Couldn't agree more!

Keto is EASY compared to any other diet I've tried for one key reason: you don't feel hungry.

You can eat as much as you want, whenever you like. Soon enough though the effects kick in, your hunger is supressed, and you have to remind yourself to eat at times.

No matter how enthusiastic you are at the start, hunger quickly erodes willpower. I failed miserably at the typical low-fat diet. Keto was the cheat code.

The second reason why keto is easy is because it produces "results" very quickly. Your scale will drop rapidly in just a few days. You haven't actually lost that amount of fat, you've lost a bunch of water in your cells, but the scale still tells you that the number went down. And the number changing for the better is what can help us keep at it.

This is also a "hack" to get into clothes that are a little too tight way faster. Your body basically shrinks a little.

Just make sure you supplement potassium since that tends to be lost with the water.

Yeah. When I first went keto I didn’t know this. Started feeling sick. Google quickly told me that I wasn’t getting salt or potassium, so I ate a salted avocado. All better.

I loved keto when I did it - just step on the scale in the morning, see results, and voila, positive feedback loop.

The only downside that I can think of it was really, really, really, REALLY boring.

so boring in fact that after a while I did not look forward to eating - while normally I am a foodie and just love to eat, when I did keto that wish to eat was gone.

however I still would very much recommend keto if you can find the life setting that supports you doing keto, because I can guarantee you that other members of your family will not want to eat what you eat- once or twice, MAYBE, but not all the time.

Maybe life is supposed to be boring. That, or maybe we should all try heroin?

If your life is boring and you have tried everything you should try heroin.

I don't think you even need to go full keto to get benefit from this idea. I often just eat eggs and some veges for breakfast on weekends (knowing full well I will be hungry for lunch) and this has helped me control my appetite, be satisfied/satiated and not gain weight. (I practice IF as well though during the week)

> It’s really interesting to see the diet industry attack this. Calling it a “fad diet” as if eating low carbs is somehow a fad. Other things I’ve seen are essentially “keto diets are for treating epilepsy, not for losing weight!” Etc.

> Keto diets don’t require you to buy any products or books or take any courses or anything. Just literally read the nutrition facts and eat 20-50 carbs a day.

But that's the issue, isn't it?

Sometimes I feel like changing my usual snack of apples with some kind of biscuit / cookie. It's next to impossible to find anything below 500 kCals / 100 g at my local grocery store. And when I look at the ingredients, there's always a ton of sugar in there.

The only lower-ish processed food I can easily find is sorbet. But that's impractical to deal with at work (we don't have a freezer).

So most of the time, I end up buying nothing if I don't feel like an apple. Why would "big ag" cheer me in going this route?

I should note I'm not even into Keto or anything, just paying attention to how many calories I eat.

There are plenty of snacks that are keto-friendly: beef jerky (no sugar added), boiled eggs, celery + peanut butter, smoked oysters... the list goes on. Yes, cookies are not included in that list, if that's a deal-breaker for you then it seems like this diet wouldn't work for you I guess.

Cookies are one of those rare foods that most diets can agree you shouldn't eat, so that doesn't really have anything to do with keto. The only space for debate about cookies is whether you should have little or none (other than for high-power people who need to cover an energy deficit, which sounds like it would be a nice problem.)

I've done keto a handful of times and found some really great snacks. Low carb cheesecakes, macaroons, peanut butter cookies, brownies with walnuts. They certainly don't taste as good as the regular version but they'll fill a craving.

Typically you're swapping flour for almond flour and sugar for erythritol.

One cup almond flour, one quarter cup erythritol, 3 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of cinnamon, half a tablespoon of vanilla, bake at 350 for 12 minutes, let cool for a half hour. Keto cookies.

I used cookies to mean "generic sweets", as opposed to fruit. I don't particularly like "actual cookies".

I'm in France, so the only time I've seen beef jerky in my life was when some dude I used to know brought some from the US. Furthermore, I'm really not sure if we have anything similar over here.

Note, I said I wasn't doing keto (never have) so I don't specifically look for no-carb options. I just realize that those foods are more like "cravings", so they won't make me eat less during the regular meals. If I want to reduce my calorie intake, I need to cut somewhere. So I usually look into cutting the calories of the snacks. While I love almonds and other dried fruits (and their butter), they typically have a lot of calories. IIRC, pistachios have something like 600 kCals and I can easily eat way too many.

Beef jerky is just a form of cured meat. You can also eat salami :-)

You can try baking your own cookies, biscuits and dry stuff like that. It's one of the really easy things to bake, they're durable, you can make them exactly to your preferences, add fiber etc. And if you want to geek out tuning the recipes and stuff, there is a lot of potential for that.

I usually do either that, or eat fruit. But sometimes I haven't had the time to bake, the fruit at the local store doesn't look all that great, etc.

Try Quest Nutrition Chocolate Chip cookies. They are awesome (like most of the things Quest makes), and less than 1g of carb per unit.

I'll try to find some, but I've never seen that brand around here (France).

I usually tend to buy protein bars from a sporting goods store, which have the benefit of making me feel full after one or two, and make me eat noticeably less at the following meal. But said store is quite out of my way, so I don't always have those on hand, and they do have a bit too much sugar for my taste.

iHerb ships those internationally.

Something I found kind of oddball about the keto diet community is that they aren’t just recommending low carbs. They push people to eat more fat. I’ve seen a friend fail to lose weight on keto and he was eating tons of stuff like cheese and bacon.

The “eat less carbs” message is great IMO but I think a lot of people need to eat less period. Personally I found that intentionally eating high-protein foods was a good way for me to be satiated with less carbs. A protein bar will fill me up, a chunk of cheese with twice as many calories won’t.

But I also acknowledge that people are different. I’m sure there people who are easily satiated by fat and can therefore eat unmetered fatty foods and lose weight.

If you cut carbs and just eat more protein instead you can literally die [0]. AIUI you're supposed to be replacing the carbs with fat when doing keto.

I've known a few heavy people over the years who claimed to be eating keto and never seemed to be losing any weight. Whenever we hung out they would use their purported keto diet as a green-light to get extra meat and cheese in whatever we were doing, and inevitably they would also eat carbs. French fries, beers, late night donuts, ice cream, the usual slip-ups.

If a person lacks self-discipline, a keto diet turns into an extremely fattening diet. It does not degrade gracefully at all. You have to either stick to it and stay in ketosis, or reel in your fat consumption something fierce because it'll all get stored as fat when you're running on glucose.

It's kind of a major flaw with ketogenic diets IMHO. The diet inherently gets a person into a habit of consuming rich, fatty foods. But when they slip up, which let's be honest, most people will. It becomes something along the lines of the most fattening diet possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Starvation

Granted, rabbit starvation can occur if your protein consumption exceeds 35% of calories, but most people are nowhere near that level.

Keto community generally recommends replacing carbs with fat and keeping protein constant. Protein consumption is almost a constant (with some variability due to workout regimen, etc).

I think of it like a see-saw, with protein level being the axis of rotation (ie., it stays the same). Now you have 2 remaining macro variables: carbs and fat. If you decrease one, you need to increase the other or else caloric intake might be too low.

Keto community generally refers to the diet as Low Carb High Fat because not eating enough fat can cause problems on the diet.

Edit: To be clear, assuming sufficient consumption of protein, if calories are still deficient, keto community recommends making up the deficit with fat rather than protein.

The diet industry makes their money on the perpetually-overweight. They don't make money off of someone who modified their eating habits and is now physically fit.

Physically fit people don't buy their magic pills and weight loss programs.

>Physically fit people don't buy their magic pills and weight loss programs.

You would be amazed by the amount of supplement pills and powders with which many "fit and healthy" people fill up their cabinets, while paying 1000s of dollars for beach body DVD programs, apps, overpriced kitchen appliances and branded gear. It's just a different industry that is selling you the illusion.

At the end of the day any rigid diet the restricts processed sugars is excellent. Keto indirectly ends up addressing this, and the rigidity of it makes it particularly effective.

I find that keto excludes a huge portion of the population that is not willing to give up complex carbs in some capacity. As long as they drop outright sugars and grains, a person should still be able to get the advantage of keto while being on a more follow-able keto-lite.

Almost all Keto programs include some minerals you might be missing out from limiting your food selection- zinc and potassium come to mind.

While I generally agree with you, I think many people have a strong rebound after a few months, that does not teach adequate portion size for later on, and after some age and some health conditions, it can put stress on kidney / liver

they don't have to. you can get those from plants and adding in potassium salt. It's not a big deal.

there's a table somewhere of all the different fad diets and what food they tell you to avoid

a third column of "how it works" is the same for all rows: "calorie restriction"

I've been doing a half-hearted keto and losing weight because I'm just eating a lot less by skipping pizza and breakfast bagels and honestly just don't have many meals in my cooking repetoire, so it's either protein shake or meat on top of salad.

I've been doing keto and am fairly athletic. I also am doing it because I find it hleps my moods and affect, and I have a stable weight when I am on this diet.

I don't think that you have to be calorie-restricted to benefit from a ketogeneic diet.

The climber Dave MacLeod has a 4-hour long video that seems (to my untrained eye) to have a number of good sources. He also has a masters degree in nutrition and is a professional athlete.

He describes how underfeeding was indeed a problem with his early experiments with this approach to diet, but how it's been quite effective after being careful to eat enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9dtfNZahKw&t=46s

Fair enough, thanks for the link

“calorie restriction” is far from the only thing in a diet. You won't get anywhere without a mindset. Keto absolutely helps with your appetite. That's every bit as important as CR over the long haul, despite what naysayers say. They like to limit the conversation, so they can preach CICO as if nothing else matters.

Much of the benefits of any diet are actually not specific to the diet itself. Just being on a diet, any diet, is better than not for health.

Isn't the ratio between fats and proteins also important?

Yeah, it's like 85% fat, 10% protein, 5% carbs. low carb doesn't really go like that, it's basically "just don't have sugar and carbs" but doesn't propose a ratio of perfection for fats vs protein.

They're a hack because they're indirectly calorie deficient, as it's incredibly hard to overeat on calories without carbs (unless you're eating a ton of fat). If you did while on a keto diet, you'd still gain weight.

Weight gain = calories in - calories out

There's also the loss of appetite, as there's one less component to the "Fat+Carb" compulsive eating trigger.

I've had incredible success with keto, but I did yo-yo back, the downside of keto being so easy is that it's hard to get back into it, knowing that you'll almost effortlessly get results eventually, so I'm nutritionally procrastinating.

> the loss of appetite

I've been strict keto now for over five years. Prior to that I was clinically obese for decades. I tried lots of different dieting approaches and most of them "worked" to lose weight to some extent. The issue was I would always regain the weight because I couldn't maintain the diet due to the constant hunger and sense of deprivation. While all diets, including keto, ultimately "work" through calorie reduction. The unique aspect of keto for me was it was the only approach that allowed me to reduce calories without hunger or deprivation.

N=1 and individual metabolisms and preferences are different, so I don't try to extrapolate my results to everyone. All I can say is that after struggling for so long with so many other approaches, keto worked for me so fast, so easily and so well - it does feel almost like a hack.

There is no one in the world that is overweight because they eat too much unsweetened oatmeal with nothing else added for taste.

Pointing out the thermodynamics of weight loss with calories in/out is stupid though because there is a huge dependency in the amount of calories consumed based on the type of food and if the food has been engineered to taste super good.

Yeah, me too. Bread consumption is like a dial of 'do I really care enough to lose weight?'

This completely disregards the question of why is it easier to overeat on carbs than it is on protein/fats?

Protein is as calorie dense as carbs, and fat is twice as calorie dense as carbs. So it isn't mere volume of food in the stomach that causes the difference - if it was, it would be easier to overeat on protein/fats than on carbs.

Basically, it sounds like you're treating the human body like some black hole that calories get thrown into, when in reality there is a very complex feedback loop taking place based on what your bodily inputs and outputs are.

As an evolutionary biologist, I suspect that mammals (and likely other animals) are primed to take advantage of sugary, transiently available food (i.e., fruit) by storing it as fat. Fructose in particular bypasses most of the feedback loops that control glucose.

Dr Richard Johnson has researched this extensively and, yes, fructose consumption triggers increased fat storage in almost all humans. He summarized his research findings in a book[1] and has discussed his findings in a number of interviews [2]. I highly recommend the linked podcast if this is a topic that interests you.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Switch-Richard-J-Johnson-ebook/dp...

2 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rick-johnson-m-d-metab...

Because it is processed garbage. If you want to get fat on fat use highly concentrated oils.

Trust me, I can easily overeat calories without carbs - on keto - and gain weight. It’s a lot easier to choose not to, however.

I've been strict keto for over five years and intend to continue for life due to the weight loss, health, emotional and cognitive benefits I experience. A little while back I did a casual experiment where I intentionally increased caloric intake while remaining strict keto. I did ultimately start to gain weight, of course (because ---> physics).

What was impressive though was how long it took and how slow the gain progressed. Because keto calories tend to be so satiating, it almost felt like I had to work at getting my energy balance to stay meaningfully positive. When I'm full on natural fats, it's hard to keep eating. The other interesting thing was, even though I gained some weight, I maintained most of the non-weight related benefits (cognitive, emotional balance). My guess is this may be due to keto calories being almost all fresh, unprocessed foods.

Fat's the best for satiety, yes. I find it much easier to overeat when I'm mainly eating protein.

I'd guess you kept the mental benefits because you were still in ketosis. While I'm sure being leaner (if you were overweight) contributes to some mental benefits (body image, feeling healthier), perhaps most are simply from running on ketones.

> perhaps most are simply from running on ketones.

Even after so many years in strict keto, I still can't tease out where exactly which benefits come from between calorie reduction, ketosis, gut microbiome, etc. I feel like it's definitely a combination of more than one of the above but teasing it out would require too much experimentation and I'm reluctant to 'mess with success'.

Certainly it's possible to overeat even without carbs and still gain weight. However, there is more to fat storage than just calories. Like many systems in the body, fat storage is controlled by hormones. Hormones are affected by the types of food you eat. Therefore, what you eat can also influence the amount of fat you store.

It is actually not only because Keto is calorie deficient, but also because it encourages ketogenic metabolism, which means that while you are calorie deficient you are more effective at burning fat. Compared with a standard calorie deficient diet, you have more stable energy levels throughout the day, because the body adapts to not getting carbs.

Keto is about making your body regulate body weight on its own.

Why exactly do I need to know this equation? My body can do that for me automatically.

> Just an anecdote: keto diets for control of obesity are so effective it feels like a hack.

I'm genuinely fascinated that you prefaced this clearly-not-an-anecdote with "just an anecdote". If it had been an anecdote, it would have been fine without the preface. Instead it's a sweeping claim that at best requires several anecdotes to support it.

How is my sharing my experience not an anecdote?

>a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.

>keto is so effect [for me] that it feels like a hack [to me].

This is literally an anecdote.

You made a statement about "keto diets" in the plural, and "for control of obesity" in general. An anecdote would be you relating which of this plurality of keto diets you tried and what results you found with each of them. "Keto diets [...] are effective" is a conclusion one may or may not take away from such anecdotes, but it is not itself an anecdote.