One Reason You Probably Shouldn’t Do Keto Diet

Egis R.
4 min readMay 22, 2022
Image by the author

Layne Norton, PhD nutritional sciences, wrote in his book:

“My father lost 30 pounds on a ketogenic diet, then added back 60 pounds because he couldn’t sustain the diet for more than four months. Once he went back to eating “normally,” he rapidly packed the pounds back on.”

That is why I think the keto diet is just wrong in any conceivable way. Probably even in ways, I haven’t even thought about (I’m talking extreme keto diet where you cannot eat more than 50 grams of carbs per day or else you will ruin the magic (meaning, made-up) benefits of ketosis).

Sustainability is the most critical factor in losing weight — any diet you cannot permanently adhere to is a shit diet. For most people, the keto diet is that kind of diet.

A 2021 study looked at adherence to ketogenic and Mediterranean diets and here is what they did:

Food delivery phase — Participants were provided with all meals and snacks for the first 4 weeks; Self-provided phase — Participants were responsible for buying and preparing their own meals; Follow-up phase — Participants were free to choose which diet (keto vs. Mediterranean) they wanted to follow
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As might be expected, average adherence was best during the first four weeks when all meals were provided by a food delivery service but the whole thing went tits up during the self-provided phase and even more so during the follow up:

Image by the author

There was considerable variability in adherence scores among the subjects — it actually increased for a few oddballs. But for most, keto was hard to sustain long-term and so the researchers concluded:

“A challenge during the ketogenic diet phase was the extreme carbohydrate restriction, which meant the exclusion of many commonly consumed foods, making it harder to follow in the long-term. This exclusion of foods made it more challenging for participants that shared meals with their families, with many participants finding that they often had to make separate meals for themselves and their families while on the ketogenic diet.”

The famous A to Z weight loss study (famous among the fitness geeks who have no detectable social lives, like me) also investigated the level of dietary adherence to…

Egis R.

I’m Egis, an online weight loss coach who has heightened BS sensors for fitness & nutrition. Only evidence-based & sustainable fat loss. www.absscience.com