Cheating While Traveling Abroad?


(Patrick Baker) #1

Hi, I’m new here, just wanted to see if anyone had some advice for me. I’m traveling to Costa Rica in 3 weeks, and I’m going off keto for it. I love the diet, but I don’t want to be on it forever and once I reach my goal (only 15 lbs to go!) I’m going to go for a more balanced diet that includes beans, rice, and all veggies and fruits (still saying no to pasta, bread, and unnatural sugar). But that’s beside the point. I wanna be able to experience the foods they offer and not be weird about ordering like I am here when I go out to eat. The 4 foods I mentioned earlier, beans, rice, fruits, and veggies, are BIG there. If I go a week where I’m eating those things, what’s gonna happen? Will I immediately gain weight? I still plan on exercising and doing yoga while there. And I’m not gonna eat any processed foods. Any comments, advice, answers, are greatly appreciated. Thanks!


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

As for eating carbohydrate on vacation, I imagine the answer will depend on how long you’ve been eating a ketogenic diet and what your carbohydrate threshold is. Everyone’s carb tolerance is different, and some people can eat more without ill effect, while others must eat less in order to remain healthy. It all depends.

If you exceed your daily carb threshold while on vacation, it is likely that you will start to gain weight again. Carbohydrates, being mostly chains of glucose molecules joined together, stimulate the secretion of insulin, because too much glucose in your blood stream can damage you (or even, in extreme cases, kill you).

So the pancreas quickly secretes insulin to tell your muscle cells to take glucose in and get rid of it by using it as fuel, and to tell your fat cells to take glucose in and store it as fat. Your carb threshold is the amount of carbohydrate that raises your insulin to the point of initiating this process. A company doctor in the 1950’s and 60’s, who had great success helping workers and executives lose weight on a low-carb, high-fat diet, wrote up some of his cases for a medical journal. He described one executive who had such a low carbohydrate tolerance that the sugar in a single apple was enough to cause him to gain weight.

Chronically elevated glucose and insulin, such as people develop from following the diet recommended by the U.S. government and many health organizations, cause all sorts of damage. Glycated proteins can no longer function properly. Glycated hemoglobin clots more readily, leading to strokes, atherosclerosis, and infarction of the myocardium and other organs (in other words heart attacks and damage to other organs). Elevated insulin causes high blood pressure (which also makes blood more likely to clot, as well as damaging artery walls), shuts off the body’s defenses against oxidative stress (making it necessary to consume Vitamin C and other anti-oxidants), and leads to systemic inflammation, among many other problems.

Much of the damage can eventually be healed, given a long enough period with low insulin and glucose levels. If Alzheimer’s dementia has not progressed too far, most of the symptoms can be reversed and cognition restored. The lowering of blood pressure and decreased glycation of hemoglobin reduces the risk of stroke and allows cardiovascular damage to heal. Fat trapped in adipose tissue can finally be released again, and burned by the body as fuel.

So this is how a well-formulated ketogenic diet affects the body. You sound young enough that you could probably return to a high-carbohydrate diet and continue for quite some time before the damage starts to catch up with you. Enjoy!


(Jane) #3

Yep. You will put back on the water weight you initially lost with keto.

Is that an issue? Only you can answer that!


#4

I can’t say what will happen with you but I was accidentally knocked out of keto recently (hidden carbs). I eliminated that item and went straight back into keto eating but it took 5 days for ketones to return. I put on 2 lbs in that week.

I personally did not have headaches or this and that, no obvious symptoms, just a near zero ketone reading on my blood analyser. (And the 2 lb weight gain). But some people report all sorts of “feeling sick and bad” (or is it that guilt, I don’t know).

I’d encourage you not to throw keto away and eat “normal food”. There’s nothing normal about it if it’s half killing you.


(Karim Wassef) #5

You can stick to the meat intake without fruits and use all that time having fun instead. Keto isn’t really about weight loss- that’s a side effect. It’s really about being healthy first and having the energy to get out and have fun.

I would take it as an opportunity to either fast or go carni - less is more here. The energy boost will only make the vacation more fun… I’d even start it a couple of days before the trip to get adjusted and then just focus on the fun part when you get there.