Doing keto diet as a vegetarian, words of wisdom?

Eat more carbs, healthy carbs and just count your calls and stick to your macros.

Hornsby wrote: »

Not keto nor vegetarian, but damn, this sounds difficult.

Is it possible?

I'd think vegetarian wise would be easy but I doubt it could be done vegan. Vegetarians can have eggs, cottage cheese, yoghurts etc.

more exercise, less food! I'm not a vegetarian but I eat like one most of the time so it's eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, veggies, nuts and seeds mostly for me.

A keto diet without actual meat is going to be mostly eggs and spinach.

MarkusDarwath wrote: »

A keto diet without actual meat is going to be mostly eggs and spinach.

#demfartsthough

I'm doing keto currently (I have about 10 lbs of fat left I'd like to lose and body recomp is so much easier for me on keto), and while I'm not actually vegetarian, I do eat vegetarian about 90% of the time. Vegetarian keto is easy: the diet is high FAT, so just throw more oil (olive, coconut, etc) on all the vegetables. I do eat eggs but mostly in things like flax bread, etc. Anyways not really the point of the post.

If you've found yourself stalling, I'd say try any of the three following things:

(1) Reduce your calories (but try to keep the macro ratios the same). On your smaller self you may just be supplying your body with all the energy it needs through food. One caveat. "Calories-in-calories-out" is correct in theory (I'm a physicist, I know thermodynamics). But, particularly the "calories out" part of the equation is really difficult to determine. Your body has all sorts of metabolic and regulatory processes that compensate for a variable calorie input, so you might find that tweaking your calories doesn't really do much. (Also there's obviously a limit to how low you can/should go with calories).

(2) Bump up your exercise. There's already a lot of information about low-carb diets and exercise around the internet, just google it. Personally, I've had the best results with longer low-intensity exercise (like lots of hikes, there are hills in my area), usually right when I wake up. I do some high-intensity interval-type training and weights also, this has two effects: I get a lot hungrier and am likely to overcompensate, and also I can eat more carbs and still stay in ketosis. If you're doing just low-carb and not necessarily ketosis then I'd say just go with whatever exercise you like best.

(3) Try doing IF (intermittant fasting) - just eat the same amount of calories you normally would in a smaller time window. (16 hours fasting/8 hours eating is a popular starting point). People will scream CICO. Yeah, sure, that's a good first-order approximation, but it fails to account for different time-dependent regulatory processes (as noted above), and hence deviations from the mean behavior it presupposes. You know if we relied on average behavior to describe physical systems we would never get neat things like phase transitions (think water freezing or a metal developing spontaneous magnetization at low temperatures). The amount of energy your body needs is the solution to a set of coupled, time-dependent, non-linear differential equations. These are hard (if not impossible) to solve in any exact fashion. So I'm saying I don't know exactly by what mechanisms IF works, but it exploits some neat things your body does in a fasted state, adds in some time-dependence to the equation, and is probably a second-order correction on CICO. Give it a try if other things fail.

Good luck!

cee134 wrote: »

Keto is a fad diet, that can be dangerous. Eat lots of vegetables and move more. That will work way better then any fad diet.

Unless you have actual proof of your claims, please keep your opinions to yourself. Been on keto for nearly three years now. Not dead yet. Healthy now than I ever was eating a high carb and low fat diet, and it's the only WOE that has helped me maintain a healthy weight. It's not the be-all-end-all of weight loss, but it's one of many ways one can achieve their goals. I wouldn't call that a fad.

Hornsby wrote: »

Not keto nor vegetarian, but damn, this sounds difficult.

Is it possible?

It is possible. You just replace the meats with things like tofu or soy products. I did a small stint with vegetarian keto. Basically just used tofu/tofurkey in place of meats and doubled up on eggs. I was able to still have tuna, so that helped a bit, as well as spam. Would I ever do it again? Nah. I loves my chicken far too much!