The reason I had to stop keto in 2023 (wish I did it differently)

  I don't really do keto anymore, {NAME}, and I want to share why I eat a wide variety of foods, I don't go crazy on carbs, but I'm not strict keto anymore. At times I’ll phase in and out depending on what my goals are. When I was doing keto for about a decade, there are things I should’ve done differently. I can see where my shortcomings were now that I’ve been out of the keto world. With that being said, here’s what I would’ve done differently knowing what I do today: I would’ve consumed way more protein When I started doing keto, it was a very high fat and lower protein diet. Then the research started to come out that fat is not necessarily the only thing you want. You want more protein, and it’s not necessarily going to disrupt the ketogenic process. Now, I see protein as the priority and everything else comes after that. Fats are great, but they don't provide us with nearly as much nutrition as something like red meat would. So I look back at the nutrient voids that I probably had, and they could’ve been filled if I was just eating adequate amounts of red meat. The fats should have just come naturally with the meat that I was eating. I would have put way more emphasis on potassium I put so much emphasis on sodium because that's where a lot of the early literature was. Everyone said you lost sodium, potassium, magnesium on a ketogenic diet. So I figured it made sense to prioritize sodium. Yes, it’s good to increase sodium, but potassium always took a back seat. I interviewed Dr. Jacob Torres of University of California, Santa Barbara, and he was telling me how we need about 3-4 times the amount of potassium than we think. A three to four to one potassium to sodium ratio is where we should be. Yet here we are getting in lots of sodium and not much potassium. When you start to lose those minerals and add more sodium in, you’re further disrupting that ratio. So I would be paying much more attention to my potassium intake, whether that's from meat, whether it's from greens or even in supplemental form. I would’ve added a multivitamin into my diet I realized that if I reverse engineer and look at my diet on keto, there was no way I was getting adequate nutrition. I used to eat things like chicken breasts with cheese and heavy cream. Some days I wasn’t eating a lot of red meat. On the days that I wasn’t getting liver or red meat in, I should have been adding a good multivitamin in. You don't need to take a multivitamin every day, but you should take it on days when you're not getting adequate nutrition. And there were lots of days where I would only eat chicken, cheese, and macadamia nuts. All I had to do was eat an ounce or two of liver, or have some ground beef. If not, I should’ve taken a multivitamin or liver capsules. I wish I would’ve focused on gut health A LOT more. The more research comes out, the more important gut health becomes. I didn’t even prioritize gut health in my beginning years of keto, and this is probably the #1 thing I would’ve changed. I never did anything to enhance my gut microbiome. I could’ve made progress so much quicker and easier if I prioritized gut health from the start. I would have at least taken a good quality probiotic... Here's a [25% off Discount on the probiotic I use]( (it's called SEED). PLEASE USE CODE THOMAS25 This is the only place you'll find this discount, and it's because I have asked them to hook my newsletter subscribers up with a good discount that isn't all over the internet. They also have a [new formula called VS-01]( which is specifically for women and in addition to the gut microbiome, helps support a vaginal microbiome. It really is the first in its class. They're paving the way for microbiome research AND probiotics. Highly recommend you try this [probiotic here and save 25% off.]( CODE THOMAS25 I would have controlled my saturated fat intake more. If you look at a lot of the literature, saturated fat in an over caloric state is a contributor to insulin resistance. It's not just sugar and it's not just saturated fat, but individually in high amounts they can cause a fatty liver. The big reason I did keto was because I was type two diabetic when I was very overweight. When I tried to fix that by just adding saturated fat, I could have ended up a lot further along if I just focused on eating good quality meats instead. I used to add butter, cheese, and ghee to everything, which was a mistake. Clearly it worked because I lost weight, but my health markers didn't improve until after I lost the weight. I could’ve accelerated that by leaning into the fats from meat versus adding just a lot of cheese and butter. I could’ve eaten leaner meats and added more fats from olive oil and avocados than just saturated fats. I’m not anti-saturated fat, but the literature suggests that copious amounts of saturated fat can contribute to insulin resistance (especially in a caloric surplus). I wish I was less carb-phobic around my workouts. It got to a point where some of my workouts were feeling stagnant, and that was a big reason for me to eat more. I thought it was a calorie issue. Then I started realizing after my keto years that I could consume a lot more in the way of carbohydrates than I thought without it impacting ketone levels. So if I’m eating roughly 100 grams of carbs a day, I'm still making ketones. I realized that as I lost weight and got more active, I could’ve added more carbs into my diet and had fuel for my workouts. That might’ve given me more anaerobic intensity, meaning I could’ve built a little muscle. I realize now that I could have even added carbs intra-workout to give myself the bump that I needed to get more out of my workout to maybe get the performance gains that I'm having now. I would have gone a little easier on the keto treats Dr. Dom D'Agostino mentioned something to me when I was on Mark Bell's podcast a couple months ago. He asked me, Thomas, how were you getting so many omega 6’s in your diet? I realized, it was the processed keto food that I was eating. It was all of the seed oils coming in from the keto treats. It’s not just because they’re hyper palatable, and not because I was eating too many of them. There were clear times when I ate only whole foods on keto that I felt way better. I wish I just had the ability to realize that. I wish I didn't fear insulin so much that came from being an overweight person. I was afraid that any presence of insulin was going to make me fat. I thought insulin was pro-growth, which meant pro-fat accumulation. And there’s no denying we have an insulin issue. Hyperinsulinemia is a very real thing. I needed to realize though, once I had recalibrated and was healthy, insulin was good for my recovery. I shouldn't be afraid of protein spiking insulin. I shouldn't be afraid of a few carbs occasionally spiking insulin, because the spike would come back down. And as long as you rise up and come back down and don't stay high, there's no problem. I also would have measured my insulin levels more. This way I didn't have to just guess that my insulin was high because I had some carbohydrates or because I ate some different food. I would have actually looked at the insulin data more so that I knew where the trajectory was. I would have monitored my cortisol more closely, especially in the beginning. There were periods of time where my testosterone levels were decent, but I had no sex drive and was symptomatic of low testosterone. Nowadays, my testosterone levels are a bit lower than they were on keto, but I'm less symptomatic. I have better libido, better drive, better motivation. It's not because keto is bad. It's because I did keto, got to the place I needed to be, and now have been able to adopt different principles. I should have monitored my cortisol to DHEA ratios. When your stress levels are high and your DHEA is low, that’s a really bad indicator that the stress from a ketogenic diet is impacting your sex hormones. The opposite would mean that I'm not in such a stressed state to produce these sex hormones, and I would function normally. So there's a lot more than we need to look at than just the simple marker of testosterone. I would’ve marched to the beat of my own drum more I followed so much of the keto research that I didn't find what really worked for me until the end. I ended up doing what I do today which is low carb, generally putting me into a ketogenic state if i'm fasting (or working out), but otherwise i'm out of that ketogenic state. I'm not in ketosis all the time, but if I go a period of time without eating, I snap into ketosis really quick, because I'm not totally gorged on fuel and carbs all the time. The lesson here? Do what works for you, what optimizes you. You have to tinker and try different things to find what works for you specifically. See you tomorrow! Thomas Sent to: {EMAIL} [Unsubscribe]( Thomas DeLauer, PO Box 1120, Stateline, NV 89449, United States