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Comment by antidaily | Hacker News Reader

There is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4124736/#S4titl...

Ive had pretty good success with Keto. Lost weight, have good energy. Check out the keto reddit if you want to try it out. Great resource.

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concur on a short term keto diet. I lost basically all my excess body fat. I struggled a little more with the brain fog, buy after doing it for about a month, I was able to get back into healthier habits. I wouldn't recommend it long term unless you have a medical condition that requires it. My nephew had seizures and he switched to ketogenic diet and his epilepsy calmed from multiple episodes a day to maybe one a day.

Wow. I also have a nephew with a seizure disorder who switched to a keto-like diet(!). Though, he's since changed medications and moved on to something else.

My experience is opposite yours. Mentally I'm much stronger when my brain runs on ketones than sugar.

This is all interesting, and warrants more actual research, but it's on a rat study that did not control for calories, so it's not super useful because we also know that:

1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms

2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).

Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.

I have a hypothesis that keto actually works just because the psychological effects of the ketone bodies result in less food consumption. Acetone (which accumulates in the brain on a ketogenic diet) is a sort of crude anaesthetic, and possibly, anaesthetics can reduce hunger.

If the (surprisingly large amount of) anecdotal evidence on /r/keto and similar messageboards is anything to go on, keto is very effective for losing a large amount of weight, possibly the best dietary strategy. But I don't think anyone really knows why.

I've always hypothesized that it's the fact that you can't eat most junk food. No chips, soda, candy, rice, bread, etc. Most fat people are eating too much of those things. I bet if they did a Keto + reasonable amounts of carbs in otherwise healthy dishes, they'd still be losing the weight.

The benefit of keto is more satiety than anything. All diets use calories deficits but on keto I'm not nearly has hungry as I am on sugars or starches. Chicken and rice vs chicken and broccoli and I'll take the latter.

That's generally what a keto diet turns into once you've lost your target weight. I eat carbs now but still try to keep them as low as possible and it's great to maintain my current weight.

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