How I Lose 25% Of My Body Weight - Part 2
Part 1 of this series can be found here
I know that a lot of people really struggle with weight and I feel for them. Know that I’ve done this diet a lot myself (and in fact I have just started as of Jan 2025). It works wonders. I quite often diet multiple times during the year.
Step 2: Understanding
My preference for weight loss follows these steps:
Keto → Modified Paleo → Regular Diet
We’ll focus on Keto to start.
The Ketogenic diet (Keto) has a funny name - it is focused on an individual being in a state called Ketosis. This is when your body switches from using glucose as its primary energy source to burning fat and producing ketones for fuel.
Superficially, this sounds pretty good.
✅ We know that Cancer cells thrives off glucose to power their fuel hungry growth. So cutting glucose sounds like a good idea.
✅ Glucose triggers the release of insulin, which plays a key role in fat storage. Any excess calories are saved for later by being stored as glycogen (stored in liver and muscles) and fat. Reducing the amount of fat directed to be stored also sounds like a good idea.
✅ Your brain typically relies on glucose for energy. Studies have shown that the brain can work better with Ketones as the fuel source.
✅ Ketosis is the process of burning fats from your body instead of carbohydrates. That sounds like a good thing if we want to get rid of our body fat.
✅ Other diets such as calorie counting can leave you very hungry and feeling like you are missing out. The great thing about the Keto diet is that its high fat content leaves you satiated. This term means when you feel full, properly full. You don’t get hungry in an hour or two’s time. The quality of foods that you will be eating will keep you fuller for longer.
The Process
We’ve already carried out the preparation of getting food in place. Let’s now understand what we have to do to put our bodies into Ketosis - the process of encouraging our bodies to burn fat.
When we start the diet, we will be tracking our daily intake using the Carb Manager app. You will need to find the setup and tell it what diet you are doing. Select the Keto diet.
The app will ask you your gender, height, weight, daily activity level. Their formula will give you a target number of calories and within that, how much of the 3 nutrient types you can eat.
You REALLY want to pay attention to your Carb numbers and don’t go over them.
You want to be aiming for PacMan.
During the day as you are entering your intake - I encourage you to do it before you make your meal or just after you eat your meal. You will see your macros update.
This is a high fat diet so your pie chart should look roughly like Pacman.
⚠️ Critical Factor - It is critical to enter your intake into the App and to track your food. Failing to do so will mean failing the diet and going nowhere.
By keeping your carb intake minimal, sticking to the diet, it takes roughly a week to enter Ketosis. You will know this by having a headache. You can also test with your Urine strips. They will go purple.
You can reduce headaches with Electrolytes, Ketogenic drinks (I have not tried myself) and Advil.
The first time I ever kicked into Ketosis it felt unreal. I felt like I was the cleverest person on earth. Clear, focused, powerful. It was a very memorable experience.
A “nice” aspect of Keto is that if you go over your carbohydrates in any given day - you will be kicked out of Ketosis and have to start again. Another week. Which really acts as a motivator to track and eat correctly. You don’t want to undo that hard work.
I’m a fan of Good → Better → Best. Just dive in and start. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You will make mistakes and learn from them.
Step 3: Preparation
Google some recipes and pick anything that looks yummy. There are so many sites out there it’s hard not to find Keto recipes.
Use Sundays to prepare a week’s worth of meals, and consider buying pre-made snacks if you’re craving something sweet.
⚠️Critical Factor - Preparation is also key to succeeding on the diet. Having a large supply of ready made food will stop you going to the pantry full of sugary, low nutrition carbohydrates.
One of the reasons you gained weight in the first place was from the convenience of ready made food. Carbohydrates are the king of shelf life. Which makes breads, cakes, cookies, chocolate, chips; go-to items.
Step 4: Action
Start the diet, make sure to weigh in every morning and be truthful on entering your numbers in the app. For a lot of products that are store bought, you can scan them using the Carb Manager app to find their Carbs.
When we say Carbs, we are really talking about Net Carbs. The formula is shown below. Notice that it excludes Fiber. Sugar Alcohols are the clever hacks that sweet Keto treats use.
Net Carbs = Total Carbohydrates - Fiber - Sugar Alcohols (if applicable)
It is important to drink water as Keto can increase Water loss (and with it electrolytes). After 2-3 weeks, if you feel you are getting headaches, make sure you’ve had electrolytes from adding salt to your meals, Potassium and Magnesium supplements.
Hopefully you can find a rate of loss around 1-4 pounds per week. The first week should be a heavy drop of weight (part of that will be water weight).
Additional Information
Start off simple. Eat the bacon, hamburger, cheese, heavy cream. Dirty keto is fun, easy and tasty. Don’t forget Eggs and Avocados. Delicious!
In the evenings I typically have a small bowl of Raspberries and heavy cream.
With time you should consider:
When you feel that your weight is under your control, consider moving to healthier fats. Avocados, Fatty Fish, MCT Oil, Tallow and Lard, nuts and nut butters, seeds.
Start thinking about introducing mild vegetables. Leafy Greens, Asparagus, Mushrooms etc.. Be cautious as a lot of vegetables have high Carbs.
After the first month - you should consider intermittent fasting. A 16 hour fast may start at 8pm at night until noon the next day. Intermittent fasts will work towards reducing your weight through (partly by reduced calories) and putting you into Autophagy (a powerful natural process that works towards cellular repair)
Try to do 50 push ups and 50 sit ups per day. You don’t need to but this will increase muscle mass. Muscles work towards burning calories even when you are sitting still. This helps towards the fat loss as well as make you look buff.
Feel free to ask questions - I am more than happy to answer from my experience.
In a future article, I will cover migration from this diet to Modified Paleo and then onto a regular diet.
Great article as always!
I'm following a very close model to this one and also lost about 25% of my body weight.
I started at 215lbs, went down to 150lbs and stabilized at about 170-180lbs for the past 5 years.
Having done that cycle a few times over, one thing I've discovered is how much the psychology of eating matters.
When you are stressed, stress hormones cause a glucose spike, which makes you feel hungry.
If you are mindful about what you eat, because you've committed to a specific diet (keto, paleo, etc.) you think carefully about what you eat, and during those moments where you feel tempted to "stress eat," instead of grabbing comfort food, you train yourself to think if it's permissible with your current diet.
Like I commented with Part 1, that allows you greater mastery over your unconscious habits, such as reaching for a bag of chips, donuts, or cans of pop when you are feeling stressed out.
Partnered with habits that boost your mindfulness of your routine behaviours, going on a diet cycle like this one is an excellent way to recognize biofeedback signals you react to with unhealthy unconscious decisions that compromise your health and take action to consciously change those behaviours.