Navigating Roadblocks on Your Low Carb Keto Journey - Part 2

In Part 1, we cleared the early obstacles: keto flu, digestive changes, cost, social pressure and cravings. Higher up the trail, the boulders look different. They are less about surviving the transition and more about mastering the lifestyle. Here is part two of our roadblock guide.

Roadblock 10: Staying in ketosis

Hidden sugars are everywhere, and so is a subtler trap: obsessing. First, the practical side. Anything labelled "keto friendly" deserves a flip to the ingredient list; most of these products carry seed oils, sweeteners and emulsifiers that undermine the whole point. Whole foods do not need a marketing claim.

Two things that are not the emergency they appear to be: a modest morning rise in blood sugar is often just the dawn phenomenon, your body's natural wake-up sequence, not a sign you have failed. And any real meal takes you out of a fasted state by definition; that is called digestion, and it is supposed to happen. Eat within a consistent window, take a short walk after meals or coffee, and let the pattern do the work. Vigilance is useful. Anxiety is not.

Roadblock 11: Food boredom

Eating from a shorter list of foods can drift into monotony if you let it. Do not let it. Rotate your cuts and preparations: meatballs one night, patties the next, a roast on the weekend. Build what we call keto bowls, an idea from one of our kitchens: hard-boiled eggs, beef, bacon, a little fish, different sauces and seasonings each time. A pressure cooker opens up thousands of recipes. And take snacking out of your vocabulary entirely; if meals are satisfying, the space between them stops needing to be filled.

One honest warning from our own stumbles: nuts are the boredom trap with teeth. A daily handful of cashews quietly added eight pounds to one of us in ten days. Delicious, calorie-dense, easy to overdo. Macadamias in moderation are the safer pick.

Roadblock 12: Sleep disruption

If you fix only one thing, fix sleep, because poor sleep raises cortisol, cortisol raises blood sugar, and suddenly your careful eating is fighting uphill. The usual suspects are timing and chemistry: eating late, caffeine hiding in drinks (including that innocent-looking evening soda), and alcohol, which dehydrates and wrecks sleep quality even in moderate amounts.

What works for us: finish eating three to four hours before bed. Magnesium glycinate about an hour before lights out, or a warm bath with magnesium salts. If you find yourself drinking lots of water at night, try electrolytes in the afternoon instead, so the water you drink actually gets absorbed and your sleep is not interrupted by bathroom trips. And a personal quirk worth sharing because patterns matter: one of us discovered that a big salmon dinner too close to bedtime meant a sleepless night. Learn your own patterns. They are worth more than any general rule.

Roadblock 13: Exercise performance dips

During the switch from running on glucose to running on fat, workouts can feel flat for a while. This passes, and what replaces it surprised us both: steadier energy than we had in our thirties, less sweating through workouts, more endurance on the trail and in the gym, and strength that keeps climbing with enough protein on the plate. If a session feels weak, look first at sleep, protein and overtraining before blaming the diet. And keep training your legs; they are the foundation of healthspan.

Roadblock 14: Skin and hair changes

Your body under transition is a body under renovation, and sometimes it shows: temporary breakouts, dryness, even some shedding of hair while your system reprioritizes. Two responses help. First, go slow; a gradual transition over months is gentler than an overnight switch. Second, feed the outside too. Simple beef tallow from your butcher is, in our houses, the best skin moisturizer money barely has to buy; even the kids request it. Most of these changes settle as your body finds its new equilibrium.

Roadblock 15: Rebuilding your gut

If your microbiome spent years being fed sugar and ultra-processed food, it needs time and new tenants. Fermented foods are the workhorses here: kefir, plain full-fat yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, real pickles. Bone broth is a beautiful, inexpensive addition, especially if you make your own; butchers will often hand you bones for next to nothing. One of the strangest and best signals of a rebuilt gut: foods you once found unbearably sour, like sauerkraut or fresh lemon, stop tasting sour at all once sugar leaves your diet. Making your own sauerkraut, by the way, is cheap, easy and oddly satisfying.

Roadblock 16: Energy roller coasters

Early on, expect your energy to dip and surge as your metabolism relearns how to run on fat. Ride it out. The destination is worth it: steady, all-day energy without the crashes, a clear head, and a genuine need to move that gets you off the couch. Your body can make the small amount of glucose it truly needs, and given the choice, it runs beautifully on fat. When the energy arrives, spend it: walks, weights, bike rides, whatever moves you.

Roadblock 17: The misinformation minefield

You will read that red meat is deadly on Monday and protective on Friday, sometimes from the same outlet. Our advice is a single habit: read past the headline. Click through to the actual study. Check whether it examined ultra-processed products or whole foods, how many people it followed, and whether it measured what the headline claims. Were they based on epidemiological studies that are correlative and unreliable? Who funded the study? You will be amazed how often the conclusion says something different from the coverage, and it is worth knowing that some of the foundational anti-fat research of the last century has not aged well under modern scrutiny.

Above all, run the only study with a sample size that matters to you: your own. Baseline blood work, honest changes, retest. Ours told us everything the headlines could not.

Roadblock 18: The people who need you to be wrong

A small group will react to your lifestyle with genuine hostility, and understanding why makes it easier to bear: your results quietly question choices they are not ready to examine, and the ego defends itself by attacking. You do not have to win. "My blood work went from concerning to excellent; can you explain that?" tends to end the conversation. For the rest, we love the Anthony Hopkins line: what you think of me is none of my business. Protect your peace, and spend your energy on the curious people instead, because some of them will transform before your eyes.

Roadblock 19: "But is it sustainable forever?"

Here is the reframe that settles it. A friend once told us her old diet "worked" because she lost twelve pounds on it, before she quit. But if you had to quit, it did not work; that is what not working means. Every previous diet either of us tried ended the same way: white knuckles, then relapse to the eating we grew up with, which is the eating that made us sick.

This is the first way of eating we have sustained for years without effort, and the reason is simple: it is not a program we endure; it is food we love that loves us back. Steak, eggs, butter, bacon, simple and delicious, no calorie math, no hunger to fight. The weight has held steady within a few pounds for years. When the food is this good, and the results are this visible, sustainability stops being a discipline problem and becomes the default.

The summit view

Look back down the trail at all nineteen boulders and notice what they have in common: every single one is passable. Not one requires perfection, expensive gear or superhuman willpower. They require information, a little patience, and the willingness to treat your own body as the most reliable experiment you will ever run.

Listen to both full episodes on Lessons from the Ketoverse, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And when you want a guide who knows where every boulder sits, that is what we do at Ascent. You are the climber. We carry the map.

This article shares personal experience and general education. It is not medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider before making significant changes to your diet, especially if you take medication or manage a health condition.