10 TIPS FOR STARTING KETO THE RIGHT WAY
If you’re thinking about starting a keto diet but you feel totally overwhelmed and confused by the avalanche of information out there, put those worries away! This guide will tell you everything you need to know to get started in a way that’s simpleyet effective. Don’t let the mountains of complicated and conflicting rules you find online intimidate you. The truth is, keto is very straightforward and you only need to know a few basic things to be successful and get the results you want. And if you’re not new to keto—if you’ve been doing it for a while but you’re struggling to reach your goals—now is the perfect time for a reset. Clear your mind of everything you think you’re “supposed to” do and start with a clean slate.
#01. Keep keto simple.
The single most important thing about a keto diet is keeping your carbohydrate intake very low. That’s right! If you go by what you see on social media, no one could blame you for thinking you need to calculate macros, track your food in an app, eat only at certain times of day, measure your ketone level, and use expensive powders and oils. But people have been using low-carb keto diets to lose weight and improve their health for hundredsof years – long before anyone was concerned about those things and before any of those technologies even existed. If you enjoy using those gadgets and devices and tracking all kinds of data, you can do that to your heart’s content, but all that just makes it more complicated and difficult—and less likely that you’ll actually stick with keto for the long term. Make things simple and easy foryourself, especially when you’re just getting started.
If your main goal is to lose weight or improve a health issue (like type 2 diabetes, PCOS, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, or fatty liver, to name just a few), then start by keeping your carb intake ultra low. You don’t need to add lots of extra fat and oil to your food in order to make it “more keto” or to hit a “fat macro” or get any specific percentage of your calories from fat. What makes a diet ketogenic is not the presence of lots of fat—it’s the absence of the carbs! This is what “flips the switch” to help your body shift from burning mostly carbs to burning mostly fat. This metabolic shift helps to lower your blood sugar and insulin, and these two changes are responsible for the majority of the beneficial effects that come from keto diets.
#02. Prioritize protein.
There are a lot of myths out there about protein on keto diets. Maybe you’ve heard that protein “turns into sugar,” or that eating too much protein will “kick you out of ketosis.” There are small kernels of truth to these when you dig deep into the biochemical weeds, but you do not need to
worry about this if your main goals in doing a keto diet are to lose weight and improve your overall health and wellbeing. (After all, drinking too much water and getting too much oxygen can also be problematic, but you’re not afraid of water and oxygen in your everyday life!)
The truth is, protein helps fill you up and keep you satiated – meaning that you’re able to go longer between meals without feeling hungry or having sugar cravings. Protein foods (e.g., beef, lamb, pork, poultry, seafood, eggs) also come along with critical micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that you need for tissue repair and physical and mental health. Protein isn’t just for building muscles. Proteins and amino acids are also the raw material for hair, skin and nails, tendons and ligaments, certain hormones and neurotransmitters (like dopamine, serotonin, and thyroid hormone), immune system antibodies, and even your bones! (It’s true: bones are mostly protein –they’re not just calcium!)
Misguided fear about protein on keto diets leads people to limit protein intake and eat more fat instead. But overdoing added fats and oils (such as butter and heavy cream) is a common reason for stalled fat loss on a keto diet. So, eat protein to satiety (as much as you need to feel comfortably full), and enjoy the delicious fat that comes packaged naturally with your protein foods but go easy on the extra fats and oils.
#03. Have realistic expectations.
Keto is powerful! It can radically transform your health and physique. But keep in mind that your transformation might not happen as quickly as you want it to, and it might not happen as quickly as someone else’s. You are a unique individual with your own genetics, lifestyle habits, and dietary and medical history. Let other people’s successes inspire and motivate you, but don’t “compare and despair.” Start where you are and follow your ownpath. Stay the course, be consistent, and you’ll get to your goals—even if the journey takes a little longer than you wish it would.
If your main goal is fat loss, keep a few things in mind so you’ll save yourself heaps of frustration and disappointment: women, don’t compare your rate of fat loss to a man’s. Men tend to lose weight more quickly than women do, even when they’re not as strict with the diet. It’s not fair, but it’s biology, and you can’t outsmart it. Your fat loss will come; it’ll just come more slowly than it does for the men in your life. And if you’re a seasoned individual “of a certain age,” don’t compare your fat loss to that of someone younger. Younger people tend to have faster metabolisms, so as a general rule they lose fat more easily than older people do. Additionally, people who are larger and heavier and have more weight to lose tend to lose it more quickly at first compared to people looking to lose just a few pounds or kilos. Make no mistake, though: whatever your age, gender, or starting weight or state of health, you can be successful on keto. Your success might just take a bit longer than it does for someone in a different category.
#04. Don’t obsess over the scale.
Not everyone does keto for weight loss, but it’s one of the most common reasons. So if you’re in this for that purpose, here’s what you need to know: You won’t lose weight at the same rate every week or every month. Some weeks and months you’ll see a big decrease in your weight while at other times the scale will barely budge, even when you’re doing everything right. Be in this for the long term. You want keto to work, and you want this to be the last time you ever have to try something new, because it’s going to work and you won’t ever need to find a different method. With that in mind, do you want to lose weight fast, or do you want to lose it forever? If you’re in this for the long term, then the speed of your weight loss is less important.
Don’t use your scale weight as the only way you assess how things are going. It’s not uncommon for your size and shape to change even when your scale weight stays the same. It is essential that you understand this: just because your scale weight isn’t changing, or it’s changing more slowly than you wish it would, don’t ignore that your physique—the size and shape of your body—may be changing in positive ways.
Consider taking your measurements once a month so you’ll see if your size and shape are changing regardless of the number on your scale. (Or pay attention to how your clothing fits. Your pants don’t lie!) Play the long game. Don’t get frustrated if it’s been only a few days or even a few weeks with no change on the scale. Weight loss is not steady and linear. It doesn’t happen at the same pace all the time. It is completely normal to have ups and downs, times of larger and faster loss, and times where you feel stuck or stalled for a bit. Even if you’re not losing weight, as long as you keep your carbs low, good things are happening on the inside. Stay the course and be patient. You didn’t get to your current weight overnight, and you won’t get to your goal weight overnight either.
Another note about fat loss: the more you’re looking to lose, the more quickly it’ll come off—at first. If you have a substantial amount of weight to lose, a good rate of loss is about 1-2 pounds
(0.5-1.0 kg) per week. People who have less to lose might lose more slowly. If you’re brand new to this way of eating, you might lose several pounds in the first week or two but then things will slow down. This is normal and to be expected, so be ready for it. If you find things going slower a few weeks into keto, don’t worry that you’re doing something wrong.
#05. Be prepared for keto flu.
The dreaded “keto flu”! This phrase refers to the bumpy transition some people experience as their body adjusts to being without the regular influx of carbohydrate they’ve been accustomed to for most of their life. The truth is, most people transition to keto with no problems at all. But some may feel a few hiccups as they get used to life without sugar and starch, so it’s important for you to know about these in case they happen to you. The first thing to know is, these issues will mostly be mild and temporary. They’ll pass quickly and they’re a small price to pay for feeling great and experiencing all the benefits of keto once your body adapts.
The most common issue is headaches. You may also feel dizzy, lightheaded, nauseated, or fatigued. Most of these can be prevented by taking in more salt. Ketogenic diets increase your body’s need for sodium, and skimping on salt is usually the cause of headaches, lightheadedness, and feeling sluggish on keto. Be generous with salt/sodium in your diet, especially during the first few days or weeks: either sprinkle it liberally on your food, add a hefty pinch of it to your beverages, or be sure to incorporate salty foods into your diet—things like bacon, olives, pickles, or pepperoni. Not a fan of those? Make a cup of broth using a bouillon cube for an easy sodium boost. (Consult your doctor before using more salt if you have high blood pressure or heart failure.)
If you experience muscle cramps (especially in your legs) that you can’t attribute to overexertion, extra salt may help, and taking magnesium can also be beneficial. Magnesium helps with constipation, too, which some people experience on keto. (A simple way to start is with 1 teaspoon of milk of magnesia at bedtime for a week.) For an acute muscle cramp or ‘charley horse’, try a generous squirt of mustard or pickle juice … in yourmouth, not on your leg! These are simple but very effective, time-tested home remedies.
#06. Prepare your environment: give your kitchen a makeover.
Surrounding yourself with suitable foods is a key factor for success on keto. Clear out your kitchen. Get rid of everything that’s not appropriate for a very low-carb diet. Purge your pantry, cupboards, fridge, and freezer of all high-carb items. Don’t wait until you finish them up. Ditch them now. If you’re starting keto to lose weight or improve a serious health issue, those foods aren’t doing you any favors, so there’s no point in finishing them. Good riddance! (Consider taking all sealed and non-perishable items to a local food bank or shelter.)
Get familiar with the foods that will become staples of your diet and go stock up! You can construct your own personalized keto diet from the low-carb foods you like best, but the core foods you’ll likely turn to will be fatty meats (beef, lamb, pork, poultry, bison, game meats), seafood, eggs, and non-starchy vegetables. High-fat dairy products, like cheese, butter, cream, and sour cream, are fine if you tolerate dairy.
The name of the game here is, be prepared. Cookingin bulk makes keto much easier to stick to. Even if you’re only cooking for one, cook large batches so there will always be extra left over for snacking or for your next meal. In most cases, it doesn’t take longer to cook a large amount of food than it does a small one. If you’ve got the grill going anyway, don’t bother cooking just one or two steaks or chicken breasts. Grill five or six at a time—or more. You can have one for dinner and have another, cold, sliced into strips and dipped in blue cheese or ranch dressing for lunch the next day. Or use it as the protein on top of an entrée salad for dinner. Make steak & eggs later in the week for breakfast, or use pre-cooked steak and chicken in fajitas for dinner one night (minus the rice and tortillas, of course.) Use your oven the same way: bake or roast eight or ten chicken legs or pork chops at a time. Most of that is hands-off time, so while those are cooking, you can wash, peel, and chop vegetables for the week.
Hard-boiled eggs are a perfect grab & go keto snack. If you’re boiling water, there’s no point in making just one or two eggs; why not boil one or two dozen? You’ll thank yourself all week when hunger hits and all you have to do is open the fridge and snag one. The same goes for sausage links and bacon. Learn to enjoy certain foods cold. Cooking bacon? Don’t mess around with two or three strips. Cook the whole package; cold bacon is a dynamite keto snack. (Bake it in the oven rather than frying on the stovetop for easier cleanup.) Sausage links are another ideal keto grab & go option. Fry or bake a few packages at once and great protein will always be handy.
And of course, keep a hefty stash of keto-friendly non-perishables on hand all the time. They require no preparation or refrigeration and you can make a snack or even a whole meal out of them in a pinch: canned seafood (tuna, salmon, sardines, mackerel), pork rinds, low- or zero-sugar beef jerky or meat sticks, cheese crisps, pepperoni and salami. (These may need refrigeration after they’re open.)
Giving your kitchen a low-carb makeover will be more difficult if you live in a household with other people who aren’t jumping aboard the keto train with you. This makes it all the more important to cook in bulk and in advance so that there are always suitable low-carb foods ready to go and you won’t be tempted to reach for something high in carbs when you’re hungry and pressed for time.
#07. Know how to order in restaurants.
Dining out is one of life’s small pleasures, and you don’t have to stop doing it just because you’re cutting carbs. The great thing about keto is that you can stay on plan at any kind of restaurant you
can imagine: you just need to know how to customize your order to make your meal low in carbs. Now that bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, beans, and noodles are off limits, what can you order? Dining out or grabbing food on the go is easy: simply ask to swap out starchy sides in favor of non-starchy vegetables or a salad. Most restaurants will have no problem substituting steamed broccoli, roasted brussels sprouts or some other non-starchy vegetable for a baked potato or scoop of rice. At fast food places, bunless burgers or grilled chicken patties are good ways to go. (Pro tip: ask for burger patties or grilled chicken patties a la carte if you don’t want the lettuce, tomato, and other toppings—it’s cheaper to just get the meat!) Tex-Mex places will serve you meat, veggies, and cheese in a lettuce bowl instead of wrapped in a tortilla. Just skip the rice and beans.
If you’re on the road and need to grab something quick from a convenience store, you’ll have no problem finding suitable items. With packets of cheese, nuts, pork rinds, pepperoni, and low-sugar beef jerky, these places are practically a buffet of keto-friendly foods. Things are even easier if you’re passing by a grocery store: grab some deli counter lunch meat, a rotisserie chicken, canned fish (with a pop-top for easy opening), and/or pre-cut vegetables from the produce department. Many supermarkets have fresh salad bars that are stocked full of perfect ingredients for a quick keto meal: lettuce, spinach, bell peppers, cucumber, radishes, olives, mushrooms, turkey, ham, hard-boiled egg, shredded cheese, crumbled bacon. Being in a hurry or being on the road is never an obstacle to staying on plan.
#08. Eat what you can afford.
Remember, what makes keto effective—what induces the metabolic changes that help reduce appetite and control hunger, plus lowering blood sugar and blood pressure—is a very low carbohydrate intake.
Organic, artisanal foods, grass-finished meats, wild-caught seafood, dairy from grass-fed cows, and free-range poultry are not required. It’s wonderful to support farmers who are producing these kinds of foods in your local area if you can, but if this is not within your budget, no worries! When you’re just getting started, there’s really only one thing you need to focus on: keeping your total carb intake very low. As long as you do that, you can buy your food from wherever fits best into your lifestyle, be it the regular supermarket, a local farmstand or farmers’ market, a co-op, health food store, or discount chain. It’s all good; just keep the carbs low!
“Processed foods” are fine, too. When it comes to reaping the benefits of keto, the degree of food processing doesn’t matter much. What does matter are the metabolic effects of your food—that is, the effects on your blood sugar and insulin. Along this line, for most people, artificial sweeteners are okay. Diet sodas are fine, as are sugar-free condiments and other “processed foods,” like pepperoni, string cheese, pork rinds, sugar-free gelatin, etc. Don’t let the “food purity police” scare you into thinking that you have to be a millionaire or cook all your food at home from scratch in order to be successful on keto. You don’t!
#09. Get professional guidance on medication.
When you do keto the right way—that is, you keep your carbs very low—major improvements in your health tend to happen quickly. Most people’s bodies respond so well to the shift from burning mostly carbs to burning mostly fat that things like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure start to get better very soon after ditching the carbs. This means that if you take certain kinds of medication, you need to understand ahead of time how to adjust things so you don’t have any adverse effects from being overmedicated. (Since keto is so effective for improving these things naturally, all by itself, it’s only logical that you might not need the same doses of medicine you needed when you were eating a lot more carbs, right?)
If you take medication for diabetes (either type 2 or type 1) or for high blood pressure, you must have medical supervision when you start keto. This is not negotiable!
Ketogenic diets are so powerful for normalizing blood sugar and blood pressure that you may need to adjust your medication doses within days of starting. If you use insulin for diabetes, your doses might even need to be adjusted on the very first day of keto! Don’t adjust medication on your own, though. Always work with a physician or other qualified medical professional who can advise you on changing your medication safely, as needed. But be aware of how important this is: if you don’t adjust things when necessary, you may experience unpleasant effects that you might think are coming from keto but that are actually coming from taking doses of medicine that are inappropriate for you. Don't blame the diet for whatthe drugs are doing!
#10. Go easy on yourself.
Some people sail right through the transition to keto. They’re thrilled that they can eat luxurious foods that were “off-limits” or taboo in the past and actually lose weight and get healthy: juicy steaks, crispy bacon, savory cheeses… Yes, please! But for others, this way of eating is a struggle to get accustomed to. When you’ve spent your entire life eating bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereal, granola, ice cream, fruit smoothies, and other sweet and starchy things, it can be difficult to let go of them. When you think about it, though, keto really isn’t that big a deal; it’s just no sugar or starch. Other than that, you’re eating the same meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, dairy, and low-carb vegetables you’ve probably always eaten. However, for some people, this is a really big deal! Be patient with yourself if you don’t master keto right away. Do the best you can, and if you find yourself face-planting into a pile of sugar just a few days in, get back on plan at your very next meal. Not tomorrow, not Monday, but immediately. No matter how far you stray, you’re only one bite away from being right back to keto.
If you have trouble sticking to keto, it’s okay to ease into it gradually rather than giving up carbs all at once. The truth is, the best way to experience the full effect of keto is to do it full-on right from the start. (This is the quickest way to be free of sugar cravings and to control hunger.) But if this
kind of all-or-nothing mindset has tripped you up in the past, then make a slower transition to this way of eating. A good way to approach this is to eliminate one high-carb food category each week. For example, week one: no fruit. You can still have bread, pasta, rice, beans, etc., just no fruit. Week two: no fruit and no pasta. You can still have bread, rice, beans, potatoes, etc., just no fruit or pasta. Remove one high-carb food group from your diet each week, and eventually you’ll be on keto. Whoot! It’ll take you longer to get there this way,but if easing in slowly helps you actually do it, then that’s what matters.
Better to make a gradual transition and stay with it than to jump in overnight but then find yourself restarting every two weeks.
BONUS TIPS
#11. Avoid packaged foods marketed as “keto”.
Just because something says “keto” on the label doesn’t mean it’s good for you to eat. Keto has come to mean a lot of different things these days and these products often contain ingredients that seem okay on the surface but that are very common reasons for people stalling in weight loss or failing to improve health issues. (For example, certain kinds of sugar alcohols and added fibers impact some people’s blood sugar more than others.) These things aren’t completely off-limits, but when you’re new to this way of eating, the best results typically come from sticking to real foods: meat, eggs, poultry, seafood, non-starchy vegetables, and unsweetened dairy products. If you’ve been doing keto for a while but you’re unhappy with your results and packaged foods claiming to be low in carbs are a regular part of your diet (keto cookies, bars, ice cream, snack mixes, etc.), consider ditching them for a while and basing your diet on whole foods that don’t have flashy marketing claims on the labels.
#12. Get baseline blood tests.
You don’t have to get any blood tests done before starting keto, but it’s a good idea to have some information at the beginning: you’ll want to have something to compare to after a few months so you can see how much things have improved! Your body will give you loud and clear signals about how keto’s working for you—more energy, less joint pain, no more brain fog or heartburn, fewer headaches, less severe PMS for the ladies—but it can also be rewarding to see objective proof that eating delicious low-carb foods is having a positive impact on your health. Plus, if your weight loss is a bit slow or it’s taking a while to achieve some other goal you have, seeing certain measurements go in a favorable direction (like your hemoglobin A1c, fasting insulin, or triglycerides) can help keep you motivated to stay on plan. Don’t underestimate the importance of
these health markers. When you’re feeling frustrated about certain aspects of your weight, size and shape, or even if select health issues are taking a while to resolve, seeing undeniable improvements in other areas can remind you that keto is working very well for you—and you just need to remember that progress is not equal or linear across all areas at the same time. Some things get better quickly; others take longer.
You don’t need to order any special or specific blood tests beyond the ones that are standard at most physicals or check-ups: a complete blood count (CBC), comprehensive metabolic panel, hemoglobin A1c, and fasting blood glucose. However, you may wish to request a fasting insulin test if you know or suspect you have a health issue related to insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome, and you may wish to request a more advanced lipid panel (cholesterol test), which would include a bit more information besides your total cholesterol, HDL-C, LDL-C, and triglycerides. If you are over age 50, it is also recommended to have your vitamin B12 level measured. ©2023 COPYRIGHT ADAPT YOUR LIFE INC.