Around July 2021, I decided I wanted to drastically cut carbs and possibly try the keto diet. Only 16 months later, and I’m finally doing it!

It’s been a journey that was originally sidetracked by terrible illness resulting from my changes in food choices.

Up until then, I’d followed my “Heart Rate Health” program I developed and wrote about in 2003, with mostly pretty good results. For 10 years, my weight had stayed consistently between 191 and 200, depending on whether I was also adding resistance exercise. At 6’1″, this is not perfect by any means, but I was mostly happy with it and not willing to commit to a big change.

During that time, I was eating oatmeal and an ounce of cashews for breakfast, a big salad for lunch, and a health combination of meat, vegetables, and some sort of “good” carb like quinoa or coos coos for dinner. Ok, also pizza and occasionally a giant plate of pasta…but that was becoming more rare. Between lunch and dinner, I ate not very good snacks of Goldfish and a Belvita bar, and I ate 1 1/2 ounces of M&Ms almost every night before bed.

Still, like I said, I was mostly happy with how I was doing, as I exercise almost every day. Not 6 of 7 days. Probably 59 of 60 days. It’s just a habit I picked up and feel great doing.

The first thing I did was to eliminate the carb-loaded afternoon snacks. I replaced that with slightly less carb-loaded protein bars.

Then, it was time for the biggest shift…and the most painful one!

I replaced my oatmeal breakfast with either meatballs or eggs, and I was much more strict on getting the right dinners. My weight started dropping pretty quickly during that time with the small consequence of stomach discomfort.

Within a few weeks, the weight was still coming off reliably, but the stomach discomfort was turning into full on pain. I knew it was the result of the changes I was making, but to me, everything was tasting good, and the results were great.

Eventually, though, I was doubled over in pain almost every day, and I could feel there was a real problem. I went in for blood tests, and they revealed I had an allergy. My eosinophils count in the white blood cell differential test was all the way to 3.8 thous/mm3. The normal range is 0.0 to 0.4 thous/mm3, so I was at nearly 10 times that. (A good friend of ours reported having intense stomach pain at 0.8thous/mm3.)

At that point, I *had* to change something, as my doctors said I may have developed an adult-onset allergy, and we started to do tests on that. I completely gave up all dairy at that point.

It turned out that I did have a moderate allergy to egg whites. I’m not sure when that developed, but I can tell you eggs are just about my favorite food, and I felt pretty devastated. (If I ever opened a restaurant, which I absolutely never should or would, it would be called “Craig’s Eggs”. Yes, I loved them that much, and I was pretty good at making them *very* tasty.

Within a few weeks, I was somewhat back to normal and wasn’t spending hours per day in complete agony. Unfortunately, over the Thanksgiving holiday, I not only missed all the very best parts of the meals and treats made by our family, I still got so sick I missed a flight home. The culprit was a kale salad of all things. So I didn’t eat anything I wanted, did everything completely right, and I still go sicker than I had been almost ever. I now avoid any store bought kale salad!

By the time it was Christmas, I was back to normal enough to go almost all-in on the holiday treats.

I had lost 17 pounds between July and December…and then I started gaining it all back.

So, my first attempt at a keto-ish switch failed. I did stick with protein and fat for breakfast (meatballs with parmesan or sausage with cheddar), and I continued to avoid the carby afternoon snacks.

In the summer of 2022, I took an interest in resistance training and put on quite a bit of muscle. By early November, I decided I was ready to go all-in on a keto diet. It was just a matter of when.

Halloween night, I decided I’d start the next day. I had awoken in the middle of the night with an itchy head that seemed like a possible spider bite. We had spent Halloween evening on the patio with a friend, and I figured some spider had dropped on my head and taken a healthy chomp.

So I started keto the next day and stuck to it extremely well for 5 days. No extra hunger, no issues with giving up the nightly M&Ms. It was going pretty well…except the itching was spreading down my forehead and I was having some twitchy nerves above my eye. I called the doctor’s offices, and they said the bite area (if it was a bite) was strange enough looking to get checked out, and they almost casually asked if I’d ever had shingles.

By the next day when I went in, every one I saw in the office looked at me like something was very wrong. The doctor confirmed I had shingles. That’s a story for another time, but it did knock my plans for sticking with keto into the New Year.

Now, finally, in 2023, I’m all in. I “practiced” the transition by weaning myself off the Christmas cookies, Manhattans, and champagne and finally started it again on 1/9/2023 – 7 days ago.

So far, so good. No shingles, no pain, no hunger…and so far, no signs of ketones or the keto flu. I’m not doing it all the way right yet, but I have seen a sizable change in the scale – from a one time high last Monday of 202.2 down to 195 today. That’s 7 pounds of something after just 7 days. I’ll take that win and work harder on limiting my carbs and protein this week to try to force the ketone production sooner.

The 16-month “transition” wasn’t what I expected, but I’m off and running now, and I’ll try to catch up here on my progress.

More soon…