Is Idli Allowed in Keto Diet

Practical questions on keto and low carb

A recap of last week's AMA

Last Friday, Kiran Jonnalagadda and Suman Bolar hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on the #kilter channel in Friends of HasGeek Slack. The AMA was on life with low carb and ketogenic diet patterns. The hosts have been practitioners for over a year each. This is a lightly edited recap.

Raghu Mohan: First question — What is the difference between keto and low carb?

Kiran: One cares about being in ketosis, the other doesn't. Keto is low carb. Vice versa not true.

Suman: A ketogenic diet is focused on burning fat as fuel. A low-carb lifestyle involves consuming as little carb as possible, but does not necessarily involve burning fat as fuel.

Sandhya Ramesh: Is there really "good" fat and "bad" fat? Same with good and bad cholesterol?

Kiran: I think most people agree transfat is bad under any framework. Saturated fat isn't looking so bad anymore, however. Also, omega-3 and omega-6 fats have distinct properties.

Suman: That "good" and "bad" cholesterol thing is badly misunderstood. People think that LDL is "bad" cholesterol". But it's now been found that there are two kinds of LDL that differ in their shape and size. Elevated levels of one type do you no harm; of the other, correlate to cardiac disease.

Chaitanya Prabhu: Do you have to keep a count on calories consumed/burnt?

Kiran: IMO, calorie counting is pointless. It's inaccurate and misleading. Count macronutrients by weight instead.

Suman: To begin with, I used to weigh my food. Over time, you become adept at eyeballing and calculating in your head. My rough rule of thumb for protein content: one egg 6g, any meat is approximately 20% by weight.

Kiran: Same here. I used to weigh everything for a month or so, until I felt comfortable eyeballing.

Prasanna: Are there any known side effects in the long term? I assume this being relatively new

Kiran: It's been well studied since at least the 1920s. The main side effect is being a social outcast because you won't eat what they want you to eat.

Sandhya Ramesh: Why do people often say that Keto leads to kidney problems?

Kiran: They mistake keto's high fat for a high protein diet, which was the original Atkins recommendation. Keto is closer to what's now called a "modified Atkins" diet plan, which reverses the fat and protein ratios.

I've been more or less continuously on ketosis since October 2015. My health is better than ever. I was previously pre-diabetic. I'm not anymore. I think I prefer the "side-effects" on this, whenever they'll show up, better than the guaranteed side-effects of where I was earlier.

Sutirth Chakravarty: No side effects, rather keto is a lifestyle. I followed keto for 8 months.

Suman: There's also the notion that since ketones (the byproducts of ketosis) must be flushed out by the kidneys, it places "extra load" on them.

Raghu Mohan: Can you enter ketosis on a low carb diet? How low should your carb intake be if you have to enter ketosis?

Kiran: Everyone's metabolism differs. Ballpark is under 25g of carb in a 24 hour period, sustained for a few days.

Suman: Differs for different people. Depends on a number of factors, including fat:lean muscle ratio, genetics, etc. To enter ketosis, as Kiran said, 25–30g of net carb per day (that's total carb minus fiber) for several days running.

Sandhya Ramesh: What can you snack on through the day? Typically, snacks are biscuits and such. On keto, do we have options apart from nuts and cheese?

Kiran: The urge to snack reduces over time. Nuts and cheese are low effort snacks. Beyond these, you'll have to find a supply or make your own (since keto-friendly snacks aren't exactly available on store shelves).

Suman: I snack on: small quantities of nuts and seeds, dried meat in the form of jerky (either make your own or buy from the US, sugar-free). I also bake my own goodies using coconut flour or almond flour. Also — because you are eating so much protein, which has a much higher satiety factor, you simply do not feel as hungry.

Pratik Shah: Where did you get Almond flour from? Amazon.in ?

Kiran: I made my own by grinding almonds in the mixie (which makes meal, not flour). Later I found it on Amazon.

Sutirth: The snacks should be cheese. Biscuit will throw you out of ketosis.

Aditya Rajan: In the context of lifting, would keto be better suited for a bulk or a cut?

Kiran: Cut. If you're going to go on a restrictive diet, it makes sense to restrict for specific outcomes.

Sutirth: In bulk basically your calorie intake should be high considering your carbs ratio would be higher.

Aditya: Consequently, is it possible to lean bulk while on keto?

Sutirth: Nope for lean bulk you need to have sufficient amount of carbs. Whereas in keto your carbs are less than 5%. I am doing bulk at the moment, hence can relate to the question.

Kiran: [to Aditya] No personal experience with that. I've had success with keto for fat loss, and now I want to train with it for running endurance.

Kiran: [to Sutirth] Surely you mean protein, not carbs?

Sutirth: No Kiran, I mean in bulk phase your carbs should be on higher macro ratio.

Raghu: Why?

Sutirth: For lean muscle building. Lean bulk is a process where one puts on muscle with time to avoid gaining fats at a rapid pace

Kiran: How do you build muscle out of carbs? [Unanswered]

Mehul Ved: [to Kiran] For endurance, do you also stay on keto for a race? Considering most of us do carb loading and also have high, simple carb diet during the race.

Kiran: That will be my experiment for this year. I know of at least one runner who does it on ketosis. Going to try for myself.

Mehul: So what kind of calorie intake would you be having during the race?

Kiran: I want to get to having no calorie intake during the race, and no carb loading before.

Sandhya Ramesh: How intensely can you workout when on keto? Traditional advice is to have carbs before and carbs + protein after rigorous exercise to help muscles recover

Suman: This really depends on the kind of workout you are doing. The advice to consume carb before your workout is often construed to apply to any workout… but if you are doing some light cardio, for example, I wouldn't.

Sutirth: You can as intense as possible. I lifted 110 kg squats and 120 kg deadlift while on keto. Calories intake 1800 cal per day.

Chaitanya Prabhu: What is the easiest way to keep a check on your macros?

Kiran: Google for nutrition facts for any ingredient and check the ratios there against the weight of the ingredient you're about to use. The eyeballing habit is surprisingly easy to pick up. I had never cooked anything more than Maggi before I started doing this.

Suman: If you eat packaged food, become adept at reading the label. Ignore calories; look instead at total carb minus fiber and the protein content. MyFitnessPal (MFP) is great if you stick to basic ingredients (eggs, for example, or flour) but once you look at a dish (say chicken curry) it can be all over the map. As with anything else online, you need to be adept at winnowing accurate from inaccurate data. Google pulls info from the USDA database.

Prasanna: Looking for similar apps in the indian context, an app called HealthifyMe showed up. It boasts of 20k Indian food database. Does anyone use it?

Kiran: I tried HealthifyMe and found two issues: one, it didn't pre-list any of my homemade stuff, and the UI got clunky around feeding it nutrient data for my personal meals. At the time I was trying it, I was eyeballing nutrients rather than weighing. Two, it has an (IMO) unhealthy focus on counting calories rather than macronutrients.

Raghu Mohan: Do diets affect mental health? If so, how and why?

Suman: I have suffered from what is known as treatment-resistant clinical depression for many years. I have been (am still) on medication. When I ditched the carb, the symptoms worsened for a short while, but over time, my medication has been halved. The mechanism for this is little-known. Right now, the thinking is that this is due to two things: one, lower inflammation in the body; and two, reduced insulin resistance.

Kiran: I don't feel drowsy anymore, but that's about it.

Swaroop Hegde: What's a recommended alternate diet when not in ketosis?

Suman: If your goal is overall health — stay low carb.

Sutirth: Well depends upon one's goal. What you want to achieve?

Swaroop: Goal is to maintain weight once goal weight is achieved.

Sutirth: I would go with low carb.

Lakshman Prasad: 25g of carb — what does that translate to in the corresponding weight of sugar, cereals etc?

Sutirth: You have to read packaging instruction to calculate net carbs. Net carbs is always minus the dietary fibers.

Kiran: Yeah, look up nutrition facts.

Shreyas Rajagopal: When y'all started, how were the initial weeks in terms of cooking? i.e. did you plan X days ahead?

Suman: For me, more a question of being prepared. So — making sure I always had nuts and cheese in the house, making sure I had olive oil to whip up a salad dressing.

One exception: when eating out, I always looked up the menu ahead of time and decided what I was going to eat. And in my home, I simply ate whatever the family was eating (say, chicken curry) as a soup, minus the rice.

Sutirth: I personally planned for the whole day rather than week. Because for sometimes it was availability of greens, for e.g spinach or lettuce.

Kiran: I never got organised enough to do meal planning. For me, it was a series of culinary adventures, trying to cook something new each day.

Chaitanya Prabhu: What are some good sources of quick keto Indian recipes? I am completely on egg and want to try something else without the fear of consuming too much carb.

Kiran: Lots of sources that aren't necessarily Indian, but not too far off from what's achievable with Indian ingredients. We'll put what we can on the Kilter blog, but since Kilter isn't strictly about keto it'll be a mixed bag there.

Sutirth: You can also check keto kitchen on YouTube.

Suman: If you are going low carb, practically ANY indian non-veg recipe will work well, barring those that use mountains of onion or tomato.

Kiran: That means kadai dishes. Veg kadai, paneer kadai, etc. Those are onion+tomato gravies and they have lots of the base ingredients in them.

Lakshman Prasad: Does reducing/increasing the number of meals have any effect?

Kiran: For a while I found myself consuming just one meal a day. I kept at it for a month and found it completely manageable.

Suman: No. As long as your macros remain stable, you can eat as often as you like. However, if you would like to try intermittent fasting, that's a whole another story.

Sandhya Ramesh: How do you measure carbs in foods like idli or in vegetables?

Suman: Most accurate way is to input individual ingredients into Google. Quicker way is to try searching on MyFitnessPal or other such websites (with the warning that they are ballpark estimates at best).

Kiran: Consider the ratio of rice to urad dal in an idli. Rice is about 70–80% carb (depending on variety) and urad dal is north of 50% as well. So basically you don't bother with idlis at all on keto.

Pratik: We use HealthifyMe app to track. Has most Indian dishes.

Kiran: Yeah, HealthifyMe works for any well defined food item.

Pratik Shah: What is the effect of not being in keto, but in low carb (45g / 24 hrs)?

Suman: As you lower your carb intake, your body will cease releasing huge spurts of insulin. You therefore become more sensitive to insulin, and your metabolism begins to heal.

Lakshman: OMG. So, (excess) carb is really a big deal even in overall health. Not just to reduce weight, but to be overall healthier? By insulin sensitivity?

Kiran: Yes!

Pratik: I meant over long periods of time… If I consistently eat low carb, and don't compensate by having sufficient fats. And if I don't have great amount of fat reserves. e.g. I'm 185cm & 73kgs.

Kiran: Insulin resistance is a thing. This is the damage fructose does. It doesn't cause insulin release, but it promotes insulin resistance.

Pratik: Is there any long term effect of consistently under-eating (defined by calories)

Kiran: Depending on how your metabolism is wired, your body will have to cover the gap by burning body fat or protein from unused muscles.

Chaitanya Prabhu: Why do Keto veterans speak about fasting? Is it to break a plateau, or is there more to it?

Kiran: To break plateaus. The body doesn't like losing fat. Sooner or later it'll figure out how to adapt to your diet and stop losing fat. Fasting helps confuse the body and resume fat burn. Look up "homeostasis." [Example]

Lakshman: Fasting. Define. Is water allowed? Fruit juice, lemon juice, fat? Also, how long? Does one meal a day count as 1 day of fasting, as 20+ hours elapse without any food?

Kiran: For me, fasting is calorie-free. Black coffee works, juice or fat doesn't. When you do 20+ hours without food, that's "intermittent fasting", itself a powerful tool when required.

Sutirth: Water allowed. Anything that spikes your insulin level breaks the fast. Intermittent fasting can be done 16:8 where 16 hours is fast and 8 hours is your feeding window to cover up calories.

Lakshman: So, being on keto (and consuming fat/protein) is also fasting?

Sutirth: Nope.

Kiran: For me, zero calorific value.

Suman: Zero calorie drinks, IMO.

Lakshman: so Coke Zero 😉

Kiran: Yes, Coke Zero works. IMO, Coke Zero is an unhealthy habit regardless of its use in fasting.

Raghu Mohan: Under what conditions is dietary ketosis or being on a low carb diet not advised?

Lakshman: When the body doesn't have adequate fat to burn?

Kiran: Yeah, there's an unfortunate tendency for some people with body image issues to attempt keto even if they are underweight.

Suman: I have been unable to find any scientific basis for keeping carb counts high.

Kiran: I also think a radical change to your diet pattern (switching from high carb to low carb) needs careful monitoring if your body is compromised in some way, as the transition can be rough. [Eg: if you have diabetes.]

Chaitanya Prabhu: How do you manage to stay on keto when you have a cough? Cough syrups that I have used are all sugar bombs

Kiran: Small amounts shouldn't kick you out of ketosis.

Sutirth: Once body is keto adapted small dosage is fine.

Suman: Also, some cough syrups (Alex for example) are available sugar-free.

Lakshman Prasad: Why is it not more common-knowledge/prevalent-wisdom that cereal based diet isn't exactly healthy?

Kiran: That's why we have Kilter. Knowledge takes time to spread. There's so much junk out there. Today I had an argument with someone who sincerely believed the water memory effect is real.

Suman: I think also we are in search of easy answers. Readymade information. We are no longer willing to take the time and effort to experiment and try things out for ourselves.

Raghu Mohan: I faced stiff resistance from family members while giving Keto a try. They were sure that I was going to end up with some kind of heart problem. Have any of you faced this and how have you dealt with it?

Suman: I have monitored my bloods over a period of three years. In answer to "you are killing yourself with all that bacon" I show them how my lipid profile, and my blood glucose to insulin ratio have improved over time. In social situations, I just say "I am under the guidance of a GP and a nutritionist" which in my case was true.

Kiran: Likewise. I told people the alternative was becoming diabetic.

Sutirth: See, I used to weigh 150kg. What possibly would have gone worse? I studied myself and implemented it. Yes, the only wrong thing I did in the start was heavy cardio. Once you see changes in mirror everything else is put to rest.

Lakshman Prasad: Once you lose weight on keto and get back to carb, how long does it take to gain weight?

Kiran: Again, depends on metabolism.

Sutirth: See, if you maintain healthy lifestyle all you gain would be muscles and not fat.

Suman: I had an absolutely WILD time from October all the way through to Jan 1. Ate horribly — cake, bread, jam, chocolate bars. For 10 weeks. AT the end of that time, I had gained 6 kg, of which I guess 2–3 kg was water. Depends on your metabolism, on how insulin sensitive you are, on how much carb you are eating daily… a bunch of different factors.

Chaitanya Prabhu: Can you please share how long each one of you took to reach your goal weight and what was the toughest part of the journey?

Suman: I am not yet at goal weight. Along the way I learnt to pay attention to other metrics too. My bloods, how I feel, how many flights of stairs I can climb. I had to lose 40kg. I have lost 30 since May of 2015. With many, many episodes of deciding to go off-plan. I began at 103 kilos. I am now at 73.

Kiran: For me, goal was to drop from 86 kg to 72 kg in 12 months. I did it in 5. Later I dropped the goal further to 66 (for total 20 kg loss), but I haven't been as committed, and I'm now hovering around 70–71 kg.

Manoj Mathai: What happens to the fat consumed as part of the keto/LCHF diet? Is the body able to use it all for energy? How much of it passes through?

Suman: I am oversimplifying this, but:

Excess dietary fat and excess sugar are both stored as fat in fat cells.
Such fat storage happens only in the presence of insulin.
At the same time, insulin also inhibits fat burning (lipolysis).
Optimal fat burning therefore happens only when blood insulin is minimal (as in ketosis).

In the absence of glucose, fat from meals is easily stored, but also easily accessed for energy needs because insulin is low.

Eating unlimited quantities of dietary fat defeats the purpose of weight loss (if that is your goal). The main purpose of eating fat on LCHF or keto is to ensure satiety (and therefore sustainability of the diet) as well as to regulate the functioning of hunger hormones like leptin and ghrelin.

Ramprasad Rajendran: Why did you guys choose one over the other? (Keto over low carb or vice versa)

Suman: I tried ketosis. There were a number of reasons it didn't work for me. Constipation was one reason (I have in the past had several surgeries for perianal abscesses and so this is a huge no-no for me). Another was that my body seemed to respond better to slightly higher levels of carb (I try not to exceed 80gm a day). And finally, I felt that low carb gave me a little more leeway, which made the whole thing more doable and sustainable.

Ramprasad: Okay, it is better to experiment and see what suits.

Sutirth: Exactly, experiment and see, but don't starve your body.

Suman: That's my approach, yes. Your body, your goals, your metabolism, your constraints will all play a role.

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Is Idli Allowed in Keto Diet

Source: https://blog.kilter.in/practical-questions-on-keto-and-low-carb-d99fdc6e48e9