Keto vegan & intermittent fasting

Hi Lovelies,

If you follow me for a while, you know that I love experimenting with food and diet tips. Of course I always try to stay in a somewhat reasonable limit. If it is too extreme or doesn’t fit my mentality than I skip.

In the last year I have been reading a lot of ketogenic diet, because a friend of mine follows it strictly and helped with her health problems. This diet was founded for people with epileptic problems, it helps reducing the seizures to them or eliminate completely. It is a really low carb, but high fat way of eating, where your net carbs (carbs minus fibres) have to be under 30grams. Also it turned out that our body can function without too much carbohydrate, and replace them with ketones. Because our body is a miracle! When something is out of balance, it finds the way to help it out.

I know a lot of people can thrive on carbohydrates and be okay with it. I just found my body is not really a friend of it. Since I went vegan (around 2 years ago now) I was sometimes struggling to maintain my wait, I had low energy even when I was eating raw, whole foods. Don’t get me wrong, it helped me solve digestive issues and also my skin got much better, and my eczema healed immediately. But other than that I didn’t feel the benefits all was talking about. I also didn’t want to quit, not only because I love animals, but because I knew that my health issues would come back.

So what to do? I tried the keto diet last year for one week, and I was amazed that I dropped 2 kilos in a week, but to be honest I was too lazy to dig in and I ate mostly salads. Which can be pretty boring after a while, and as I dropped all the carbs overnight I almost fainted at my workplace. This year I wanted to come back and do all research for foods, for how to prepare, what rules to follow. I started slowly, lowering my carbs from day to day, finding substitutes for high carb foods, and measuring ingredients to learn how I can incorporate more variety in my days. Since I’m not willing to give up on fruits, I eat less (since I started I don’t eat half of a watermelon in one sitting) and try to eat them at the beginning of my day.

The other thing I’m into lately is intermittent fasting. There are a lot of types, but mainly 4 of this method:

- 8 hours eating window with 16 hours fasting

- medium level: 6 hours eating window with 18 hours fast

- high level: 4 hours eating 20 hours fast

- extreme: 1 hour eating with 23 hours fast

Basically it is helping your body to digest everything properly, and fasting for more than 12 hours stimulates the elimination of growth hormones in your body, and starts the fat burning.

Up to my twenties I almost never ate breakfast. I felt sick whenever I tried to eat something in the morning. A good cup of tea or cacao just was perfectly enough. But when I became a teenager I started to gain weight with hormonal changes. And when I started dieting I read everywhere, that breakfast is the most important thing in the world, if you start your day with a big meal you won’t get hungry during the day, you can eliminate binge eating….. But the truth is, the bigger breakfast I had the more I ate after it. My stomach got used to bigger quantity, and instead of losing weight I gained again. Than I started a low carb diet, but still was eating meat and dairy, and had a lot of problems. I lost 15 kg in 3 month so I was really happy about it, but didn’t feel good, my weight loss stopped at this point and couldn’t get anywhere from that point since than.

Now the combination of these two methods seem to work for me, I try not to rush into anything, slowly but surely getting results. Also with the intermittent fasting I started light, I usually ate my breakfast around 8.30, and I gave myself a longer period to work this up to 12 (15 minutes longer fast per day). I don’t say I’m not hungry sometimes, but I don’t feel weakness or any bad issues with it. I usually eat till 6 p.m. because I’m not hungry after that and I don’t like to go to bed with full stomach. In the first week I didn’t train that much, I went on runs, but not for so long distance, but now I’m back with full power. I also managed to go for a run in the morning! Although I’m still not a morning person, so I don’t know how I will maintain morning runs :D I drink more water, but on the other side, I lose more water, which is good for me, because my body tends to hold back water, in summer it became an issue for me and felt heavy all the time, my legs and arms puffed up, but now it is all gone. In the first 2 weeks I'm 2,5 kg down.

Also intermittent fasting is really flexible, you can do it every day, or just some days of the week, you can adjust it to your schedule. So don't reject any invitations with friends and family for breakfast or brunch, take things easy and don't stress on food. With keto I suggest to use an app to track you macros at the beginning (cronomether, myfitnesspal), but only until you get used to it and learn which foods and quantities are okay for you. Don't get too overobsessed with it, you don't want to build up eating disorders.

If you tried these methods, or have a good tip for me, please comment and share, I would be grateful for it. Next week I will put up some recipes for keto vegan diet with macros, so come back if you are interested in it.

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