Hello everyone. This is my first post, and I’ve been putting it off forever, probably because I’m worried people will think I’m an idiot for failing at this so many many times. It’s likely to be long, so apologies, please bear with me…
About me: I’m in the UK, female, just over 12 stone, and short so need to lose a couple of stone to be at a comfortable weight for my height. I’m also exhausted, mentally, completely drained.
I’ve tried keto a million times over in the last three or four years since I first heard about it, I’ve listen to tons of podcasts, read books by Gary Taubes and Jason Fung, watched the documentaries on Netflix, etc etc etc. Whilst I understand the science, the logic, the history, and it all makes perfect sense to me, I just cannot seem to DO it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I’ve been putting off posting because quite honestly, I’m embarrassed and ashamed.
Everyone else has managed it and I just cannot. I’ve kept at it for a while with the help of artificial sweeteners, very dark chocolate, recipes for keto baked goodies, and lost a few pounds but thought about sugar constantly. I say sugar, I mean milk chocolate.
I’ve tried on other occasions without any of the above but with full fat Greek yoghurt and berries, or by allowing myself Diet Coke or sugar free squash. Same result - I lose a few pounds but think about sweet stuff constantly until I cave, eat a load of milk chocolate and struggle to get back on for weeks. My weight just keeps creeping up a few pounds every year.
I’ve tried allowing myself very small amounts of chocolate, I’ve tried mindful eating - it doesn’t work, but it did teach me something. I don’t want to mindfully eat, I don’t enjoy it because it isn’t giving me what I need. And this is because I realise that I use sugar in a ‘stuff myself and then feel a surge of (calm?) that makes me relaxed and reduces my stress’ kind of a way. Mindfully eating it does no such thing.
I have terrible stomach/digestive issues/pain/IBS in general - I can’t eat gluten at all so never do, or spicy food, and plenty of other things, but even so I’m still struggling to go full keto despite the fact I don’t eat grains at all or processed food (excluding chocolate). Food feels like it controls my life and I would like more than anything to a) not have these overwhelming chocolate cravings, b) sort the digestive issues so I’m pain free, c) live a life where I don’t think about chocolate every minute of every day and d) lose some weight.
I’m really hoping keto can help and I really really really want to do it. I’ve cleared out all my cupboards and fridge so there is no longer any cocoa powder, dark chocolate, berries, artificial sweeteners - clearly I cannot be trusted with these as they just keep my sweet tooth very much alive. I don’t know if anyone else has this problem?
So tomorrow it is, the big start. Wish me luck. Any tips gratefully received. I don’t know how long it will be before my sweet tooth cravings diminish - this has never ever ever happened to me or even come close, and I keep reading about it happening to others and I would be overjoyed if it happened to me!
Sorry for such a long message.
First post - and me committing to keto
Getting your head in the right place to start can be helped by having your hormones in the right place. Many women find it easier to start a diet in the first half of their menstrual cycle - that gives you a couple of weeks to help establish habit/routine before the premenstrual chocolate gremlins kick in. Not sure if this is true or relevant for you but it might be worth considering. Best of luck to you.
Not everyone can do it, I assure you. Well some people can’t even try… I couldn’t go under 20g carbs in the first years! 
And I cut out sugar without problem years before I went keto the first time.
Everyone has their own failings, maybe not at keto but elsewhere.
What do you eat? How many carbs?
My chocolate cravings got cured with keto first, then I got adapted… But if I go really low-carb, all sweets cravings disappear. It’s like a dream! I ate sweets all the time on my original keto (I had to, all my other food was carby… and anyway, I always had a huge sweet tooth, I still have, it just mostly turns off when I ignore plants).
What exactly we eat, what style of keto we follow (or don’t follow just happens… :)), that may be key. It may change us very much.
Good luck!!!
And milk chocolate is really good… I was fine without it in the first several years (I have my own dark chocolate, I ate it for almost a decade every day but since I tried carnivore, I lost interest) but then I got reminded to it… One can live without that. If I want sweets, I eat keto sweets at least (if possible, carnivore ones but they aren’t very sweet 
but sometimes sweet enough. for me as my sweet perception changed a lot after I stopped eating sugar).
But maybe your tie with chocolate is even stronger than mine was. And it was massive. But I dislike sugar and processed stuff and doing things right so I fail differently, not with milk chocolate.
Can’t be “strong” when shopping? I find that pretty easy. Resisting stuff at home (or at a relative or at work if there is food around often), even in our most sensitive times, that tends to be harder for most of us. But one can learn even that, even if willpower is never really used (it’s against my principles and instincts. I don’t resist temptation, period. but I can train myself to want the right things. it’s a bit slow but lowering carbs quickened things).
You may want to consider carnivore. The total lack of carbs completely removes cravings.
Years ago I tried giving up refined sugar, but there was still some sugar in the soy milk I was drinking and I was eating fruit. The craving for sugar never went away.
I’ve been doing a carnivore trial for the past seven months and there is no hint of wanting to eat sugar. Not a hint.
( 
as I slink away and hide in the crowd of everyone else)
Not everyone @claire1, just keep trying, if you like this woe so much that you have tried it a million times, you will get it. I had a similar problem but add jujubes to that chocolate addiction of yours and that’s where I have been for the last 3 years. I started off in 2018 with a month strict, and at that time felt I had found the answer, no cravings, never hungry, and then out of the blue sugar came back into my life. I have been up and down with my cravings, on and off the Keto Train so many times.
This year, for unknown reasons, I somehow found the magic in the universe. I have foods that I like, and that’s all I eat, but I always have them on hand, leftover or ready to be cooked up. I love these foods, and whenever I get a little hungry and think about having a lot of candy, I just imagine eating my foods at home. I’m 10 weeks strict, which is amazing to me, and feeling like I can do this forever. It’s the first time since month zero that I feel confident in saying this. I just eat steak, cheeseburgers, chicken wings, and a salad which is basically 2 cups of romaine lettuce with bacon and cheese and olive oil and ACV.
Just keep trying, one day you will find your magic too! ( Wow, how corny was that statement 
)
Oh my I wrote “no one can do it” instead of “not everyone can do it” and did’t notice…
I quickly edited now.
Of course there are wonderfully disciplined people or who just do it right without effort because something clicks…
But I saw enough stories to suspect most of us aren’t like that. I just wanted to tell some of us are quite horrible at it first…
Even without a sugar addiction. I don’t believe I ever had that as cutting out sugar was no effort (except avoiding some nice items containing it but I didn’t desire the sugar itself so if I made it without sugar, it was even better. okay, I didn’t eat processed things so it wasn’t a big deal. except in the face of homemade cakes where I had zero chance so I didn’t use effort even then. in the shops when my desire turned off my rules about no overly processed things? I just read the ingredient list and it was an instant cure. I just had to read that as I had the trick where I didn’t look at it just bought it because I wanted it and didn’t care. but as I go to a big shopping once a month, even that wasn’t so serious. still, buying some store snack especially a sugary one once a month, that’s way too often! I did’t do that, fortunately).
I always say I had a sweets addiction, not a sugar one, it’s completely different. And I blame carbs as I need to eat carbs first to have it. And I didn’t know it until at least 9 years into low-carb! Stupid lingering carbs…
Seconded.
Keto didn’t diminish the sugar cravings for me, so the willpower required was significant - and as women on here often discuss, hormonal cycles are underestimated; it’s not necessarily lack of strength when you succumb, it’s your body seeking for different nourishment. I talked a little about my experiences with this here.
Carnivore resolved this for me. Your mileage may vary etc, but given your struggles so far, @Clare1 it might be worth a trial run to see if it helps.
I used to suffer cravings and had a big sweet tooth.
Binged on junkfood like my life depended on it.
Its all gone now, it took about 3 years.
Sweet tings I find discusting enough these days that cravings never happen anymore.
I’m getting hungry right now and all I can think of is meat and fish.
How I changed, can barley believe it myself.
Like with most p., it started with struggles, now i’m happy, healthy, skinny and 99% carnivorous.
There is hope @Clare1, just follow us.
Ahh heck you are so normal it is crazy true LOL
everyone fails over and over again. a very limited few ‘start an eating lifestyle’ change and make it yet we base ourselves on those people which is wrong…but what works for many…TIME ON PLAN and trying over and over again!!
My tip.
You want Keto then you do natural keto. Do not use keto candy protein bars, do not make fake sweetener keto desserts. Do not use processed keto crap in your day.
You do alot of great meat/seafood/fish and you pair that up with low carb veggies and you EAT AS MUCH of that as you need when you start…focus on protein.
worst offender for anyone changing over is hunger. We think we must limit our food ‘to diet’ but key really is to eat the hell out of your natural on plan foods and hold the plan tight but eat, eat, eat. More ya eat the more fast you normalize and ‘feel safe’ on your menu change.
So eat natural fresh keto. Don’t rely on snacking like nuts and more. Make your food meals big and satisfying!
then hang on like we all did and see where ya go!!
Wishing you the best!
Oh God bless; my heart goes out to you. When I started keto, I felt completely hopeless and despondent. Here was another miracle “diet” that wasn’t going to work. I felt terrified and really had no hope of even losing ten pounds - a drop in the bucket.
What made keto easier for me is that I ate enough food. I never tried to restrict how much I ate (as I had done in the past with other diets). I obtained my macros off of a free site and met or exceeded my protein and fat macros each day while keeping the carbs less than 20g. I ate three meals a day even though I had never done that before, dieting or otherwise. No snacking in between and clean eating - no processed “keto” food. This alleviated my cravings and hunger.
Another suggestion, keep it simple. I never cooked or baked anything elaborate (and still do not after two years). Breakfast was usually bacon or sausage and eggs, maybe with a little cheese. After weeks when I was no longer hungry, “breakfast” became a butter coffee, which surprisingly held me until lunch. Lunch was whatever I could throw together, keeping within my macros. Pepperoni chunk, hunk of cream cheese, simple salad with blue cheese dressing, egg, tuna or chicken salad - any number of things that were available and easy. Dinner consisted of a piece of pan seared meat (usually some kind of fatty pork), beef, hamburger, chicken thighs - whatever - and a steamed vegetable in bacon grease or butter. Sauteed hamburger is good with shredded cabbage tossed in. You can cook it in the grease and it is delicious. I would make soup with broth, spices, ground pork sausage, and creamed heavy cream and cream cheese as a rich thickener.
It helps if you like fatty, rich food, which I do. My husband and I would often marvel, “Can you believe we can eat like this!!!?” I lost weight weekly and steadily (55 lbs). My husband lost the ten extra pounds he had and has maintained the perfect weight. I weighed myself rarely and usually only when I went to the doctor and they required it. I still don’t weigh myself. I know I look good and the number doesn’t matter. How quickly I lost didn’t matter either as it was happening in its own time and I had finally found something that actually worked and that I could very easily live with. All those bad foods that I was previously addicted to became just a passing thought, but without the cravings.
Keto has been my miracle. I hope that it will become yours. Hugs!!! 
@Clare1 Many of the things you said sound so familiar to me. I spent years “trying” to do keto or low carb or whatever it might have been called at the time. But I constantly sabotaged myself with mind games, exceptions, excuses, weird math/logic – you name it.
Years ago, I had great success with Atkins, even though I ingested a lot of artificial sweeteners and too much dairy, and didn’t know about the evils of seed oils, etc. Unfortunately, I fell off that wagon when I gave into social pressure to eat pie at holiday time.
Eight months ago I decided to commit again. This “keto” forum was more accessible to me than Atkins or other low-carb groups, so here I am. I’ve lost about 40 pounds so far.
In my case, the enemy is my own mind.
It is so much simpler to commit to eating a certain way, and stick to it no matter what. I do allow myself some leeway, but very little. (I won’t even say what that entails, because what works for me won’t work for you.)
Great to see the word “committing” in your subject line. I believe that is the key. Best wishes.
Wow thank you everyone for such a huge amount of really useful practical advice, and making me feel like I’m not the only one. I definitely recognised myself in some of what others were saying or have experienced.
This is all incredibly helpful, I’m grateful for all the responses and welcomes.
The other day I made uncured polish sausage stuffed with cheddar cheese and wrapped in bacon. I cooked it up in an air fryer. My husband and I were cracking up over how unhealthy it would be considered on any other diet. We still find it amusing after being keto for four years.
I’ve been low carb/keto 7+ years, and I will still – STILL - look at some foods and think, “Man, that’s a lot of fat.” I was on Pritikin (very low fat) for years.
On the other hand, eating very low fat for a long time had its benefits. When people on here say they can overeat cheese, that doesn’t happen to me, because I never ate cheese on Pritikin. (Have you ever had fat-free cheese? Yuck.) I can eat a piece or two of cheese, and I’m done.
Fatty food was always okay in my book (not all, sure, I mean just because it’s fatty, I never considered it bad)… I just ate a lot of carbs along with it in my distant past… That wasn’t fortunate in my case.
There are such thing as too much fat… I so easily could overeat fat, I need to be careful (less so on carnivore-ish, I actually never went overboard with fat on it for longer term but I want to be safe and anyway, I have carbier days sometimes).
So I have this too. I can eat any fatty items (if it’s not on my blacklist :)) but not in any amounts…
Sometimes I dream about days when I just eat as much fat as I wish, without my decade long automatic restriction. Sometimes I relax my ways but this is something I am very nearly almost mindful of.
Our old habits easily influence how we view food even if we changed our attitude. I still see some food more or less containing my daily needs little (my typical food being calorie dense doesn’t help I find my fat intake always little, even on my 250+ g days. Well it’s just 250-260g, not MUCH, indeed. But I suspect it’s not normal to think so. It IS too much for me on a normal day but not really much to me if I embrace my love towards fat influenced with my distant past habits).
I don’t always have this (seeing my food little) but usually. Fortunately my satiation doesn’t care about that aspect.
I don’t believe in low-fat cheese let alone fat free That’s an oxymoronic abomination, some item from surreal nightmares. My imagination fails me there.
I’ve been happy with some of the things I cooked in my air fryer and didn’t care for many others. I just ordered the grinder and sausage stuffing attachment for my KitchenAid along with sausage casings from Amazon due in tomorrow so I see some sausage-making this weekend.
Picked up packets of sausage seasoning for making Andouille and Kielbasa sausage and a big pork butt to grind up.
What temp and how long did you cook your sausage in your air fryer?
I know! I laugh all the way thru my steaks, chops, ribs and bacon!
wow…stuffed with cheddar AND wrapped in bacon! You guys are rocking your air fryer!