Keto made easy

A Rough Weekend and a Small Group

2017-07-25

July 22–25, 2017 — a marked-up face, a bad weekend, and a Tuesday back on

The story

On Saturday I went live straight from sparring. A couple of marks on my face, and hungover on top of it, so I looked rough for more than one reason (live TDHN9809). I didn't go live to talk about that, though. I wanted to pass on a tip I hadn't seen much in the keto groups.

People in their first weeks of keto get cramps, bad sleep, and that thirst that won't quit, and the first thing a lot of them do is run out and buy a pile of magnesium or a bag of pink salt. My sister is a pharmacist, and a while back, before keto, I'd been told to watch out for multivitamins that pack in several hundred percent of your daily iron. So my workaround was a prenatal vitamin: they're made for pregnant women, so the doses are kept tight. The bottle said two capsules, I took one. A half dose, once a day, for six or seven days, and see if the symptoms ease off. I was clear that it's not meant to replace food. You're supposed to get that stuff from what you eat; this was just rounding things out while you adjust (live TDHN9809).

Then I had a weekend. A rough weekend of drinking, as I put it on camera, and I'll leave it at that (live UYDJ7165).

That Tuesday I got home exhausted, terrible lighting, and recorded anyway. Most of that video is me reading out the ingredient list of a plant-and-greens meal powder I'd bought before I ever went keto. Two scoops was 16 grams of carbs with 12 of fiber, 40 grams of protein, two and a half grams of fat, about 250 calories, by the label I read out. I also told everyone what it tastes like: a barn. Hay, a bit of grit from the chia seeds that never get ground up enough, and a hint of the part of the barn you don't want to think about. "Chocolate flavor" was a lie. I wasn't paid, I had no connection to the company, and you could tell from the review. My point was only that if you know you're short on vegetables and you can chug anything in 15 or 30 seconds, it gets some fiber in you (live UYDJ7165). For the record, I kept drinking it; a week later it was part of my "big day" before the five-pound spike (video OCNV2313).

At the end of that same video I said two things that mattered more than the shake.

The first: this was the first ever "Keto Basic exclusive." I was making a real effort to get back to everybody in the group, because I wanted Keto Basic to be a smaller bunch of people who stick together and keep each other honest, not one of those giant groups where everybody yells at each other about the same five questions (live UYDJ7165).

The second: after the rough weekend, I'd got back on the horse that day, and it felt good to be back in the zone, mostly (live UYDJ7165).

That's the whole story. No plan to "make up for" the weekend, none I mentioned on camera anyway. I got back on the horse that day, and said so out loud to a group of people I'd just promised to get back to.

What I'd tell you now

Getting back on quickly matters more than never falling off; one bad weekend is one bad weekend, and the diet is what you do over weeks (what happens if you cheat on keto, and alcohol gets its own story later in the series, Drunk Faster). On the prenatal tip, the picture is less tidy than I made it sound. The studies don't test a half-dose prenatal for keto flu. What they do say: in a trial of women, diets that cut whole food groups, Atkins included, left real gaps in things like thiamine, folate, iron and magnesium (Gardner et al., 2010); the US Preventive Services Task Force finds the evidence insufficient for multivitamins preventing heart disease or cancer (USPSTF 2022); and the NIH notes that stacking supplements can push some intakes past safe upper limits (NIH ODS). Food first, still. Cramps and thirst in the first weeks are usually a salt-and-water question (keto flu and electrolytes; do you need a multivitamin on keto?). If you're pregnant, have kidney disease, or take medication, ask your doctor or pharmacist before adding vitamins or mineral supplements (who should talk to a doctor).

Watch the originals: the post-sparring live and the barn-shake video.

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