My Story

I lived HARD. It was a nonstop party though my 20s and early 30s, which although fun, and full of memories that most people only see in movies, eventually left my body and mind a mess. I woke up one day over 340 lbs, wondering how things had managed to get so far out of control. I gave up my apartment, all of my stuff, and moved back to live with family and figure out how to get healthy again. 4 years later (and to date), I weigh just under 190lbs. How was this accomplished?

First was changing the way I thought of food / dieting so that feeling better about myself outweighed the need for immediate gratification. I think if were being honest, most of us carry a fair bit of buried shame, born from feeling like we fail ourselves again and again in little ways every time we lose the debate in our heads about what we should or shouldn’t be eating, should or shouldn’t be doing for exercise etc.. If I made a mistake, I had to choose to let it go, and focus on the next decision being one I could be proud of.. because adding to the shame just made me more likely to eat to pacify those feelings. For those willing to do a small meditation along those lines, 10 minutes a day to remind myself of these things made them so much easier to apply. Once my decision making process was one less prone to self-defeatism, it was a matter of what tools to use to get things moving in the right direction. I started reading about Atkins, learned about ketosis, and came up with a ketogenic diet (what is a ketogenic diet?) I felt I could live with on a long terms basis, and not feel deprived. What did I choose to do exactly? Well I felt that counting carbohydrates was going to make me feel like I was depriving myself of food, so decided that instead, I would eat only zero net carb foods (what does zero net carbs mean?), and the vegetables with the lowest amount of carbohydrate, and allow myself to eat as much as I wanted at meal times.

Next was creating a routine. I always hated routine, but it turned out to be the single most important aspect to turning my life around. Although weight loss was the driving force to changing my eating habits, the thing that turned out to be most impacting was the freedom from the constant mental energy expenditure / back and forth in my head revolving food. I filled my fridge with only zero carb foods, and the lowest carb vegetables, decided on meal times when I could eat anything in there, and never deviated from that. Fixed meal times were actually easier than anticipated, because protein and fat fill you up for long periods of time, so getting hungry between meals wasn’t really an issue. What started to happen after a month or two, is I stopped thinking about food entirely between meals.. I had become conditioned to always eating at those times, and so my mind slowly stopped thinking about it entirely in between. It’s hard to explain how much relief comes from that alone.

The last component was exercise. The ketogenic diet made things so much easier on this front as well. The improved energy made me want to exercise more, and as I lost weight and felt lighter, made it feel like less of a chore. I applied the same concept of making the next small decision one I could be happy about, and again created a routine.. So eventually there was no mental battle to be won every time I thought I should exercise.

To date I am happier and healthier than I have ever been, and throughout this process, struggled to find good information on how to practically apply a ketogenic diet to my life. Over four years of mining for nuggets of zero carb gold online, and creating delicious, truly zero net carb recipes by trial and error have been put together in this site, in the hopes of making that journey easier for others.

I encourage everyone’s input on the site, their experiences with ketosis, variations of my recipes, or zero net carb products / recipes of their own.. just leave your comments on the most appropriate page, and I promise to keep an eye out and respond on a regular basis.