How to do keto when it feels like life is trying to sabotage you

Keto is not easy. Such a huge lifestyle change is never going to be easy, even when everything is in your favour, it's quite an adjustment. Now imagine if your life suddenly decides to start doing some internal sabotaging. Work gets crazy, you are studying full time, you have a new baby, or you have to spend lots of time away from home for whatever reason.

There are many ways you could suddenly find yourself facing the choice of life or new "diet". I've been pretty lucky so far, I work from home, don't have kids and when I started keto I had a lot of time to experiment with new food. But I am more the exception than the rule.

A few people have asked me how to fit keto into a busy lifestyle. This is a list of ways to simplify keto and ways to manage a new way of life when you just don't have time. Keto hacks. This list is not all inclusive, and should be used as a guide, rather than a list of absolutes to follow

I am not good at change.

I am not good at change. I have had a lot of change happen to me in a very short time span in this last year. The glamour of weight loss is starting to wear off and I am left a little broken. Suddenly finding yourself with the body that you dreamed of (not really, but close enough - I had more realistic expectations) leaves you with a very strong "what now" feeling and that is when you suddenly figure out that weight loss does not solve all your problems.

I stood in front of the mirror this morning staring at this body that I feel like an imposter in. I feel like a fraud. One day I will wake up and the owner of this body will want it back and I will go back to the old me, the real me. The me my brain thinks I deserve. The invisible me. That little voice in your head, the one who likes to voice your self-doubts, doesn't like me at all. She never has. I am not friends with the nasty self-hating voice in my head. She has been working on trying to ruin my life since I was old enough to understand her. And today I find myself wondering why I give her so much power.

The side effect of losing weight: other people

Start telling yourself that you are enough. Because, chances are, no one else will. My whole life I have been told repeatedly that I needed to lose weight, I was always made to feel that I was never good enough. This was done by people I knew, by friends, by family and in large part, by society. You all know this pressure, it starts when you realise you don't look like the "beautiful people", that you are different. It started for me when I was about 6. I didn't really look different then, but I felt different from everyone around me.

It's harder when this is coming from the people in your life. And, to a large degree, I don't think it's done on purpose but that doesn't make it sting any less.  When you spend your whole life hearing that you need to change, be better, be thinner, be different than you are; you start telling yourself this stuff. STOP THAT BULLSHIT RIGHT NOW. No one else is going to be your cheerleader, if you don't do it for yourself and by yourself, it won't happen.

Losing weight is bloody difficult, and I don't mean the physical stuff - because compared the things that come afterwards, that stuff is cake. The hard bits are the emotional baggage, adjusting to yourself and fielding other people's reactions. These things usually happen during and after weight loss. Despite this, weight loss is still 100% worth it. If only for the valuable lessons you learn about yourself and other people.

How To: Reading Labels

I used to see people reading labels in grocery stores and I would wonder what they were using that information for. I was perfectly happy continuing to live in happy ignorance of what I was putting in my body. I did not take my health seriously at all. When I started doing keto I had to train myself to READ EVERYTHING. No more blindly trusting that if a product had a heart health symbol on it, or it said "diabetic friendly" (the biggest lie you can find on packaging in South Africa), "sugar free" (when the contents list maltodextrin), "wholegrain", "all-natural", "organic", "gluten free", "low calorie",  oh and my favourite "superfood". I quickly figured out that the only person I could trust regarding my nutrition, was myself. Which meant I had to educate myself.

In the first few months I did a lot of reading and watched all the food related documentaries I could get my hands on, regardless of their point of view. I wanted all the information. Then I started filtering the information based on what I felt was working for my body. As I'm sure you've all figured out by now, I do keto, which means I severely limit my carbohydrate intake to less than 25g a day. I had to teach myself how to make sense of what food labels said so that I knew what I was eating each day.

My Story

Hi! So after finally starting my food blog I guess I should start by introducing myself. My name is Elizabeth (or Lisa, or Liz, or Littlebit, or Pix - I have too many nicknames and no idea how this happened). I am a type 2 diabetic, I also have hypothyroidism, PCOS, anemia and on the 9th of March 2016 I had a BMI of 40. For the last ten years of my life I had been slowly, passively, killing myself by pretending that everything was ok. My husband and I had decided that maybe the next step was kids and so, as one does, I went off the pill. As it turns out the birth control pill was the only thing holding my body together like a tiny piece of dental floss keeping the house from falling down. And the minute I went off it, all hell broke loose.