Getting Started

So, how on earth do you get started?

I'll start with a very simplified rundown of what keto is.

I'm not going to get into the specifics or any medical advice. There are lots of great articles on keto on the internet. But here are some basics from Healthline.com.

The keto diet is a low carb, high-fat diet. It lowers blood sugar and insulin levels and shifts the body’s metabolism away from carbs and toward fat and ketones.

Healthline.com has a good breakdown of the four basic types of keto diets.

• Standard ketogenic diet (SKD): This is a very low carb, moderate protein, and high-fat diet. It typically contains 70% fat, 20% protein, and only 10% carbs.

• Cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD): This diet involves periods of higher-carb refeeds, such as 5 ketogenic days followed by 2 high carb days.

• Targeted ketogenic diet (TKD): This diet allows you to add carbs around workouts.

• High protein ketogenic diet: This is similar to a standard ketogenic diet, but includes more protein. The ratio is often 60% fat, 35% protein, and 5% carbs.

In full disclosure, the reason I called at least the Facebook page Easy Keto is we don't follow a strict keto diet.

What's the difference between what I call strict keto and easy keto? Mainly counting.

Strict keto would have you count your carbs, all of them, net carbs, and total carbs. As well as monitor your fat and protein intake. There are great apps out there that help you do this like carb manager or carb counter but I have never used them.

The average American eats between 300 - 400 carbs a day, at least! On a keto diet, you want to stay around 30 to attain ketosis. Some would say target 20.

But for easy keto, we simply monitor each food that we wish to eat. If a food has less than 3 carbs we feel pretty good about eating that food. If it has 4 carbs, well, we'll eat it in moderation. If a food has more than 5 carbs, for the most part, we don't eat it or we might eat very little of it. This way overall we are probably keeping our net carbs to around 30.

So over the next posts, I'll cover some tips and recipes that we have found made going keto easy!