I'm able to sustain keto when using Huel Black (17% carbs), but your mileage may vary.
And Huel is both vegan and sustainable.
(I'm not affiliated, just a user)
It varies though and I use keto-sticks to check what level I'm at. And like you say, depends on daily activity.
I'm not a fan of vegan food in general (hard to get tasty), Huel is what I can tolerate.
If you're talking about B12, they use Cyanocobalamin which is produced by bacterias - Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanocobalamin#Production.
Thing is that if you over-do it and have too high keto-levels, you can get poisoned by it and that certainly have a high level of stress on the body. (The old man points this out in your video)
Also, if you don't eat often enough, you may not trigger insulin and thus won't get hungry at all and get to little calories (thus dropping in weight).
You mean using a breathalyzer? I did not find them to be very consistent.
You know what likes keto even more? Your heart. There are studies and research of fatty acids being able to reverse heart disease, and them being incredibly more efficient fuels than glucose is. N=1 placebo, but I certainly feel my heart (in an overweight body) pumping better and with less effort 1+ weeks into very low carb.
Adaptation takes a while because our mitochondria are dysfunctional due to standard diets being so high in glucose. Fatty acids are the better fuel for muscles, and mitochondria in general.
I don't want to dismiss your personal experiences, but I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw.
Common mental illnesses - particularly depression and anxiety - have incredibly high placebo response rates. Everything looks like a promising treatment for depression in an uncontrolled trial. You can pick practically any intervention - including literal sugar pills - and get ~40% remission rates in an open-label pilot study. Many thousands of potential treatments supported by plausible theories, anecdotal accounts, case reports and small uncontrolled trials have fallen flat as soon as they were tested rigorously. The base rate suggests that the chance of a keto diet (or any other intervention with this level of evidence) being an effective treatment for depression is on the order of 0.1%.
If keto works for you then you should stick with it. The problem is that it's overwhelmingly likely to be no more effective for other people than a low-fat diet or a low-GI diet or sugar pills or faith healing. Articles like this one do a huge disservice to patients, because they completely neglect the base rate and perpetuate a cycle of hype and disappointment that can ultimately lead to distrust and despair.
Regarding placebo - they do touch on this in the article. I have pretty high confidence it’s not placebo for me. But that’s the point, we just don’t know yet and all I’m saying is I’m glad we will soon know more based on my experience.
To partake in a study you need to get out of the house, go somewhere new, talk to new people a few times, do something new, get some daylight, etc. Those are all things we know has a positive effect on depression.
Big part of treating depression is to make people do those sorts of things, despite their bodies and mind screaming stay in bed, it's not worth it.
You have zero proof & did zero research on this person, yet trying to put someone who down sees profound benefit with the good old: "it's just placebo".
Just because there is no direct studies backing it up yet doesn't mean there isn't real effect. Could be keto, could be lack of certain starches or other foods, could be the focus & rhytm, whatever it is let's not discourage someone who is having a great practical benefit.
In this case there is literature & studies on epilepsy and keto, and OP was on put on epileptic medicine & describes a link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6361831/
Proof of what? I fully accept that this guy finds keto really helpful and I have made no effort to dispute that. There is a world of difference between "a thing that some people find helpful" and "an evidence-based clinical intervention".
>Just because there is no direct studies backing it up yet doesn't mean there isn't real effect.
The entire point of my comment is that the chance of there being a "real" effect (i.e. greater than placebo) is extremely low. That isn't the same as saying "this is definitely, 100% bogus".
You do know things can be effective without evidence-based clinical trials?
Just because there isn't any clinical trial done on it, doesn't mean it defaults to a placebo effect. What makes this case even more convincing is that there is literature on Epilepsy and keto, and OP was on put on epileptic medicine before: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6361831/
Everything new, and old but unprofitable, lack clinical trials. Clinical trials are extremely hard and expensive. Especially on complicated issues with hard to control variables: for instance mental issues with similar symptoms might have different causes.
Clinical trials are trying to prove what works safely for a large group, that's it, nothing more.
As someone who has allergies and a ton of symptoms that were alleviated by cutting out foods, it is really tiresome to hear that it is placebo or it is psychosomatic. Before I knew it was allergies and had the test in hand, I just had to grin and nod along when someone said my chronic sinus headaches were essentially make believe. Now I have a piece of paper that confirmed just about every food I had cut out or naturally avoided.
You are clearly not familiar with the research in this area. People dealing with mystery symptoms that are cleared up by cutting out certain foods will generally be. Maybe hold off on telling them it is placebo?
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6606425/
As I am writing this, I am going through something like this. Over a longer period of time I have made myself believe that it is related to what/when I eat etc. If you can, could you share what were the triggers for you?
If society wants to determine if X is generally an effective treatment for Y, there need to be robust experiments that involve multiple people as subjects.
If, however, one guy feels a lot better doing X, and feels worse they stop doing X, then sure, that person should probably keep doing X. Why does X work for that person? Who knows?
In my experience, both long term, major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder only substantially improve through understanding, which of course is realized in at least 2 ways: experience and/or therapy.
We can say with some certainty that antidepressants' effectiveness is questionable, at best, long term, but of particular interest for effective indication would be any number of psychoactive substances, which routinely make headlines for this type of treatment but remain taboo for some still yet to be resolved reasons.
Of course this ultimately boils down to personal choices, but attitudes towards drugs will change before we see any real progress in this area, I'm afraid.
My lifestyle changed once I got a live-in partner. I need to get back on it.
It's difficult to describe how massively my life changed when I started keto.
Like the subject of the article, I've had Bipolar (1 in my case, they didn't specify their version) for most of my life, since way before it's supposed to manifest in late adolescence. I was misdiagnosed here and there since I was a very young child, but I finally got on the right treatment plan at 20 years old.
The maintenance of that treatment plan has been taking a medium dose of Lamictal, an epilepsy drug, daily. It worked damn well compared to the regular mania, often culminating in psychosis and occasional full-on can't-even-hold-a-job levels of suicidal depression, but within a week of full-blown ketosis, I was a new person.
I found out about it through some documentary disguised as "In Defense of Fat" or something similar, and I was fascinated by the epilepsy cure thing. I had always known there was a connection between my condition and epilepsy, given that I was on seizure drugs and often experienced what I figured were mini-seizures (often described as brain zaps, I think).
I couldn't find any information on links except a few random, very weak studies, and sorta just told everyone who naysayed me to fuck off cuz it works for me. I lost 20 lbs of excess covid weight as a very nice side-effect, but I can safely say this is the most effective treatment I've ever experienced for my condition (of the many, many I've tried) and I feel like I have superpowers in comparison.
It is very obvious if I get kicked out of ketosis now after a few days or so. I've done it purposefully on vacations or just random cheat times. After a while I feel worse in the head, body, and soul. I make dumb or impulsive decisions (like my old self), or am grumpy in a way I haven't been since starting. I start to have awful dreams again and wake up my wife sleep-talking in distress, and am tired all the time like the old days.
It's certainly not the easiest diet to adhere to, it's also surely not the best for the environment unless you're really strict in specific ways like some, and it's potentially disruptive socially, but it's a lifestyle choice that has given me personally a truly new and improved life that I don't ever want to or plan to return from.