Eat To Perform Blog

The biggest issue with any diet are the zealots, we have them too but in the end the people on the extremes (both ways, failure and success) rarely tell the full story. 

So this is my view, based on my experiences and the experiences of literally 100’s of thousands of people that failed at Keto and ultimately started Eat To Perform. I hesitate to include myself as a low carb failure and I will tell you why here in a bit.

If you read my story about intermittent fasting the idea is going to sound similar. 

Keto is not magic, you are eating less, in fact, there have been many studies that have compared calorie for calorie eating keto versus eating flexible and the results are similar if the goal is FAT LOSS. (There does seem to be some advantage when the diet cycle ends with flexible eating. There is a lot of speculation on why but keto has some disadvantages that get worse when you just keep eating keto. Here is a study of studies that showed this, note the big advantage was post dieting for flexible eating.)

So why do SOOO many people START with keto?

It’s simple, it’s literally simple. 

That might seem like an advantage but it’s actually a disadvantage. Let me explain why:

If your goal is to drive from Los Angeles to New York you are probably best to use some form of navigation or a map. So if I said to you, just go right until you get there, you might get there.

Or you might end up lost in Utah for a week. 

The dirty little secret of all of those keto success stories is that many of them don’t have an after that after. Many rebound hard and the biggest reason they do is because that level of inflexibility isn’t life friendly. 

By now it’s known that it’s not a carbohydrate problem so when people talk about “high carb” diets they are mostly blowing smoke up your ass. Flexible eating is not high carb, it’s MODERATE CARB based on the individual's needs and it’s highly customizable based on what the person does.

That said, low carb (or extremely low carb) does have one advantage, it does seem favorable for hunger signalling. 

What that means if you know that is that you can build a way to use lower carbs to help with your dieting phases.

Which brings me to me. After losing 75 pounds and regaining 100 pounds using low carb I realized that inflexible eating was not something that worked for me. I wanted to live life on my terms and for me food was part of the joy I wanted in my life, all food. 

Not just a small list of foods (that’s ultimately what keto is).

So when I built Eat To Perform I knew some level of lower carbs was favorable for satiety (hunger signalling). Not all Eat To Performers know this but their “low” days means low carb (though calories are typically lower also but not always).

Those days also have one other effect, it clears out water a bit. 

People get enamored with the water weight they lose doing Keto and often end up with a bit of a washed out look if they just keep eating less and less along the way. Which by the way, is the nature of human beings, if some is good more is better right?

Not always. In fact, weight loss is not always fat loss and holding water in your muscles and organs is important. So the way Eat To Perform is designed is that you have FOUR days that are moderate carbs, TWO days low carbs (customizable for the user and their activities) and one day where you can eat flexibly (a lot of Eat To Performers like what we call our SUPER day not for the carbs but for the higher fats).

It SEEMS like this would be a slower approach but what happens for most folks doing keto is that they hit a wall they can’t figure out how to get past without just eating less. Our approach extends that window longer. So what we see is that individuals that do Eat To Perform compared to Keto have similar results weight loss wise but often can keep the weight off a lot easier when the dieting cycle ends.

And all dieting cycles need to end. 

Frankly, that’s where Keto fails people. I don’t feel like I failed at Keto, far from it, I have been able to help 100’s of thousands of people use a better approach to eating low carb. 

Using the example above if I can say, you need to go south at Salt Lake City and then catch highway 90 all the way to Omaha. That failure ultimately became a piece of my success later.

That’s success!