First of all I get it , some of you on here don’t do other foods ever , and are strict keto eaters for what ever reason , but I’ve always had my day here and there away from the diet for different reasons , it’s usually when I just can’t find anything that fits in to the diet by not being at home. It’s not all the time but does happen. Anyway lately when I’ve had it happen the guilt from it had been quite bad and I’m almost beside myself to get back on the keto wagon and stay on for as long as I can before it happens again. I mean I took on this diet to lose weight and see if it helped with my anxiety, after only minimal results with the later , the main reason is to stay trim and be healthy. I just think it’s an over reaction to eat one non keto meal and freak out about it , I think the strictness of this diet as given me an unhealthy relationship with anything non keto. Maybe a bit of obsessive behaviour. This will be a good talking point if nothing else. Interested if anyone else does it as well.
Has Keto Woe given me a unhealthy relationship with other foods
Okay I started my journey the first of September 2022, I started trying to do strick keto, that lasted about 6 to 8 weeks. I migrated to moderately low carb at that point and have been completely fine with it. My rules are no fast foods, no processed carbs, no artificial sweeteners. In other words if it is real food I will eat it all in moderation. While I don’t count calories or carbs, I did count calories for over a decade, I know from experience what is good for me and what isn’t good for me now. By my guessing my daily carb intake average is about 75-90 grams. I eat a high protein diet followed closely by fat. I have lost 50 pounds, and 12 inches from my waist, I will be 76 Thanksgiving. My lifestyle is fasting an average of 19 hours each day, and eating until I am comfortably satisfied. I never feel stuffed and I am never hungry. Also, I never eat anything with wheat in it, so no bread of any kind.
I walk and hike the forest trails in my neighborhood and stay active. I have had two vacation trips over the time of my new lifestyle and didn’t fast during the vacation trips but mostly stuck to my eating habits. I managed both vacations without any weight gain.
Yeah, addiction is a pain in the butt. I don’t think keto gave it to us, but it has definitely revealed it. When we are eating carbs all the time, and are therefore hungry all the time, we don’t notice our carb addiction. It’s when we try to cut way back on our intake that it becomes noticeable.
Not every one is vulnerable to addiction. The estimate is that about 20% of the population are vulnerable to any given addiction, be it a substance or a type of behaviour. And having one addiction doesn’t mean being vulnerable to other addictions, either. I know a guy who is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, who can smoke without getting addicted to nicotine, whereas another friend was hooked by her first cigarette but finds it easy to resist drugs and alcohol. Go figure!
In your case, try to take a page from the A.A. Big Book and tell yourself you can have all the carb-laden snacks you want–tomorrow, just not right now. That usually works much better than trying to swear off for ever, which usually gives us a feeling of deprivation. So you can still have carbs, just not at the moment. If you give it some time, you are likely to find the keto diet so satisfying, that the cravings for carbs become much more manageable.
The final alternative is to cut out plant-based foods altogether; i.e., go fully zero-carb/carnivore. I am finding that I don’t hardly crave carbohydrates at all, whereas the cravings were more difficult to resist when I was still eating some carbohydrate. Many carnivores testify to this effect, and they say that their relation to food is finally normal, with this way of eating.
In any case, good luck! Just keep calm and keto on! 
Your personality and whatnot must be unfortunate. I never felt any guilt from eating and once I opened a package half-filled with Australian candy and jumped it, right after several carnivore days 
Of course, keto isn’t magic so if you have some inclination to feel guilty when you go off or a previous eating disorder (I know such a person), it won’t just go away. Certain otherwise helpful, okay thing can cause problems, like tracking or weighing ourselves. It’s up to us to solve it if we can or avoid it somehow. I can imagine keto is mentally unhealthy for some even if physically not.
Keto doesn’t even feel particularly restrictive to me, I usually have the opposite problem, it’s such a very loose diet that I gain momentum and go overboard Carnivore is easier. I go off either way so it may not mean much but I still do days very close to carnivore way easier than normal keto ones (I blame the carbs as always). But higher-carb is the worst, it doesn’t give me balance at all and it’s impossible to stick to that.
My relationship with food isn’t right either but it’s just some obsession and overeating tendencies. I have that on every woe, tracking is better on higher-carb as I don’t track there at all but everything else is worse… I still have a huge room for improvement. Fortunately I don’t need to choose as carnivore(-ish) the best, no matter my viewpoint. So I focus to do it and if I go off, so be it, I do my best to enjoy the hell out of it and I inevitably bounce back. It’s just more or less normal food! How could I feel quilty? That’s not hedonistic at all, I have enough true problems. If I damaged my body with my diet, I should have feel something (I am still immune to guilty feelings due to food I suppose but I “should” feel that, kind of) but I don’t do that.
(Oh I can feel bad just fine, it’s just not guilt, more like disappointment and frustration but that is rare too. I am optimistic, it’s easy for me to bounce back so I look forward.)
WHY do you feel bad if you can’t avoid going off? You have a reason, it’s not like you choose going off (as I do it maybe too often… 
)… Or if you can, ensure you won’t go off. Pack enough food, find a supermarket… There are situations where you can’t do that but it’s rare, there are way more likely that temptation, social pressure or something else mess up with your woe. You can accept it or fight it. I can’t fight temptation at all but I have methods to avoid it most of the time…
By the way, eggs (especially yolks) make almost everything better in my opinion. Chicken may not be one in my case but sounds a good idea. Yolks are tasty and fatty, 2 things chicken breast isn’t so good at.
Well as you stated, you do have anxiety issues so that seems reasonable in your case. I think it’s reasonably natural to feel guilt because you believe you failed yourself. But did you really fail? I don’t think so. Sometimes you just gotta do what you shouldn’t do just to remind yourself why you shouldn’t do it in the first place.
Forget the mistake but remember the lesson.
I’m stricter than you being carnivore so my choices when away from home are even less. I went on a four day trip recently and I had to make a few concessions. I had to buy some food that wasn’t strictly carnivore but it was as clean as I could get so it was less bad than eating SAD. I don’t feel the least bit guilty and I darn sure wasn’t going to upset my trip. If there was nothing I was willing to eat then I would just fast. No big deal.
I’m home now and back to eating right and all is good with my world.
After a while you will be thrilled to learn that your little detours from keto are just barely bumps in the road. Most of us have strayed, for whatever reason, and MAYBE the scale shows it, or our joints feel it… but it is absolutely temporary if you go right back to keto. You can bounce back super fast.
I stray every so often on purpose. It’s usually for a holiday or a fun family get together. I don’t worry about it because I know the next meal or the next day will be right back on track. If you can have that kind of attitude and discipline to get back on track, I don’t think you should worry about it.
( I’ve been keto for six years, so maybe it’s just that I’ve been following this WOE long enough to develop that attitude. I was definitely more fanatical at first.)
Good point.
If I had 6 keto days a week, I would be totally impressed by myself. Or not. As I did 14 carnivore days in row (with very little and limited meat at that!) and it was easy enough. If I feel it’s easy, I am not proud or impressed. And if it’s not easy, I go off. So good thing I don’t feel quilty.
But even if I go off 1-2 times per week, I still can see improvement compared to my pre-keto or rather pre-carni times 
I still like to see improvements every year… And I do that, I don’t need to do things perfectly for that to happen! And that’s good as I am me but even people who can resist temptation, are humans. It’s normal not to be perfect. Our body can handle some bumps, we just should be mostly good to it. It’s individual how much but if one is more sensitive, they get more motivation to behave too.
This.
Yes, I have a very heavy heart when I fail, I think that’s just how I’m going to be wired for my life, disappointed in myself when I’m imperfect. I’m working on it, though!
For me, the fewer “data points” I have to go on, the more important and impactive one slip up looks and feels. I beat myself up because I only kept my promise to myself for a few days, or I lost four pounds in a month and then seemingly gained back three overnight. Having a nice big dossier of success to lean on is a really helpful, reassuring thing though, even if I do feel momentarily upset and weak. Hopping on a scale and thinking ok, I just gained three pounds, but over the last two years, I lost 40. I have over 700 “good days” under my belt. I’ve got this.
It’s not so bad to feel that way. After all, we don’t really have any control over our feelings, anyway. But the goal is to move on, instead of dwelling in it. As @Geezy56 says, “Forget the mistake, but remember the lesson.”
Self-forgiveness is just the same as forgiving others: not insisting on payback. It doesn’t mean you have to think the original situation was okay, just that you are not going to exact retribution for it. And of all the people in the world who might deserve retribution, you are not one of them!
@LPT I totally get what you are saying. Since l have been on the keto diet l have become very strict about what l eat and can get a bit panicky if l eat something which isn’t very low carb. It’s as if l have now become slightly afraid of the high carb foods plus all grains and legumes. If l PLAN to eat some carbs, for whatever reason , then it is OK, and l just go back to being strict as soon as possible. If it is planned, it feels OK. So far l have only done this once, but I have another planned carb meal in 2 weeks time, which will be fine.
Keto can’t do that to you, only you can. I say that as a person with a terrible history with food, a binge eater that needs semaglutide to curb me back down to only a normal over-eater, and an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to track everything. Because if I don’t do all that, I’ll slowly slip of the track, and go to hell very quickly.
You need to train yourself to use what you now see as a weakness, and make it your strength. That obsession with food can make you better at adhering to healthy eating, and doing it for the long haul when many others will fail. But at the same time, you need to drill into your brain that NEVER cheating, and NEVER eating off plan is NOT normal for the 99%! When you screw up, rather than letting the guilt factor send you into crazytown, know that because you do it right more than most people, that you’ve earned the leeway to eat a cheat meal without guilt as you’ve given yourself the wiggle room.
For me, 4yrs of strict keto gave me my life back, BUT on the other end, it also made be hyper sensitive to any carbs I ate, I’d crash and burn, have days worth of cravings after, then over restrict after the fact out of guilt, that was wrong. I always felt restricted doing it. Since switching to TKD/CKD and having carbs around workouts, that no longer happens, I don’t go into food coma’s, don’t feel hungover the day after, process them right now, and I’ve also acheived getting my BF% back into the 10’s, from the 30’s, which I couldn’t do otherwise because of all the back and forth.
Just gotta find what works for you, don’t worry about fitting your WOE into some generic cookie cutter.
This is called life. Everyone’s journey is different. While we expect life to be linear, it rarely is. We all live in the real world, where at times we do not eat according to our plans. So what. Life is already hard enough. You already have awareness. Sometimes asking yourself better questions helps. Though sometimes I do have a bowl of ice cream. Beating yourself up is not the answer. Accept it and move on. I have been doing keto and low carb for 13+ years now, and I eat what I want. Mostly healthy stuff. But there are times when I don’t. This is okay. Look at the big picture.
Also, keep in mind that those on this forum are generally successful Keto/carnivore people. I have met many who failed or could not do Keto for a variety of reasons.
Keto has made me afraid of carbs. It was very difficult to eat more carbs when I decided to try going from very low carb (keto, or carnivore) to low carb. The fear was definitely pathogenic.
But what I gained from keto was far more important to me than what I lost. Thanks to keto, I’ve learned a lot about food. I’ve become conscious of carbs and learned recipes low carb that could replace carby ones. I still use them, even though I’m not in the keto woe anymore.
Same except I do keto most of the time but not always. And I cook for a high-carber. There is a carnivore dish he likes (he eats it with lots of carbs, that’s true…) and several keto ones. If I leave him to his own devices, he cooks something plant-based, almost always. It’s fine but not very satiating, even for him.
Too bad I can’t average myself with someone regarding a single thing sometimes… I eat carbs extremely easily even if I don’t want to. It’s fine as long as it’s still carnivore but of course it’s not always that… I have a very few high-carb items I super easily eat and in big amounts even though it’s highly reduced compared to my past (even in my low-carb times, my off days often were quite wild).
I still developed a few barriers on low-carb/keto/carnivore I can’t break, no matter how I don’t care about carbs at the moment. I am pretty much unable to use flour in baking except bread type things. And I can’t even buy sugar, no matter what is my reason for it. Twice I wanted to (once it wasn’t even food related) and couldn’t. But these are fine, no matter how frustrated I get that I can’t make crunchy biscuits/crackers… (But I could’t them even with flour, I just can’t stop putting eggs into my baked things.)