The medical establishment and weight loss orthodoxy for a hundred years has been that people lose weight when they burn more calories than they take in. That’s the only way to lose weight, and if you are trying and failing to lose weight, it is because you are eating too much and not active enough. 

That is simply not true. 

I am no physician. I am an ordinary mortal person who has read a couple of books on keto. After decades of trying and failing to lose weight using calories in/calories out thinking, I tried a very low carb ketogenic diet. And without even breaking a sweat, I lost over 200 pounds. I did it without counting calories. I did it without sacrificing everything delicious. I did it without exercising – seriously, I didn’t exercise a lick. 

For well over 30 years, I tried losing weight with severe calorie restrictions. I was sad, I felt deprived, I hated the food, and I was always hungry. I tried increasing exercise, but the time investment and sheer exertion it took to burn off the calories in a single spelt sandwich with hummus and alfalfa sprouts was miserably discouraging. I could typically be successful for about 3 days, then would collapse into a puddle of self-recriminating failure. Losing weight was absolutely hopeless.

As I’ve mentioned before, I had some people around me losing weight on keto, so I looked into it. Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, lays out the argument: 

“[T]his calories-in/calories-out paradigm of adiposity is nonsensical; …we don’t get fat because we eat too much and move too little, and…we can’t solve the problem or prevent it by consciously doing the opposite. ….[W]e do not get fat because we overeat; we get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of…the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars…and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us more sedentary.”

I didn’t really understand the science. I didn’t care. I was 350 pounds, and every day was an exercise in humiliation. I was pre-diabetic, and picturing losing my sight, and my feet, and my ability to choose what I eat. I just knew someone was offering a very different idea. I also knew it was working for actual human people I knew. I love potatoes and pasta as much as anyone. I didn’t love the idea of giving those up, but if it worked, the sacrifices would be worth it. 

So I did. And I ate bacon and hollandaise and developed a taste for artificial sweetener and ate desserts my new palate found delicious and deeply satisfying. Some weeks, I lost 10 pounds – in a single week. If calories in/calories out was accurate, I would have burned 5,000 calories per day. I assure you, I did not. Anything that was low carb was fine to eat, and I ate plenty, and loved the food. I basically never felt hungry, and did I mention I didn’t exercise? I counted nothing except carbs, sticking religiously to 20 per day. In 18 months, I weighed 140 pounds.

People say, with some justification, that keto is just another yoyo diet, because you have to stay low carb or the pounds come back. Indeed they do. True story. The good news is, I’ve found it easy to permanently eliminate carbs from my life. There is nothing easy about eating 1,200 low-fat calories per day. I tried that for decades, with great misery and without success. I am able to eat wonderful food, and have even been able to go vegetarian in the last year (more on that later), and still stay keto. 

Now, weight is not solved for me. My weight has been creeping back up – about every year, I pick up 10 pounds that I can’t make go away, which puts me right now 30 unhappy pounds above my ideal weight. Most of this is due to the persistent addictive behavior I bring to my eating – I will freak out about once a month and binge-eat (eat like an alcoholic – but still low carb!), and that weight is hard to lose. My brain is still kinda broken like it was when I was morbidly obese, but there are infinitely more good-eating days than tough-eating days, because keto is so easy to stay on.

But I have had healthy blood sugar and great cholesterol numbers for the past 5 years. I am not remotely heading for diabetes. I am even able to take carb breaks when I go on vacation, and have a cronut in Manhattan and a maple creemie in Vermont. You know what you don’t get to take a vacation from? Diabetes. Keto corrected my blood sugar completely – no more pre-diabetes, not for years.

Oh, and when I do take a keto Rumspringa? Eating carbs makes makes me bloated constantly, ravenously hungry between meals, and exhausted all the time. In my previous, carb-eating life, I felt this way day in and day out. Taubes says that when your body is burning fat for fuel on keto instead of burning carbs you’re eating for fuel, you experience a consistent source of energy and your body and brain work better – and in my experience, this is unequivocally true. Even if I wasn’t eating delicious food, even if I wasn’t losing a ton of weight, the sense of well-being alone would be worth sacrificing carbs. It really is marvelous.

I will also say, in later keto, I do eat in a very restricted way most days – weekdays, it’s fat bombs and Quest bars all day, and nuts and olives for dinner. I think that’s because of me and my unique physique – I still have 200 pounds of fat cells floating around in my body, waiting for any opportunity to plump back up. On the days when I eat more than my usual restrictions (most every Saturday), I will gain 4 pounds in a day, after eating maybe 1,500 calories more than typical. By calories in/calories out logic, that kind of weight gain would be from eating 14,000 calories in a single day. I wish that were different, but I drop those pounds quickly when I get back on my plan of eating during the week.

If you are desperately overweight, if you are blaming yourself for your inability to lose weight, and for the love of God, if you are laboring under the tyranny of the miserable and terrible food available to you on a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet, I hope you will try keto. I don’t say this about medical experts in any other context, but on dieting, they are wrong. I have excellent health after years on this diet, and have even incorporated regular exercise (more on that later too). If there is a medical drawback, no one’s identified it in me. The health and wellbeing benefits I have gained from carrying around 170 fewer pounds are better than any mashed potatoes or chocolate cake – and you know what? I even get those sometimes too. If you have questions, feel free to ask, I am an evangelist for keto and would love to hear from you.