Since I left Morocco in 2004, I started training at the gym about 2/3 times a week (2 hours sessions). Although I was working out, my diet was getting worse and worse, and it [fast (junk) food and sugar everywhere ] did increase my body fat.
I started to accumulate fat in the belly region and could not lose it. I tried fasting + work out, bad results and more body fat afterwards. I tried reducing my caloric intake but I always ended up hungry… I tried working out more (10-16 hours/week) and ended up eating more, gaining muscle and fat.
Anyway, after many unsuccessful attempts, I found a way to lose the belly I couldn’t lose in years, the ketosis diet (Please read this article in order to understand what I will be talking about.).
I coupled it with exercise (5 times a week + keto) and you can see the result :
Other examples of successful keto’ers :
Links
Here’s an aggregation of data that you may find interesting.
- Reddit Keto
- How to start
- What food can I eat ?
- Another interesting article if you plan on bodybuilding.
- Nutrition Calculator
- MyFitnessPal : to keep track of what you eat.
- Food List
So basically, you need to eat a lot of fat, no carbohydrates, and pretty much the rest in proteins. A good ratio would be 60% fat, 35% proteins, 5% carbs.
Quick Steps
- To start the ketosis diet, you need to order Ketostix and stop eating sugars and carbs (bread, pasta, rice,…) right away. Tomorrow morning, start your day with 2 hard boiled eggs with a lot of mayonaise and try to work out a little bit (cardio is better). Calculate (15kCal/lb) how much calories you’d need to maintain your muscles and do all the math you need to do to establish your goal.
- With the aggregation of links I’ve supplied above, you should be able to know what to eat and how much you should eat. Remember just that cheating (eating too much carbs that will lead you out of ketosis state) will slow you down and even make you gain some weight. What I would suggest for lunch would be a steak with squash zucchini and mayonnaise. You can add bacon and cheese until you are satisfied. Remember, in keto, you can eat as much cheese and bacon as you want.
- You can be hungry during the afternoon if your steak was not too heavy. If it’s the case, you can eat some charcuterie with cheese, hard boiled eggs and salad. You can eat almost any green veggie, but don’t forget the mayonnaise (since it is your main source of fat when you eat veggies and proteins like steaks and fish). Eating too much proteins over fat may lead the proteins to be assimilated like carbohydrates which is not something we want.
- For the dinner, you can go ahead and have another steak with either green beans, squash zucchini (it was my best friend during keto), salad, cheese, bacon, mayonnaise, eggs, ham, ground beef, etc…
After a week or two of ketosis, you can start integrating just a little bit more carbs. There are various low carbs recipes on the keto subreddit which was my main source of information and was also the starter of everything.
I will never thank enough the /r/keto community for all the information, support and motivation they gave me. This is where everything started and I think I found the best way.