A little more than a year ago, I watched a movie on Netflix, quite by accident. It was a documentary called The Magic Pill and it was about diet, specifically the ketogenic way of eating.
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes explanation: our bodies use sugar for fuel. If we eliminate all the sugar, it has no choice but to use fat as fuel, instead. So assuming we don’t feed that body any sugar it will burn fat, and you will lose weight. My husband and I discussed it afterward; how much sense the science made, how logical it was that getting rid of chemicals from our diet could positively impact our health, and how simple a solution it seemed to be.
And then I probably sat down and ate a bowl of ice cream.
Because of my lifetime love affair with carbs, if there was one component of the lifestyles featured on The Magic Pill that I couldn’t get my head around, it was that – no carbs and no sugar. It seemed impossible, as someone who was running on probably hundreds of grams of carbs per day, to imagine a life of 20 grams of carbs per day or less, which is the requirement for your body to be in nutritional ketosis. Pretty much everything I ate was loaded with carbs, even the healthy foods I enjoyed. When I saw these people purging their pantries and throwing away everything with carbs and sugar, it was mystifying. How do they live? What do they eat? How sad must they be?
I even had a conversation with someone about it in June, that came up a few weeks ago in my Facebook memories. One of my friends suggested that the keto diet was working for many people and I scoffed that it was an impossible diet to maintain. “This will never be my life,” were the words I used.
But I tried it. It was more of an experiment than anything else just to see how hard it would be and to see if it would yield the results of friends who had success. I didn’t have confidence that I would be able to stick with it because I viewed it as a diet I was trying. Give it a shot and lose a few pounds, I thought. It probably won’t work, but I guess it’s worth a try.
It was trial and error. I used an app on my phone to track the carbohydrates, protein, fat, and calories in the food I was eating. I kept my meals very simple, eating only what I knew to be within the total 20 grams of carbs per day required for me to be in ketosis. I read every single nutritional label, and I familiarized myself with what 100g of cheese looks like, as opposed to breaking off a chunk and calling it a day. I was conscious of every single thing I ingested, no matter how small.
The sugar detox was difficult, I won’t lie. I craved it every minute. I also found the food prep to be a challenge. As someone who would eat out several times a week, I suddenly found myself cooking every single meal every day for both my husband and me. It was especially difficult when we had to be away somewhere, since it’s that much harder to find a quick meal to grab on the go when you’re so limited in what you can eat.
I cringe a little when I hear people say “the keto diet” because the people who seem to fail are those who see it that way. This way of eating is a complete lifestyle change, which I didn’t anticipate at the outset. It is a transformation of the way I look at food, eating, nutrition, and health. It’s a decision I made from a position of ignorance that, through extensive research, commitment, and genuine effort, has turned into a new lease on life.
I won’t tell you that going from being the biggest food addict I know to adopting a very restricted diet was an easy transition to make. Meaningful changes seldom are. But I recently read a quote by Hippocrates that reads, “Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that made him sick.” And that’s what it was, I was ready. If I wasn’t ready, I’d still be sick.
I will continue next week.