"THE Keto Diet" is a Myth

I changed what I ate for a while, back at the end of 2019 and early 2020. I started out wanting to lose weight, and having heard so much about how effective "the keto diet" was I did a lot of reading. I discovered that there's no such thing. 

Before you start yelling that of course there is such a thing, let me clarify. The problem I have is that those writing about keto dieters all assume the worst about food choices made to maintain ketosis, and they use the definite article (*the* keto diet), where in reality it's an exclusion that guides a person's diet, i.e. it's *a* ketogenic diet, using the indefinite article. If I come across the definite article used in relation to keto diets I move on to the next thing, because there are probably millions of keto diets, and most are entirely undocumented, untested, and unique to their dieter. Talking about this eclectic and messy mass of individual eating habits as "the" anything is really reaching. 

 I did a lot of reading before I began, and I read so much about how low carb diets are too low in fibre, antioxidants, and other things that come from plants. It's absurd. Green leafy vegetables, oily fruit, kai moana, brassicas, herbs, fungi, alliums, nuts, etc. are all keto options. Yes, you will find some people subsisting on steak and eggs, and any vitamins they get die of loneliness, but that's not a trait of the keto approach. It's a possibility, as is vegetarianism. 

 I opened with the hope of losing weight, but stuck with it for a while because it changed my life. My body hurt, malfunctioned, and stored fat at the drop of a chocolate before I made this dramatic change. My body thrived and performed so much better after I mostly excluded starchy, sugary, or grain-sourced foods from my diet. 

Note, 2024.07.26, I’m no longer ketogenic, and haven’t been for four years, but I stand my position that referring to “The Keto Diet” is stupid. 

For another month or two after hitting ketosis, I continued to get a minimum of 20 grams of fibre a day, with 30 grams as the goal, and I was eating 90 % plant matter. I'd excluded certain plant-sourced foods, such as sugary fruit, grains, or starchy root vegetables. I was in ketosis, as supported by peeing on a piece of indicator paper showed, but I was eating very little animal fat, and had a nutritionally diverse and balanced diet.

My keto approach was probably very different to the next person’s, and theirs is different to the person next to them. I was and they are each on *A* keto diet. Ketogenic means different things for different people. All they have in common is being low in net carbohydrates. 

As with everything we choose, how healthy or unhealthy it is comes down to our own choices, and how our individual bodies respond to different input. We're all on different diets. Many are low carb, or low fat, or low animal protein, or low gluten, or low something or other, but nutritionally rich and good for the individual. Equally, there are those who follow the lard, lard, and more lard model of keto, who are not doing their bodies any good at all via what they put into it. That isn’t “The” keto diet either, because there is no single, concrete keto diet to justify being definite about it.