My Biggest Issue With Keto

The hardest thing about the keto diet (or any form of clean eating) for me is convenience. Boil some pasta and dump some sauce… Boom! You have dinner. Exhausted and have to feed a family? Stick a frozen Stoffer’s meal in the oven. Need a quick breakfast due to kids dragging their feet? Toast some waffles!

Carbs are easy. They come prepackaged and sometimes precooked. Clean eating is usually not. You could buy salads for lunch, but that adds up real fast if you’re on a budget. 

Strict keto is fairly cheap. If you miss bread or tortillas and follow a looser keto (I personally follow ‘if it follows your macros’), you can buy them or buy ingredients to make low carb versions that cost more (so it isn’t cheap!). 

Keto can be simple. Bunless hamburgers. Chicken Alfredo on zucchini noodles. Baked chicken with broccoli.Pepperoni chips with guacamole or sour cream. 

What helps me stick to keto is meal prep. I try to do intermittent fasting so I don’t have to worry about breakfast for me. During weekends, I’ll sacrifice my energy and try to meal prep my lunches and a few dinners, that way if my husband and I don’t want to make a fresh dinner, we still have a keto meal.

Otherwise, buying food from Taco Bell or Domino’s is too tempting. We have In-N-Out where we live and I love their burgers, and how easy it is to be keto. But uh, everyone likes them and last I checked, you can’t order ahead of time. It’s a decent wait to get burgers. With kids at home, that fast food chain isn’t fast enough!

Here are a few recipes my husband and I love that are low carb/keto:

Low Carb Taco Bell Nachos copycat recipe
Big Mac Casserole
Snickerdoodle Fat Bombs
Pancakes
Taco Soup

Where To Start?

I’m overwhelmed and excited, and yet unmotivated. Where do I start? What do I write about?

Well, first, let’s talk about something I can do the easiest: change of diet. My husband, thankfully, will eat mostly whatever I do (he is a bit picky). We’ve attempted keto off and on since 2015, when I was diagnosed with PCOS.

The standard American diet (which I find amusing that its acronym is SAD) doesn’t suit my body well. For starters, PCOS increases my chances of developing Type 2 Diabetes. Fun! The American diet uses sugar in place of fat (we favor a low fat diet). Sugar spikes insulin, which can in turn cause Diabetes (from what I understand, I could be wrong!).

Secondly, my Psoriatic Arthritis. This sounds like woo, but carbs seem to be inflammatory food for me. If I can manage to stick to keto for around three days, then cheat with carbs, my symptoms are so much worse the next day. For example, last week I was really good with keto. Then I decided to cheat on Monday evening with biscuits and gravy (my favorite unhealthy meal). Tuesday, the tendons on the top of my feet were so inflamed. Moving my feet hurt. I have trigger finger in both of my index fingers, and it was definitely harder to fully curl my fingers than usual.

Then weight loss. It’s an obvious reason to do keto for me. I’m morbidly obese. I hate seeing myself in photos (though, I expect I’ll always hate seeing myself). Obviously it’s not a healthy weight to be at, but with PCOS, I breathe near carbs and gain a pound. It’s infuriating. Eating a clean, low fat, low calorie diet? Still gain. And feel like crap. At least on keto, which is restrictive in what to eat, I lose and feel better.

Finally, and this is such a minor thing, but I suffer from GERD (acid reflux) and the American diet can make me suffer for hours with acid reflux that medicine can’t help in the moment (so Tums or Pepto do nothing for when it strikes). If I were smart, I’d regularly take Prilosec because it helps. For whatever reason, against what every website advises, a high fat, low carb diet helps me a lot with that.

So that’s where I’m starting: diet. I’ve had carbs already by the time of writing this blog post, but as soon as I finish here, I’m going to try sticking to keto. I may share some of our go-to recipes one day, but for now I recommend checking out /r/ketorecipes on Reddit. So many great recipes there!