What is a Ketard?

I am once again asking my fellow ketards..

I am the very model of a major ketard-general,
I've macros of all vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I'm adding fats to everything, have never feared cholesterol,
In terms of ketogenesis, my level's therapeutical.

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mitochondrial,
I understand the endocrine, from glucagon to cortisol,
About insulin resistance I am teeming with a lot o' news,
With many dreadful facts, foremost of seed oils and fructose abuse.

grand ketons nutritional park

I am a Ketard

I’ve jokingly called myself a Ketard for years now.

A ketard isn’t just somebody doing keto. It’s somebody who believes in or promotes a ketogenic diet doing things that it clearly can’t do. Somebody who makes excuses or blames the dieter when it fails. Somebody who is aggressively resistant to inconvenient facts.

I have been a ketard for the last 5-6 of the 9 years I was on a strict ketogenic diet. That’s because I couldn’t/wouldn’t admit that keto was failing me in the fat loss department even after regaining 100lbs on it.

That’s right, even after ballooning back to 300lbs and becoming morbidly obese again, I still couldn’t accept that keto had stopped working.

And if you can’t accept it’s not working, you can’t try to fix it.

Now, in my defense, it did keep my Non-24 sleep issue under control this entire time, which is an unprecedented and medically “unknown” cure for an “incurable” condition, so I had that going for me.

Apparently everybody is just doing Keto wrong

It’s quite obvious that “just doing keto” doesn’t fix obesity for the majority of people. It does for a certain percentage of those who try it. We don’t have an objective measure of whom it works for, but I’d say less than 30% of those who try. I’ve spent 10-15 years in the keto/low-carb world, so my guess is somewhat educated.

There are some for whom keto magically fixes everything and they become very learn or even athletic without trying. That’s maybe 15%.

There are some for whom keto gets them from constantly battling hunger & food cravings to effortlessly reversing their morbid obesity or even get to non-obese levels. That was me the first time, and hey, even if I never got abs, I’ll take it any day of the week.

But there are also many cases where people try keto and barely lose any weight. Maybe 5-15lbs, but nothing spectacular. Or they only lose weight if they also fast a lot or heavily restrict calories.

Some people are somewhere in between: they feel much better, don’t have constant cravings, and they do lose significant weight - but they’re still obese or severely overweight, and “just doing keto harder” doesn’t seem to help.

Others can’t seem to tolerate keto at all. They white-knuckle through and use all their willpower to stick to it if they see some decent results. But that tends to not last; people hate hating their diet. And some people just really hate keto. It’s not for them.

Some people even get pretty severe symptoms from it. Digestive issues are common, as are “hypothyroid-like” symptoms like reduced metabolic rate, reduced core body temperature, feeling fatigued all the time, and bad sleep. Heck, even actual, clinical hypothyroid sometimes, although that seems more rare - few people can white-knuckle their metabolism into submission to such a degree.

Now, I don’t think all of these people are “ketarded.” Ketards aren’t people for whom keto doesn’t work as advertised. Ketards are those people explaining away the huge and obvious failures.

“You were doing it wrong!” - ok, but wrong how?

If only very specific variants of keto work, or maybe each person even requires his or her own variants, then clearly “just do keto” isn’t very good advice.

Of course, this applies to nearly any diet tribe - if the diet didn’t work, it’s never the diet’s fault, it’s your fault. But as a long-term ketard, I am most concerned about calling out my own tribe. Let the vegans sort each other out.

There are Many Ketards

As you can imagine, I’ve followed and been in contact with a lot of ketoers and keto-gurus over nearly a decade of doing the diet, and doing both low-carb and paleo before that.

There are a huge number of prominent gurus/proponents who will not admit the simple facts above: that keto doesn’t work miracles for the majority of people, and that you can in fact get worse on it, gain weight on it, or not even tolerate it at all.

One very prominent low-carber told me in private conversation that the tomato sauce I was putting on my ground beef & green vegetables was probably containing sneaky sugars. As if I hadn’t been checking labels religiously for half a decade at that point.

Another guru told me that I might just be metabolically ruined forever from my carb-eating days, and I might never be able to return to normal weight again.

Ok, cool story: but how did I spontaneously lose 100lbs the first time, then regained it, then spontaneously lost 75lbs again with a certain keto variant?

“Ruined forever” sure seems like a finicky mistress. Most morbidly obese people don’t spontaneously go from 300lbs to 200lbs and back.

A third keto guru likes spouting off about Metabolism in his Classroom. When I asked him how he explains ASIA - you know, that continent full of people who were skinny & non-diabetic eating mostly rice for millennia - he said that he just returned from Asia, and they have diabetes there too now.

Yea, no shit - I wonder what changed. Did their carbohydrate intake go up?

Blinders & Flight into Complexity

Whenever pressed on these details, an intellectually honest person could just shrug. It is fine to say “Heck, that’s a good question, I don’t really know.” Or say that your low-carb theory only seems to apply to a certain number of people, maybe based on genetic or environmental factors.

But a true ketard can’t shrug and admit he doesn’t know. If reality doesn’t line up with his hypothesis, it must be reality that’s wrong.

Besides “You were doing it wrong,” the most common response I see is just plain ignoring what’s happening. If you don’t acknowledge the people for whom keto didn’t work, it’s as if they don’t exist! You can just keep claiming that keto fixes all metabolic maladies, and if you believe it yourself, you’re not even lying!

Or maybe you’re still lying, even if you believe the lie yourself.

Another strategy is the flight into complexity. You see, it’s not just carbs, or all carbs. Fructose is the real bad guy! Oh, people on fruit do fine? Well, I meant to say refined fructose. People used to eat hundreds of grams of refined sugar in America and they weren’t fat & diabetic? What I really meant to say was high-fructose corn syrup is at fault! HFCS isn’t actually particularly high in fructose when compared to table sugar? But it has.. chemicals! Notice how we have left “carbs did it” as the explanation and landed on the “glyphosate or something theory of obesity.” But if you start the conversation over with a ketard, he will start explaining how carbs did it.

Once again, this is not limited to ketards, of course. I was once accused of strawmanning the “Energy Balance Model” (EBM), THE mainstream model of obesity, by describing it in terms of “calories in, calories out.”

“No serious nutrition scientist believes in the naive model of CICO,” a very serious nutrition scientist (with a PhD and a book to his name) scolded before blocking me on Twitter.

In fact, a seminal paper about the EBM is literally titled The Energy Balance Model of Obesity: Beyond Calories In, Calories Out.

You see, what we REALLY meant to say was that..

Oh, shit! The Energy Balance Model relies upon.. insulin?!

Anyway. As much as I love battling the mainstream CICOtards, they are not my tribe and never have been. They wouldn’t be convinced if you cured obesity outright in 8 billion people.

It’s a War

Another big one that ketards rarely say out loud, but that seem implicit in how many behave, is that this is a big war and if we show weakness in our theory, the other guys are winning.

And yea, it is sort of a war with 2 of the biggest hypotheses being the Energy Balance Model (EBM) and the Carbohydrate Insulin Model (CIM) as a distant second.

But just cause they’re even wronger doesn’t mean we’re not largely wrong. If we “win” and everybody went on keto forever, I’m pretty sure that obesity rates would only drop by maybe 5-10% at most.

But it seems clear to me that the CIM is either wrong or at the very least very incomplete, even though I do believe fuel partitioning is at the root of obesity and other metabolic diseases.

Try keto; don’t be a Ketard

I personally love keto. I do super well on it, especially the lower-protein versions. Obviously, do it minimizing PUFAs - which, honestly is pretty difficult.

Standard American Keto (SAK) is a PUFA trap par excellence - U.S. pork, chicken, salad sauces, nuts & seeds, and keto-frankenfoods are often chock full of linoleic acid.

Stick to ruminant meat like beef; don’t eat any commercial/restaurant sauces or dressings. Stay away from the frankenfoods that say “keto” on the packaging.

I would say that strictly avoiding linoleic acid is much more important here than avoiding carbs, maybe even sugar.

Try (beef) carnivore. Maybe you’ll do well on it, maybe you won’t. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

If you gave keto a good shot and it didn’t work for you or your goals, try something else. Don’t double & triple down, don’t start fasting aggressively or eating only lean protein & drinking overpriced electrolyte supplements.

There are some legit variants that work for certain people, like high/low protein. Try those.

But if it’s not working, be honest with yourself and try something else. Maybe high-carb/low-fat. Maybe something completely different.

And for God’s sake, have the humility to accept that your favorite diet might not work as well for everybody else. Especially if it works well for you.

Don’t be a Ketard.