In other posts, I have mentioned that Lurko and I are on the keto diet. In this post I’ll go into more detail about the hows and the whys.

Also, the whens: We started on November 18, 2023. After a month of slow progress, we added intermittent fasting. From then on, our window to eat was 8am to 3pm. No eating past 3pm. That added up to 18 hours of fasting every day.

We read that it’s not good for you to do keto for more than 6 months, so we paused our diet on May 13, 2024.

Then we assessed. In six months, I had gone from 78 kilos (171 lbs) to 58.1 kilos (128 lbs), a loss of 20 kilos (43 lbs).

Lurko started at 117 kilos (258 lbs), and by 5/13 was at 80.2 kilos (176 lbs), a loss of 37 kilos (82 lbs).

We were happy with these results, but we aren’t *quite* at our goals yet. After Lurko returned from Burning Flipside, we officially started up again on July 1 and we’ll stop when we hit our goals. Mine is to get under 54 kilos (119 lbs), and Lurko wants to get to 72 kilos (160 lbs). We don’t have that far to go. But let’s start from the beginning…

Why Diet?

1. When we moved to Mexico in November 2023, we were pretty overweight. In fact, at 5 feet tall and 171 pounds, I was the heaviest I’d ever been. I didn’t quite know how bad it was, because for years I refused to step on a scale. Over the last five years, Lurko and I had developed some good health habits: we quit smoking, quit drinking alcohol, and we usually just drink water. No soda, coffee, etc. However, we still had some bad habits. When we lived in the States, we ate a lot of fast food, a lot of sugar, and a lot of processed food. “Cooking” was often pizza or whatever we could heat up in a microwave. In the past, we both had made efforts to eat healthier, and would lose maybe five to ten pounds at a time. But by November, we were both considered on the overweight side, and Lurko’s weight was considered to be in the morbidly obese range. We knew that we needed to get more serious about losing weight.
2. We wanted to avoid getting sick, especially since we still had no health insurance. We didn’t want to be among the 48 percent of adult Americans with heart disease, or the 11 percent of Americans with diabetes. I’m 52 and Lurko is 53, and we knew we needed to start taking better care of ourselves. At some point we will get health insurance figured out, and thankfully health care is cheapER here, but private health care is still not cheap. Our primary care doctor is a big believer in preventative care, which matches what we believe as well. Taking care of ourselves now will hopefully avoid a lot of medical problems later.
3. I hated having to buy new clothes, and thanks to our national obsession with being thin, there was a special shame in having to buy larger and larger sizes. I went from wearing Brazilian 2-piece bikinis to sensible one-piece bathing suits designed to hide my stomach and hips. I hated it, and I hated giving away cute clothes that I no longer fit into. This was my very vain reason, but it served as another tool for the motivation toolbox.
4. We had a chance for a fresh start. At the time, we wondered whether it was a good idea to start this major diet while adjusting to living in Mexico and moving into a new house. Surprisingly, it ended up being a great idea! New life, new country… we were a blank slate. Our little town was nowhere near any McDonalds or Taco Bell, so no access to fast food. We had little experience with even buying food at a grocery store here, so we could just start off buying healthy food from the start. As they used to say in the 12-step programs: “The only thing you have to change is everything.” And we did.

Why did we pick keto?

I had tried a few different diets over the years. I had had some moderate success with the Fast Metabolism diet. I’d lose 5 to 10 pounds, then I’d go back to bad habits and the weight would come back. It was kind of a tough diet because every day I was stressing out about what to cook and what to eat. I tried to meal prep ahead of time, which sometimes I could do and sometimes not. There were also some very specific ingredients, which I could easily find in Dallas but maybe not so easily in Mexico. So I knew I didn’t want to do that diet again.

Lurko liked the idea of keto because there was actual science to back it up. The concept of ketosis made sense, and there was lot of research that proved it was safe when done correctly. He also knew I would be on board because I wouldn’t have to give up cheese.

He was right about that! A diet where I could still have butter and cheese sounded like a dream. We would just have to be conscious of our cholesterol levels. And combining it with intermittent fasting ended up also being good for us, because then we only had to worry about two meals a day: breakfast and lunch.

How It Went

The tough part in the beginning was trying to remember which foods we could and couldn’t eat. There was a lot of Googling of “is ____ keto?” And we read lots and lots of labels. Our basic rule of thumb was more than 5 grams of carbs in a meal was too much.

I looked at a LOT of keto recipes online. And since recipe web sites annoy me to no end with all the stupid ads, I copied the text of every recipe I liked and saved it to my EverNote. Sometimes I had to modify them based on what I could find here. I’ll share a few of my favorites.

It was a challenge at first to find some of the ingredients. But La Comer in Bucerias carries a lot of the hippie stuff, and we also found a couple of health food stores in Sayulita. So now we know where to go to buy stuff like almond flour, or shredded coconut without sugar (SO hard to find here!). Our sweetener of choice became monkfruit. I don’t care for the artificial chemical crap, but monkfruit tasted good and was not too hard to find here. I even started taking a handful of packets with me to Nakawe Coffee, until the owner noticed and started stocking it herself. Thanks Viri!

In Mexico, the hardest thing to avoid is bread. Tortillas are served with every meal. If we go out for a hamburger, we ask to substitute lettuce for the bun- which a lot of restaurants here do know about. But when we go to the ceviche stand and ask them to hold the tostadas, they look at us incredulously. Then we explain we’re on a diet and can’t have them, and they’re like, “En serio??” Over Christmas, it was tough to have to avoid the station wagon that sold the pan dulce (sweet breads). And we did miss ice cream. But Lurko was adamant and we were able to stay strong. We hardly ever cheated.

One thing we had to be careful about- we weren’t eating enough fiber! Before this diet we were like, “who cares?” But after a couple months we started having problems with constipation, which we learned is very common with keto. We got online to read about what we could do about this. We tried Metamucil in our limonadas, which didn’t taste great but did help. But we needed more fiber. We read that women over 50 should have 21 grams of fiber per day, and men over 50 should have 30 grams per day. We thought we were doing great by eating salads, but they only accounted for 9 or 10 grams at best.

Then we learned about the magic of chia seeds. They have a LOT of fiber – 34 grams of fiber per 100 grams of seeds. They are 100% keto friendly, and it’s easy to add them to food without changing the taste. We added them to soups and sauces. I mixed them with almond milk, monk fruit, vanilla, and cinnamon to make chia pudding. Lurko learned how to mix them with eggs to make a pizza crust in a nonstick frying pan. “Breakfast pizza” became an everyday thing, and each day was different depending on which sauce or topping we wanted to use. After adopting this easy solution for breakfast, we only had to worry about one meal a day, which was fantastic.

The one other weird health thing was during the first two months, I developed a terrible, itchy rash that spread across my back. It sucked. I read that this sometimes happened to people who started keto, and it was known as “keto rash.” Great. We debated seeing a dermatologist about it, and I resisted because I was afraid they were going to tell me to stop the keto diet. And I didn’t want to stop, because the diet was working! I worried that I was doing something bad to my body, but after a few months the rash went away on its own. And after restarting keto seven months later, the rash has not come back. So I guess whatever happened, my body adjusted.

Our Post Keto Plan

We are getting close to the finish line! Lurko and I each have about 10 pounds left to lose. We talk about how we can ease back into eating “normal”… and what normal even looks like. The first time we got off keto in May, we were afraid of doing anything differently. We kept eating our breakfast pizzas, because they were easy and we liked them. I felt guilty for drinking one agua Jamaica, which has tons of sugar, so I started making a sugar-free version at home with monkfruit. It was kind of easier to just keep doing what we were doing. I did miss beans and ate those again when they were offered, but we continued to stay away from rice.

We did relish being able to eat shrimp quesadillas, and tortas ahogadas, and ice cream. For our birthdays, we each ate 15 french fries with our burgers, which we still wrapped in lettuce. We enjoy eating healthier, and don’t have any desire to return to those bad habits. It seems likely that when we’re finished we’ll probably do a version of “modified keto with some cheating.” I do love Mexican desserts, and plan to enjoy those in moderation. Lurko and I can split a dessert, or even a meal, as portion sizes here can be large. We agreed that we will continue to weigh in every Sunday, so we can monitor ourselves and notice if we start to slip.

I don’t know if keto / intermittent fasting is for everyone, but it sure worked for us! Let us know if you have any questions.