My 6-Week Keto Diet Experiment: Surprising Energy Boosts and Lessons Learned

As I approached my late 20s, I noticed that I regularly felt sluggish. Specifically, I struggled with having energy. I woke up feeling tired, experienced food coma, and lacked energy in the evenings.

Mind you, I didn't really exercise regularly or eat particularly healthy food or have good sleep habits. I was always on the thinner side, with a healthy weight based on BMI calculations, and I was a relatively young adult, so I didn't feel the need to worry about my health. I now see the faults in that logic.

But as I got into my mid-30s, I got tired of feeling tired all the time. So I started focusing on exercising more, eating healthier, and sleeping better.

For exercise, I would run regularly, anywhere from three to five days per week, or I would do daily core exercises. At the same time, I made sure to get over seven hours of sleep per night as regularly as possible, going as far as maintaining a spreadsheet that tracked my sleep patterns. I also made good diet adjustments, like switching from processed cereals to oatmeal—a big step for an absolute cereal lover—and replacing sugary drinks with water.

As a result, I felt an improvement in my overall health and mood, which was great, but to my surprise, it didn't do much for my tiredness.

So, I decided to experiment with the ketogenic diet. In a nutshell, "doing keto" means minimizing intake of carbohydrates while eating a high amount of fat supplemented with some protein. The macronutrient ratios I went with for daily caloric intake were 75% fat, 20% protein, and 5% net carbs (net carbs being total grams of carbs minus the grams of dietary fiber).

I won't get into the nitty gritty of my specific keto experiment here, but the point of this diet is to be in ketosis, a state where your body burns fat for energy instead of carbs. Carbs are like quick-energy snacks for your body. When you eat lots of them, your body gets a quick burst of energy, but then it burns up, and you crash. In contrast, burning fat for energy is like having a long-lasting battery: it gives your body a steady supply of energy, so you feel less tired and gain more stamina.

I was on keto for six weeks. The result?

It worked.

My body needed about a week to get used to the change (your mileage may vary). Once it did, I was delighted to discover that food coma was no longer a thing and I didn't get drowsy at all, even on days when I had less or poor sleep. In the evenings, I didn't feel like sludge–I could be active and do chores with much more ease. I also had fewer mornings with brain fog. From an energy standpoint, this made a substantial difference in my life.

Are you thinking about trying out the keto diet? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. The keto diet, if managed incorrectly, can have a dangerous effect on your health.
   Certain ingredients, even if they appear keto-friendly on the surface, can cause a negative glucose or insulin response (which can vary for each person) and kick you out of ketosis. Or, if you eat too much protein, the excess protein is converted to glucose. In either case, coupling a higher-than-recommended glucose level with high amounts of fat is a big health risk.
2. The keto diet requires continuous maintenance.
   To minimize the above-noted dangers and maximize the benefits, you want to stay on top of:
   1. Understanding what ingredients trigger a negative response.
      This requires monitoring your blood glucose and ketone levels, ideally before and after meals, any time you introduce a new food to your system. To do this, you need to invest in a glucose meter.
   2. Sticking to your macro ratios.
      For a while, this means accurately logging each ingredient you eat and how much of it.
3. The keto diet does not offer balance.
   What I mean by that is, other diets let you indulge a little in the way of breads, sweets, or grains. The keto diet, in contrast, is very strict, largely because of the previous point. You can obviously add your own cheat meals here and there, but doing so can negate the benefits of this particular diet to a higher extent than it might for other diets. Is it sustainable? For some, it may be easier to say a permanent goodbye to some of their favorite foods blacklisted by the diet; for others, maybe not so much.
4. The keto diet can be expensive.
   This is especially true if you're used to consuming a lot of grains and breads, which is a very affordable way to fill your stomach. And you may want to take the diet to the next level where you get higher quality ingredients, such as grass-fed beef and other organic options. While definitely better for your health, they are harder on your wallet.
5. The keto diet just doesn't feel natural.
   Synthetic supplements are highly recommended to prevent nutrient deficiencies resulting from only consuming keto-approved foods. I also found myself regularly constipated, which is a common side effect of this diet. And for someone who's not diabetic, the constant monitoring of food intake as well as glucose and ketone levels felt like an unnatural barrier to enjoying food.

Can the benefits of keto outweigh these drawbacks? Absolutely. I loved having energy, so I haven't closed the book on the ketogenic diet. Six weeks is a relatively short amount of time. I'm confident that there's definitely room to optimize the diet in a sustainable way for my personal needs. Once I familiarize myself with the effects that particular foods have on my body (i.e., what foods to avoid), I can probably get to the point where I don't need to calculate my macros regularly. Just for the benefit of energy alone, keto would be well worth the front-end efforts.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. Please consult with your doctor for any health concerns related to the ketogenic diet.

Cover photo by Christine Siracusa / Unsplash
Body photo by Benjamin Davies / Unsplash