If you had a chance to read my post last week, linked here, you’ll know that I was leaning between two diets: Ketogenic diet or a traditional diet.
Having tried and found success with both diets, I feel confident that the decision I’ve made will be the easiest and most effective route to achieve my goals. Hopefully by the time you finish reading, you may be convinced as well.
Before I get to deep into explanations, lets establish the path I’ve chosen. After careful review, weighing pros and cons, and repeatedly flipping back and forth- I have firmly decided to follow a traditional diet over keto. I imagine this wasn’t the answer you expected, nor was it the answer you were hoping to see. I don’t blame you if that’s the case, most readers have decided what they want to read about and what they expect an article to cover before even clicking on it. If I’ve disappointed you, I apologize sincerely and hope we can remain friends.
With that said, lets understand why I really do believe this is the easiest and most effective path – not for just me, but most others as well.
First off, Keto works. Let’s establish that now. I tried it, had great success, and am no longer as skeptical as I was previously. The benefits were great – consistent energy, mental focus, suppressed appetite, etc. However, there were 2 major factors that ruined it for me and may ruin it for you as well.
- Feeling of Exclusion: This is something that I think makes the keto diet nearly unattainable for most people long term. The moment you can no longer have something, that’s when you’ll suddenly crave it all the time. And with keto, unfortunately a single cheat meal can potentially set you back days several days. You must maintain a state of ketosis for the diet to truly be effective, and for those who lack the immense discipline required to maintain this, it can be devastating. It’s the stress of saying no to all the foods you’ve likely been eating your entire life: bread, pasta, oatmeal, fruit… ice cream… donuts… list goes on. I feel that I’d rather be in a situation where I can cheat from time to time, and not really feel that it’s destroying my diet.
- Exercise Effectiveness: This can be a tricky subject, because it really this could go either way. For endurance training, I don’t think I noticed any significant difference between either diet. However, I noticed a substantial drop off on my anaerobic workouts. Lifting weights on keto was absolutely 100% more difficult than when I was eating carbs. And to put it in perspective so you have an idea of the severity, here’s exactly when I realized how bad it was. I was doing incline bench press, where for the last several years my comfortable starting weight has been 225lbs. A month into keto, I legitimately had to scale that down to 135lbs. I tried doing 185lbs, and I was only able to do about 4 reps. My mind was blown. And this trend continued through most of my lifts for the next month – feeling like I was consistently digressing further with each session. The moment I ended my keto experience, and had carbs for about a week, my strength shot back up to my normal levels. This, to me, was an absolute deal breaker.
Now to be fair, I may not have been as fat adapted as I should have been for those types of workouts. Considering I’d only been doing keto for 2 months, that’s entirely possible. Regardless, I’m not convinced that I ever would have obtained my previous weight levels, and certainly would not have surpassed them. Its because of these two major reasons that I feel a traditional diet is better for me, and likely better for you.
For most, keto is a great way to lose weight quickly. It’s not that you’re burning fat right off the bat, but you’re depleting glycogen and shedding water. It’s super motivating, and the results come fast and furious. The issue is that it doesn’t teach you how to eat long term. Unless you can truly do keto for years to come, I genuinely feel that this will hurt you more than it will help. You don’t necessarily develop good eating habits, and mostly just avoid one macronutrient entirely. While it’s a simple idea on paper, it’s a bit trickier in execution.
With a traditional diet, you’re not limited in what you can eat. I say this with hesitation, because I don’t want to open the flood gates to eating a bunch of garbage if it fits your macros. You can certainly do that, but you’ll likely feel like crap pretty much the entire time. What I believe makes traditional diets so effective, is that you can truly break them down to be incredibly simple. Eat ‘X’ amount of calories, with a healthy balance of protein, carbs and fats. That’s it.
With a traditional diet, I’m removing as much of the minutia as possible. No intermittent fasting, no timing carbs, not spiking insulin levels to maximize protein synthesis, etc. Just simply saying, I need to eat around 2700 calories a day, for a few months, and I’ll hit my goal. Obviously, your calories may be different from mine, but you get the idea. We often overthink just how simple losing, or gaining, weight can be. There isn’t a trick to it, and there’s no magic pill to do it for you. It only requires the consistency to eat a certain amount of food per day for an extended period of time. Traditional diets remove the stress of saying no to certain foods and allow you to work around them. In fact, one of the best approaches is to add foods rather than remove them. You can still have your treats from time to time, but try adding more vegetables, fruits, etc. towards your daily consumption.
An issue with dieting today is that it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the process. When you’re bombarded daily with different sources claiming to know the secret to weight loss or reading about the latest fad diets, how can you know which source is the right one? There’s so much information out there, it can really make you second guess everything you think you know. I think this is what makes a traditional diet so appealing – it’s incredibly simple and has been proven to be effective time after time. I’m incredibly confident that the method works, and will put my money where my mouth is.
Starting tomorrow, August 1st 2018, I will be doing a 90 day plan with only one rule – do not exceed my daily calorie limit. I will be starting at 2700 calories a day, and as I progress through, I will slowly drop the number to avoid plateaus. That’s it, nothing crazy. Hopefully with my results, it’ll motivate you to try this method as well.
As a quick disclaimer – I hope this goes without saying, but this is assuming you’re not suffering from any form of outlying medical issue. This is for the everyday person who just wants to lose or gain weight. Eat less calories to lose, eat more to gain. As you progress, you may have to play with the numbers a bit. Lastly, I can’t say this will work for everyone, as all our bodies are different. There’s always going to be outliers, and nothing is 100% guaranteed to work. However, I’m confident that this method will work for the overwhelming majority of people out there.