waddap bruddah
glad to see you're doing well.
how are you finding the keto? id like to challenge you to do daily updates to your log, with general tracking of your calories, protein, and any exercise you did.
speaking from personal experience, having maintained a 99% pure log for the past 4 months on another board, it goes a long way to motivating me to stay all the way on top of my shit. not even remotely questioning your commitment, progress, or anything similar. I just have found some very great benefit from the semi-permanent, semi-public transformation diary and wanted to share.
down 120lbs scale weight in 359 days (the goal was slow and steady with no "dieting" the first year, with a planned actual cut/diet starting on the 1 year mark)
Hey brother, happy new year!
I genuinely love keto / carnivore!
I’ve used it on and off for years, but before Reta I’d occasionally “allow” carbs and that often turned into a slippery slope - binge-y eating, weight creeping back on, one step forward and two or three back. The more metabolically compromised/insulin resistant I got, the easier it was to gain fat and harder it was to lose it.
Since starting Reta, the food noise and impulsivity are basically gone. That’s been the real game-changer. Now, if I have carbs in a specific context - popcorn at the cinema, a family meal, Christmas, whatever - it doesn’t derail anything. I just switch straight back to keto/carnivore without friction. I’ve literally just come off a two-week Christmas stretch with plenty of carbs and junk, flipped back to keto a couple of days before leaving, and carried on without effort.
What’s not to like about keto anyway? I get to eat great food - meat, fish, eggs, cheese, nuts. All the good stuff. Carbs can taste good, sure, but for me they’re mostly nutritionally empty and clearly don’t suit my physiology long-term.
I am a bit on the fence about carbs longer-term though. Part of me is open to re-introducing some if it turns out I genuinely
can’t add muscle without them. But I’m also fairly sceptical that meaningful carbs are actually required for a non-competitive, general-population lifter whose goal is just to get back to ~12% body fat and look “kinda muscular,” rather than chase stage conditioning or maximal performance.
My current thinking is: if I can make steady strength and hypertrophy progress without carbs, I’d rather keep things simple. If progress stalls in a real, measurable way, I’m not ideologically opposed to adding them back - I just don’t see a compelling reason
yet.
On the logging front - I get exactly where you’re coming from, and massive respect on the 120 lbs in a year. That’s no joke. Right now I’m tracking the big things pretty tightly (weight trend, protein, training, compounds), but I’ve deliberately avoided daily calorie micromanagement because historically that’s been more mentally draining than helpful for me. And on keto it's not easy to overeat with how satiating the food is. Then adding a GLP-1 like Reta on top and I have pretty much guaranteed a caloric deficit. So little to no benefit to me counting total calories right now. As I said though, I track my protein tightly - I aim for 110g of protein per meal when I eat 2x/day, and about 75g per meal when I eat 3x/day.
That said, I do see the value in a semi-public accountability log, especially as the cut deepens. I may add more structured daily notes as things progress, particularly with my new training program. I have decided now is a good time to:
- move from a 3x/week all-over body workout with a target RPE of 7-8
- to a 4x/week Upper/Lower split with a target RPE of 8 to begin with. Aim is to seek strength progression session on session, without compromising form.
Out of curiosity - are you running GLP-1s or any other compounds, or was that all diet and adherence? Always interested in what levers people are (or aren’t) pulling.
Really appreciate you sharing what’s worked for you, genuinely. And seriously - outstanding work on your end bud!
