After 30 days of keto, and initial dabbling with restored starchy carb intake, I decided to revert back to my prior lower/slow-carb diet going forward.
Keto worked well for what I needed at the time. It pushed my body to better utilize stored body fat. It helped kickstart fat burning that had stalled in recent months. It helped me hormonally readjust, which helped get my sleep patterns back on track (though the cooling Vegas weather combined with increasing daytime darkness may have also helped with that).
Now that I’ve adjusted to nose breathing and thus improved the quality and efficiency of my aerobic endurance workouts, which was also part of why I went keto, I think the whole project have served its purpose. The Vegas weather has cooled and I can once again easily train outdoors. I ran a 10K easy this weekend and was fairly pleased with the results.
My weight loss did slow after starting keto, though it did stabilize a few pounds below where I had started. Now that I’m ramping up run training again, my overall calorie requirements are going to increase dramatically, and I’m already maxed on how much protein and fat I can reasonably take in per day. Even if I had good reason to stay keto, it wouldn’t make much sense to pound more steak and more coconut oil.
Going forward I’m going to eat carbs without restriction, though again my normal intake was lower than most, in the 100-200g daily range. I still have done a good job of keeping my aerobic heart rate lower than before, even as I’ve reintroduced carbs and even as I’ve began picking up the intensity on some of these base runs.
The growing volume of run and cross training, combined with a greater need for daily overall calories and the predominantly slow-carb diet I generally eat already, will help spur subsequent weight loss.
I’ll probably still have some keto days where I eat low carb, high fat/protein. But now instead of being a mandated habit it can be employed incidentally.