Keto F*cked Me Up, and Then Peating F*cked Me Up Some More

This post was not written using AI.

I will always love you, Ray, even if your followers got me fat.

A digression for which I ask the indulgence of my readers who are interested in other things: many here are refugees from X (or perhaps still dual citizens) and a fair number there are also interested in health and nutrition topics.

My diet was primarily ketogenic starting in perhaps 2016. This isn’t the place to get into it for those who are unfamiliar, but essentially, a ketogenic diet involves reducing net carbohydrate below the threshold at which the body flips a switch and begins to rely primarily on ketone bodies produced from fat for its fuel, rather than glycogen (it creates a little glycogen for the tissues that require it from protein, through a process called gluconeogenesis). It’s stellar for weight management, as I can attest (and it also puts the final nail in the coffin of the “calories in, calories out” model of weight loss and gain, as I can confirm from the personal experience of eating upwards of 4,000 calories a day and remaining lean). I had a carnivore period in there as well, which only ended because one day after six months of nothing but ground beef, I woke up and thought, “I’m living on literal dog food.”

Unfortunately, stellar as it is for staying lean, keto is not so stellar for other things. It is an emergency mechanism, something we developed evolutionarily so that we could survive a dearth of available carbohydrate. That it is secondary is evidenced irrefutably by the fact that the presence of carbohydrate turns it off — the body prefers to run on carbs. In fact, keto is a kind of starvation state, and like straightforward starvation, it produces cascades of stress hormones — and downstream of that, it downregulates critical functions. The tl;dr is that it tanks thyroid function and androgens. By the time this reality really sunk in thanks to some labwork I did last September, my testosterone was half what it had been when I started (and libido was affected similarly, if that’s not TMI), and my T3 (active thyroid hormone) and free testosterone were out-of-range low.

So this N=1gga decided, of course, that a change was desperately needed. And I went down the Ray Peat/bioenergetic rabbit hole, of course, as anyone would in current year who was researching why not eating carbohydrate f*cked them up.

The tl;dr on Peat is that he was a mad genius who saw the human being in holistic terms, more so than almost any other foundational figure in health and nutrition. His vision focused on the primacy of metabolism: basically, taking energy (and therefore energetics) as seriously as structure in every domain. This is not the place to do a deep dive on Peat: I’m not capable of doing him justice and I’m writing this piece quickly before my workday anyway. Suffice it to say that his vision of the human being and human health is deeply compelling, especially for holistically and spiritually minded folks who nevertheless have an affinity for science (calling all Aquarians). You should read him, or read about him.

The trouble is, everyone asks for “how can I start with Peat?” and there is no answer really besides, read this handful of books and digest thousands of pages of his newsletters and listen to hundreds of hours of interviews. So since I wanted to take action, I did the best I could listening to secondary sources — some of the heavies in the bioenergetic space. I stopped fearing simple carbs. I drank milk and OJ and ate lots of fruit. Of course, I ate the carrot salad and the mussels. I ratcheted down my workouts to reduce stress. I stopped fasting. I stopped the cold showers. (I already had sleep down — eight hours religiously for years.) I even enjoyed some delicious Mexican Coca-Colas.

And what happened? LOL. In three months I gained 17.5 pounds of fat mass (measured by DEXA), lost a few pounds of lean mass, and my visceral adipose tissue (VAT) nearly tripled.

“Peating made me fat.” This is not just a meme; and I know it’s more than a meme because I had a few consults with one of the bioenergetic heavies and he confided to me that he gets many clients from another one of the bioenergetic heavies because they get fat following that guy’s advice, and can’t lose the weight merely by trying to juice thyroid function naturally. (I’m not going to name any names.) His counsel? Meticulous calorie tracking and maintaining a controlled calorie deficit. (“Oh, and ditch the sipping on OJ all the time.”) Exactly the kind of autism I thought I was rejecting when I went Peaty. Le sigh.

So where am I now? 2̶0̶ ̶p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶v̶i̶e̶r̶ (update! 27.7 pounds heavier, all fat!). But joking aside: I am done with extremes. I’m going to JERF (just eat real food). Lift. Get some cardio in (I was really lean when I was hiking 80 miles a week before kid #3). Eat a sane and normal diet, which in my case, is basically 70s style wholefoods cooking with some meat thrown in. Within reason, and without fanaticism, follow the traditional fasting rule of the Church. Do some intermittent fasting to generate a calorie deficit without calorie tracking. Track progress with DEXA and some additional labs. (Hoping that at least, Peating helped get hormones back on track — but since VAT is an estrogen factory, I’m not overly hopeful. We’ll see.)

Learn from me, brethren and sistren. Underneath dietary extremism of all kinds is, I think, the notion that we can make ourselves immortal and immune to chronic disease if only we do the biophysical “right thing,” and this notion is false. No diet and no physical lifestyle can do that. Jesus is the Savior, not your diet. Subtly, when we adopt extreme diet and lifestyle practices and philosophies, we’re doing it (I certainly was, anyway) because we fear illness and death. “That person got cancer, but I won’t because I’m [keto/vegetarian/vegan/carnivore/a Peater].” That’s the clandestine thought, which perhaps we don’t even admit to ourselves.