Prevention vs Treatment

First of all, I'm so glad you're here at theketoathlete.org! I started this website as a place to organize and collect information for those of us interested in using a ketogenic diet to fuel a healthy and active life. This is a meeting place for all the fat fueled fitness enthusiasts out there!

There are many, many great resources and supportive communities for the use of a ketogenic diet for weight loss and the treatment of metabolic syndrome. The important word there is treatment. When a disease state has occurred, a very-low-carb diet can be used as a therapeutic treatment option. But what about those of us who are not sick and would like to take preventative measures in order to maintain our health?

Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, defined this difference as Life Guards vs Swim Coaches. If you are drowning, you need a lifeguard. Your doctor is your lifeguard - the trained professional there to save your life when things go wrong. But if you're drowning, what you needed was a swim coach. You needed that swim coach years earlier in order to prevent the drowning incident in the first place.

With that in mind, theketoathlete.org is a resource for "swim coaches" - many of us taking self-directed measures to teach ourselves how to swim.

This is an important distinction in many ways, because maintenance strategies are very different from treatment strategies. If you have a broken leg, what would be the best approach to heal your broken leg? One option would be to look around you at all the people who do not have broken legs and see what they're doing. It seems they're all walking and running around a lot. Conclusion? You should walk and run around a lot on your broken leg so that you can be just like all the people without broken legs!

My husband with a broken leg in 2010. He did not get better by walking and running around like all the uninjured people.

That's nonsense of course. If you have a broken leg, you need a very different approach from what the healthy people are doing. You need a doctor, maybe surgery, definitely a cast. For weeks or months your lifestyle will be inhibited as it must be in order for you to heal. Then you probably need a physio therapist and a long rehab program. Then, maybe long term, you can hope to be walking and running around as one of the people without a broken leg.

When it comes to nutrition, I see people make this mistake all the time. An overweight, metabolically deranged person looks to see what life-long healthy people are doing and tries to follow those behaviors. They are trying to learn to swim while drowning. They are running around on a broken leg. It's doomed to fail.

Here at theketoathlete.org, the content is from the prospective of maintaining a life-long disease free state. We are practicing swimming. With no broken legs, we can handle more variety. So in my recipes you will see I sometimes use sweeteners and that I use (small amount of) the real thing - maple syrup, honey, brown sugar. These would likely be a no-go on a therapeutic application of a ketogenic diet. But with a properly functioning metabolism and an active lifestyle, I've found small amounts of the real thing do not interfere with ketogenesis.

I also post openly about cheat days (we call it Faturday). I have one or two meals a week that are not at all "keto" - Pizza night with my kids, dinner out with friends, lasagna at my uncle's, etc. This works just fine for me as I maintain my health, but it might be a terrible idea for someone else who is working hard to regain their health.

So lets continue to support each other and share information, but keep in mind we're not all at the same place or in need of the same things :-)