Q: Hey Mike, I started eating healthier and working out in June, 2011. At that time I was overweight, had low energy and not much muscle to speak of. (Around 190 lbs, ~40" waist or so.) Now a few months later I am down to about ~158 lbs and a ~32" waist and a lot more noticeable muscle mass and I feel great. In that time I have been following a 2000-2400 calorie per day diet. (~43% protein, ~27% carbs, ~30% fat). I have been following your site and eating all the foods you listed. My room mate who is also into nutrition and fitness told me about a type of diet called a Ketogenic diet. I have done some research and it seems a little too good to be true. I was wondering if you knew a good amount about this and what kind of calories should I consume and what kind of ratios for protein, fat and carbs? I am wondering if this diet would help me speed up the process of burning the remaining stubborn body fat I have.

I am:
20 year old Male
5-11
~158 lbs
Thank you so much for your website, the nutritional information that I learned from there is priceless. I feel so much more confident and full of energy now.

A: First off, great to hear about your progress -- awesome job! On to your question... I agree with you as far keto being too good to be true. It does have one immediate and seemingly beneficial side-effect: your body will quickly drop some water weight once you eliminate or nearly eliminate carbs from your diet. So right away you will look leaner. But that's as far as its benefits will go. This leanness will only last as long as you consume no carbs. Go back to a regular diet and your water weight will come right back, as it should. ( If you are not familiar with what water weight means, check out http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/how-to-lose-weight ).

I've never seen any controlled study that concluded that a keto diet is superior to a protein-rich but balanced diet of the kind I recommend on this site and of the kind that worked well for you. Clinically keto diets are used to treat not obesity but epileptic seizures and certain metabolic diseases.

And there are plenty of negative side-effects to keto. Most people will suffer cravings and loss of strength and energy on keto. Constipation is very common since dietary fiber comes primarily from carb-containing foods. Long-term you will be depriving your body of many vitamins and minerals that are found primarily in plant (and therefore carb-containing) foods. You would increase the chances of developing kidney stones and some other medical problems. To make up for this most people on keto take synthetic vitamin and mineral and fiber supplements. I am firmly convinced that no synthetic supplement can fully replace naturally-occurring vitamins and minerals. They're supplements, not replacements.

In my opinion the keto fad is another example of a good idea taken too far. People noticed that reducing carbs helps lose fat and decided that eliminating carbs completely will help lose even more fat. Our bodies rarely work that way. Just because something is good in moderation rarely means that it's also good in the extreme. Working out is good, but working out 3 hours a day every day will only result in tiredness and injuries. Drinking a gallon of water a day is good, but drinking 10 gallons a day is not. And so on. Balance is almost always the right choice.

If you find your progress in losing fat slowing down you may want to consider going on a slow, clean bulk for a few months. At 5-11 and 158 pounds you definitely have room to gain a few pounds. So consider going on a bulk for 4-5 months by increasing calories, mainly carbs and continuing with heavy whole-body weight training. You'd aim to gain no more than about 2 pounds per month on a bulk. That should result mostly in solid new muscle and unavoidably a bit of new fat. But you will end the bulk with much higher metabolism (you'll probably be eating well over 3000 calories by then) and it will be very easy to cut the calories (again, mostly carbs) and restart the weight and fat loss. After a couple of months you will be back to your present weight but with more muscle and less fat.

Hope that answered your question and gave you an idea on how to keep making progress.