think you need to be perfect with your diet from day one, chances are you’ll never even start. The way we started a keto diet was by subbing out high-carb options for low-carb replacements and continually improving from there.
