Insights on the Ketogenic Diet

From what I'm seeing on the Internet the ketogenic diet is a raging buzz word. It certainly was not so nine years ago when I first got so sick that almost everything I ate made me feel unspeakably ill. I can only say that the diet I undertook to deal with my symptoms was a desperate avoidance of almost every kind of reactionary food. Basically I became a grass grazer (lots of green leafies, coconut oil (which I discovered gave me energy and kept me from being too much of a skeleton) and just a few other simple foods -- See my horrendously constrained, but wonderfully restoring diet. Yes, call it strict, but it helped me tremendously!)

Later a friend whose son has Doose Syndrome, a very rare form of epilepsy, looked at this blog and wrote back commenting on my keto diet. Never heard of a keto diet before so looked it up, and looked up the treatment for people with Doose. It was a bit hard to understand, eating to feed the brain ketones to burn instead of glucose that most people's brains are fired off of. Found a based-on-real-life movie "First Do No Harm" starring with Meryl Streep on the keto diet. In it Meryl's son had the rare form of epilepsy and the movie was her fight to save her son with the virtually unknown tightly regulated keto diet. A very moving movie and also one that gave me a deeper understanding of the practical application and importance of rigid adherence to a program known to be beneficial for a specific body type-body requirement.

So now there are tons of materials on the web for the ketogenic diet. I don't really support the direction the keto diet is going because most people, as far as I can tell, aren't informing themselves of long-term dietary issues that the diet can create. Nor do I feel that most people are really in tuned their bodies to know if the diet is really benefitting them or if they should tweak the diet to make it more beneficial for their own body types and nutritional needs. Anyway, I found this website more informative than others on the specificity of the keto diet and hope that others can get some more specific answers on it if they're choosing to try the diet. 

BTW, this isn't a diet that you try for a couple of weeks but is a lifestyle change diet. Just something to keep in mind, especially as the brain is burning ketones and needs an adjustment from burning glucose, so I'm thinking the one week of a keto diet and the next of a glucose-brain-fueling diet wouldn't be particularly beneficial for the body. 

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For more on the diet, reference: The Ketogenic Diet Resource