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I was diehard keto for over a year straight. Chronic inflammation that I’ve lived with my entire life disappeared totally after a few weeks. I became pretty dogmatic about the whole thing and eventually my body started to suffer. I don’t believe it to be a long term sustainable diet, at least not at the level i was doing it (sub 20g carbs a day).

My blood tests got very worrying towards the latter part of the year and I started to have regular panic attacks and what I can only presume is chronic low blood sugar that ultimately left me feeling pretty lifeless and scared.

Anyways just my personal anecdote to remain cautiously optimistic


My mistake was I gravitated to eating mostly fatty pork and chicken after a year. Turns out those are very high in omega-6’s. Does not play well with my mental health, skin (exacerbated my pollen allergy related eczema), resulted in starting to regain weight around my stomach despite maintaining a loss of 50 pounds for two years, and becoming cold all the time (yes, my thyroid and calories were fine).

After some research on wtf might be going on, I had my suspicions and took an omegaquant test which revealed my circulating phospholipid omega-6 levels were crazy high, just a few percent below their max reference range. Moving to beef only halted my issues after 1-2 months.

I like beef and monotony, but even I can’t eat just beef. I now cycle between keto and carbs (mostly potatoes, carrots, onions and glass noodles, sometimes pasta or bread buns). I generally have carbs near workout days. Now that I’ve shed the omega-6 pounds, I have some tolerance again but end up still mostly use beef, eggs, and frozen seafood blends (no fish, which when farmed tends to be high in omega-6).

Oh, and if you are looking for a salad dressing that isn’t just flavored vegetable oil (high omega-6), give the “skinny girl” brand a try.

I'm at 3 years with occasional breaks. At a certain point my weight wouldn't go lower and I started feeling terrible. I think I was producing more ketones than I could use. I'm not sure exactly what fixed it, but now I'm sustaining a low-carb, low-but-nonzero-ketone mode, and still getting 50-75% of the mental/energy/anti-inflammatory advantages.

I think it was either changing my diet to focus on veges instead of meats (still 15-30g net carbs/day though), or adding artificial sweetener to maybe fool my body to making insulin? The science says that shouldn't happen, but idk what else it could be.

all exclusive diets (vegan/carnivore/keto/etc) are deficient in some vitamins, minerals, and maybe other things (omega-3, specific amino acids, etc).

were you using supplements? on keto in particular, a decent multivitamin and some extra vitamin C, magnesium, and potassium are a must.

What did you see in your labs?

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