My personal keto diet mistake: overeating my calorie deficit

Rule One of the Ketogenic Diet: if you want to lose weight: absolutely only eat when actually hungry (don't let thirst fool you). I've been messing this one up every day so far (I started keto 16-days ago).

I started keto 16-days ago. Aside from failing catastrophically, happily, and gladly, on Thanksgiving with both Thanksgiving 1PM dinner with my Capitol Hill family and an evening loaded pizza pie, I have been keeping keto every day. I have even learned how best to be on a ketogenic diet. 

Keto doesn't allow you to eat all the sausage, meat, bacon, cheese, butter, coconut oil, and olive oil you can stuff down your gullet and still lose weight. While it may seam that way, it's not true. Here's the secret of keto: it kills your appetit dead. 

The ketogenic diet isn't magic. It's still energy in, energy out; calories in, calories out. The ketogenic diet also loves an active life: aerobic exercises like running and Spin as well as anaerobic exercise like heavy weight weightlifting, CrossFit, and 9Round.

I am not hungry under the ketogenic diet, so why am I eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, whether I am hungry or not. This is antithetical to the ketogenic diet. This is why fasting and intermittent fasting go hand-in-hand beautifully during the keto diet.

Keto trains your body to rely on fat instead of carbs for fuel and fasting relies on the fasting body's ability to use fat as fuel to keep the body thriving between meals, whether those meals are 16-hours or 16-days apart. Keto and fasting go perfectly together. 

My Withings scale tells me I am not losing any weight on keto and I know why. I am not adding all the extra butter and sauces and fats that keto requires to doctor a normal, healthy, diet, to My Fitness Pal when I track calories religiously.

In my desire to be in ketogenesis I have eaten my own body weight in butter and bacon and chicken thighs and sausage and asparagus drenched in Bertolli Alfredo Sauce--this is not the way to lose a hundred pounds.

The only way to lose a quick hundred pounds is to let the magic of a ketogenic diet work its magic: if you're not hungry, you won't want to eat; if you don't eat between meals and only eat until you're full only when you're actually hungry (missing meals will not kill you) then you will effortlessly go into a caloric deficit, which will allow your body to feed off of its own fat storage--by belly, my butt, my jowls, my thighs, and also the visceral fat surrounding my heart, liver, pancreas and kidneys.

I have started taking my activity level up from just walking for steps every day on my LifeSpan treadmill desk, walking slowly at 2MPH all day long, to jumping back on the Concept2 indoor rowing ergometer that I write about way more than actually jump on a row.

Between Thanksgiving and midnight Christmas Eve, December 24, I will attempt to row at least 100km with a goal of reaching 200km during the course of the 2017 Concept2 Holiday Challenge.

My business partner and CrossFit god, Dan Kreurger, wants me to add push-ups, site ups, and squats to my day, every day, every 30-minutes, and I want to make sure I swing my kettlebell for 90-seconds every 60-minutes following the Get Fit, Get Fierce with Kettlebell Swings system by Don Fitch.

I also plan to get back to visiting my local 9Round at Penrose Square here in South Arlington off of Columbia Pike as well as following a weightlifting plan I have on my JEFIT app.

That's all talk. We'll see how it goes, starting with rowing 200,000 meters between now and the strike of midnight welcoming in Christmas Day! Wish me luck on all of this.

The TL:DR of all of this is: eat fewer calories than you burn every day in order to lose weight--even when you're on a miracle diet like the ketogenic diet! Everyone says: 80% of weight loss and weight maintenance is diet and working out and running and going to the gym and walking everywhere is really only 20% of the formula. 

Good luck and godspeed and I look forward to learning from you in the comments!