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A few weeks ago I tried keto for a week, during which time I had to do a 26km run as part of my marathon training.
Huge mistake. I was basically hitting the wall from the get-go and it took me just shy of three hours to complete, at least half an hour longer than I'd planned. I felt utterly miserable for the duration of the run and was convinced that signing up for the marathon was a colossal miscalculation
I gave up on keto and went back to my regular carb-heavy diet. That weekend I did a 24km run and breezed through it, nearly an entire minute/km faster than my run the previous weekend, and I felt in fine form for the duration.
I think once I've completed my marathon I'll try to do keto for a bit longer, maybe a few months, as it seems effective at weight loss and doesn't seem to interfere with my gym workouts that much. But based on my personal experience it's completely incompatible with long-distance running.
Carbs are fuel, so yeah if you're running marathons you're burning fuel and not putting them on as stored fat.
The trouble is when people stop doing the exercise and still consume the fuel. Then it's not getting burned, so it will end up as fat stores. If you try the keto without the heavy fuel combustion of long-distance running, it may work better for you - let us know how it goes!
I'll report back in one of the Wellness threads.
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I also experience difficulty with completing workouts on keto.
There might be some options. On /r/ketogains they talk about targeted carb consumption around workouts and also cycling in/out of keto. Since I'm only about 4 weeks in, and the weight loss has been great, I'm just going to deal with bad workouts for now until my body fat gets down to where I want it.
I'd also point out that at 1 week, you are in "keto flu" territory. In the first few days, you lose a lot of water weight and need to consume a lot of electrolytes to compensate. Some people say that long distance work is doable on keto, but you need help for "explosive" activities like sprinting and weightlifting.
What's a good source of electrolytes?
I purchased some specifically for Keto on Amazon.
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It's complicated. You store around 2000 (IIRC) calories as carbs in your body. People regularly overestimate how much calories running consumes - aka you can't outrun a bad diet saying. So if we take 700 calories per hour running in normal times you have almost enough carbs for a three hour run. Of course your body changes the mix the more run progresses - it tries to stretch them. So the ratio of carbs you burn constantly decreases.
if you are on keto (and you are not used to being on it) - well you don't have your preferred fuel to burn. And fat usually takes time to be activated. On top of that by memory - on keto your endurance barely decreases but the peak performance and max load does.
So I think that your experience is absolutely by what science says on the topic.
It's so demoralising when you do a half-marathon in two hours, count the calories and realise that you've only burned about half of a kebab.
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I don't know if my diet was bad, but I've outran it several times. The way I gain weight is by ceasing to exercise, not by compensating for burned calories through increased appetite, or by weird metabolic shenanigans my body is supposedly pulling.
I don't have a conclusion here, but all the "exercise doesn't help that much" takes run counter to everything I experienced.
I think people say this because to the average sedentary person. "Exercising" means jogging for 20 min, 3 times a week. And it's true that just doing that doesn't burn a whole lot of extra calories. An actual long distance runner who's doing 100 miles a week can of course eat a lot and stay slim
I was once a jogger, like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee. Even then 100 miles a week would have sounded whack (wouldn't you have to run a marathon 4 days per week to do that?!), I was doing a bit more than double of your example of an average Joe. OTOH I wouldn't say I was eating "a lot", but I was allowing myself a decent amount of vices like beer and various sweets. "Slim" might also be in the eye of the beholder, I'm happy with "not fat" usually.
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I honestly think it's more of that "biology is complicated" problem. The way people exercise today is artificial; nobody was doing much of running marathons or three times a week visits to gyms in the past (except for certain people). You 'exercised' by manual labour and general work in keeping house or running a business, plus walking nearly everywhere. From Chesterton's autobiography:
People like that walked where they couldn't take buses, and if you read Jane Austen novels (I know, going much further back) the young ladies think nothing of walking miles to visit friends or go see the sights in a nearby town.
So I do think for most people, yeah - being moderately active is enough. For some people, if they want to lose weight (as distinct from toning muscles or increasing fitness), they need to do a lot of exercise. And for some people, like yourself, weight will drop off once you exercise but pile on when you stop, even if you're not eating more or being extra-lazy. Individual bodies respond individually.
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Exercise has one slim benefit that I sometimes see mentioned: if you put on muscle that way, the resting metabolism of muscle is higher than that of fat, so the fat loss doesn't stop the second the exercise does; you also get a "free" hundred calories a day per pound of muscle you can maintain.
But for me the biggest benefit is one I've never seen discussed: for some reason my body doesn't seem to "fight me" against exercising the way it does against dieting. If I burn 500 calories on the treadmill one day then I've burned 500 calories and that's done; even the immediate feeling of tiredness quickly goes away and I feel more rather than less energetic over the long term. But cutting 500 calories of food in one day leaves me somewhere between "ravenous" and "awful lethargy". I can't seem to lose much weight via dietary portions (rather than via the easy choices: no liquid calories, avoid sugar, etc) without using a calorie counter app to try to carefully thread the needle between "not eating less" and "my brain feels like it's starving".
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