IMPORTANT NOTICE #2

After about a month of this post still getting likes despite my asking not, I went a head and changed the title so the clapping seals of WordPress go ahead and fuck off.

IMPORTANT NOTICE
This post is quickly becoming my most popular. Which is heartbreaking, because this was pretty low effort compared to some of the other stuff I put up. My concern is that no one is even reading this, but that jackasses who are shilling dieting advice are just giving this a like in hopes of a follow back.
That’s just disappointing.
Anyway, if anyone is actually fucking reading this GIVE THIS POST A COMMENT SO I KNOW THAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY READING THE CONTENT. DO NOT LIKE THIS POST!
If in a month’s time I have accumulated more likes on this post, I delete it.
-M. March/14/MMXXII

I moaned previously that I get irritated when a bunch of WordPress spammers started liking a certain post of mine. They didn’t bother to read the post, but merely saw that I had posted something with ‘self-employment’ in the title and liked it hoping I would give them a follow back and like a bunch of their posts. Sorry, but I won’t help you try to scam your way into a cushy ‘influencer’ career where you write best selling books about writing best selling books.
Wouldn’t you know it but that shit happened again. This time, it happened with a series of post I wrote called ‘Keto and expertise’. If I were a smarter person, I would have called it ‘Expertise and Keto’, because the posts had less to do with actual dieting and more to do with fucking epistemology. And wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of people with nothing but Keto recipes on their WordPress site saw ‘Keto’ in the title and responded like barking and clapping seals. I thought I had been pretty even handed in my analysis, and spoken about how no lay person, such as myself, could actually speak to the efficacy of the keto diet within justified confidence. And still, the keto crowd barked like seals.
I also made it pretty clear that I had good reason to suspect that keto gave me gout, despite the research showing that it is meant to alleviate gout.
Out came the seals.
Well, now it’s follow up time:
Keto gave me gout.
Also, keto doesn’t fucking work. Not like you think it does.
The second sentence should be qualified with ‘for me’, but that would take away a bit of the flair. The business end of the statement is really in the third sentence. Let’s go through them one by one.
Keto gave me gout.
Yup, it’s official. Since being crippled for about two weeks with gout, I went to a normal, non-keto but otherwise light diet until the gout passed. I then kept that diet up for about another two weeks. After which, I tried going back to a Keto diet.
And started having fucking gout again! Thankfully, I also had gout medication.
I am not going to be a science-denier on this one. There are a couple of things to consider: people are built differently, and I may be anomalous. Also, as a very smart friend of mine who provided the cold hard research that keto is meant to help with keto pointed out, it may be the fact that, seeing as how excess uric acid is stored in fat, my losing weight caused said excess uric acid to be released back into my blood stream.
If either of these stipulations is true, I need to be cautious with keto going forward. As mentioned in the previous post, I had a problem with gout prior to even hearing about keto, and frankly, I am far too young for this shit.
Keto doesn’t fucking work. Not like you think it does.
Keto doesn’t work like you think it does. There really is no magic to the combination of certain foods, or lack of others. I didn’t let my experience with gout stop my diet. What I did was modify it. I went on a carb-less largely vegetarian diet. As expected, the weight loss came. Not wanting to give up meat entirely, I would punctuate a week of vegetarianism with a day of meat eating. What I came to find was that I lost weight on the days I ate vegetables, and gained weight the days I ate meat as well.
Vegans are going to read this and miss the fucking point, but I plead with everyone to please keep reading on.
Clearly something else was going on here. A bit of back of the envelope math confirmed a suspicion, being that the obvious ‘calories in, calories out’ was the real strategy to success. Here I have to mention another thing that seems to be peculiar to my own metabolism. While everyone and there dog that talks about dieting seem to say that protein satiates more than other types of food, that doesn’t seem to be the case with me. Those days where I ate only vegetables, I found myself eating far less. Not just by calories, but by shear weight and volume of food. I don’t know why that is the case, but it seems to be so.
Simply put, actual keto as suggested by most people doesn’t function for me. As far as I can tell, all keto sums up to be is a bad heuristic. Is it a functioning heuristic? Yes. It can work, unless you are able, as I clearly am, of stuffing a half-pound of mozzarella into my mouth in a single meal.
Does this mean keto is bad? No, but frankly if you really are looking at the world in simplistic terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, you are frankly beyond anyone’s help.
A truly functioning diet is a dizzying adventure of costs, benefits, analysis, modifying, reconsidering, and re-calibrating. Ditch the overly simplified solutions and give things true, well considered thoughts.
I look forward to the hate this generates, and the precipitous drop in people subscribed to my blog.