The Keto Konundrum: If this diet is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?
Undiscovered country. That’s what I’d walked into. The woods ended with me standing at the vertex of a ‘V’ formed by the treeline, opening onto a meadow shrouded by mist. Untouched, dew-topped green beneath phantasmic gray and white.
I’d been walking for some hours already, but I didn’t feel the weight of my pack. Only the cool. And the quiet.
I saw a deer feeding in the meadow, so I paused, awestruck by the scene right before me and the backdrop of rolling hills.
I had to get to the next ammo box — and soon. So I eventually started moving again. But the purely sublime sensation stuck with me for the remainder of “the evolution.” [1]
I’d find out only many years later that this feeling is called being present.
Keto can help you be present, fight “brain fog,” and gain improved mental health according to some studies. That “sublime sensation” I refer to above is a kind of high that I have come to relish. Those who consistently meditate come to know it well, even if it may not always arrive. The keto diet can take these sensations further through organic production of what otherwise would be illicit drugs.
To recap, people on keto often feel better emotionally and think more clearly. Sounds like a win-win. Is there really no downside?
You don’t climb hills in Florida. It’s flat after all. A giant sand bar exposed amidst the slack tide of millennia.
Hills are so foreign to Floridians that kids there can be forgiven for mistaking landfills for “Look, Mom! — mountains!” [2]
But the SEAL-training land navigation exercise I mentioned above was in large part about this strange phenomenon that I was now getting used to (out of pure necessity): trudging up towering domes of earth.
