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dred seizures a day, like some of Cervenka’s
patients, this might be worth it (although
she says her lab has a 50 percent six-month
attrition rate even among epilepsy patients).
For a normally healthy person, it was awful.
If I can explain the ketogenic diet in
one meal, let it be the time I tried to make
a smoothie out of coconut milk, nut butter,
cacao powder, and half an avocado. It came
out as bitter as baker’s chocolate, but with a
weird consistency, as if a chocolate shake had
farted into a cup of hair mousse. Also, it was
gray. I ate it out of a cofee mug with a spoon—
forcing down each bite as if I were a toddler
and this whole excuse for an article ought
to be banned by the Geneva Conventions.
Once I managed to conirm ketosis, I still
felt strange as heck. As promised, I was pre-
ternaturally calm—but in a bad way. It was
impossible to do anything at all. I tried to
play a dice game and confused the number 50
with 500. My hands tingled when I went for a
run. My mouth tasted like burnt Corn Nuts.
Keto adherents call the diet’s unpleas-
ant induction period the “keto lu.” To get
through it (for journalism), I took electro-
lyte supplements and drank prepackaged
ketones that were so bitter I’m pretty sure I
would have rather drunk industrial solvents.
Five days later I came out the other side. A
blood test conirmed that I was still in ketosis,
but I could do math and think again. How-
ever, I still did not feel good. Keto devotees
say that by the time you’ve been doing the
diet for a while, you can feel when your body
is burning fat for fuel instead of carbs. For
ma ny people, that shif t is ma rked by feelings
of steady energy and well-being, along with
a satiety that helps with weight loss. In my
case, it was marked by hiccups, terrible heart-
burn, and a luttery feeling in my chest like
I was about to slip into cardiac arrhythmia.
After twelve days on the keto diet, I felt
like a saltwater ish in a poorly calibrated
aquarium. I yelled. I stank. Somehow I
gained three pounds. Literally in the mid-
dle of an argument with my long-sufering
boyfriend—about...god knows...appro-
priate sock storage locations? What kind of
maniac buys one-ply toilet paper?—my phone
pinged with an email containing the results
from my Habit test.
“You are a Range Seeker,” the page said,
alongside a whole bunch of recommended
recipes for ish tacos and risotto and smooth-
ies and other things I normally eat. “We
recommend a higher-carb, higher-fat, mod-
erate-protein diet.” You don’t say.WHAT IS IT?
Temporarily restricting foodWHAT IS IT
SUPPOSED TO DO?
Reduce weight, improve healthAM I GOING TO BE
HUNGRY ALL THE TIME?
Ye sIS IT SAFE?
Depends on your history. Ask
your doctor.INTERMITTENT
FASTINGoctors have known for
decades that, if you half-
starve rodents, they live
longer. Caloric restriction
can increase the median life
span of rats by 14 to 45 percent, reducing
inlammation, oxidative stress, cholesterol,
triglycerides, and the risk of tumors and car-
diovascular disease, and improving the
immune system. There’s just one problem: If
you’re not a rat whose diet is controlled by sci-
entists, such restriction requires iron
willpower to maintain. A 1940s study known
as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in
which doctors reduced calories by roughly 50
percent in volunteers, resulted in cases of
depression, hysteria, and irritability, includ-
ing one man who cut o three of his ingers.
Enter intermittent fasting. Starving
lite™. One option, time-restricted feeding,
is basically eating all of your calories in an
eight-hour window. For the 5:2 diet, you drop
to 500 calories on two non-consecutive days
a week and eat normally the other ive. Either
is enough for most people to lose weight, but
it’s the other advantages that are most excit-
ing. Skipping food occasionally can lead to
some of the same efects as keto. It can also
initiate cellular processes that enhance
longevity, such as autophagy, or “cellular
cleansing,” in which the body recycles old
cells by eating them. (Yum.)
I tried the 5:2 diet, which made me so hun-
gry I salivated over cookbooks, buying new
eyeliners to distract myself whenever I felt
my willpower lagging. (I now have many.)
But apart from that, intermittent fasting.
Was. Awesome. Here was the relaxation I’d
been promised by the keto diet. The weight
loss and the peaceful mind. At the end of each
fast day I experienced a paradoxical bump in
energ y (maybe my body wa nted me to go ind□
Spinach salad with
olive oil, sunlower seeds,
and feta cheese□
Broccoli-chicken casserole
made with caulilower rice,
a ton of cream, and Parme-
san cheeseAN
AVERAGE
DAY ON THERecipe
□ 1 Tbsp cacao powder
□ 2 Tbsp NuttZo
seven-seed and nut
butter
□ ½ can coconut milk
□ ½ avocado
□ ice
→ Blend until smooth.