“Many of the firefighters that I used to work with who were overweight refused to eat anything but meat. This usually resulted in temporary weight loss in the beginning and them smelling bad, feeling bad, and often collapsing at fire scenes when they had to exert themselves. “
It is not possible to be healthy and strong on a keto diet.
Your body requires carbs at anything above 70% max heart rate. It’s simply not an option.
70% is a mild exertion.
Your body can produce carbs on their own without having to eat them.
And the Keto diet is not just meat, most Keto proponents will tell you that you must eat a lot of green leafy vegetables, and too much meat is too much protein, which will contribute to Insulin Resistance.
I have an unfortunately fairly long story that illustrates this.
My wife was an “athlete” in her own right but she had never been much of a bicycle rider while I had raced successfully at the national level. So, I purchased tandem bicycles and we started putting a lot of miles on them. We had a 40-mile ride in hilly terrain that we rode nearly every weekday. Unfortunately we got hit by a car driven by an 80 year old lady who had just had her second eye surgery and my wife's foot got crushed.
It put her out of commission for quite a while but after the surgery on her foot healed, I started getting her out again. A group of riders that I met on the road invited us on a century (100 mile) ride with them. Unfortunately, the rear chainstay on our good road tandem broke about a week before the ride, so we had to take our funky folding tandem that had mountain bike handlebars, cheap components, and a frame that weighed 10 pounds more than our road tandem.
Just about everyone in the group were wearing the latest in high fashion cycling clothes and riding bikes worth as much as a used car. They took one look at our setup, and they gave us a map to the restaurant that we were going to visit at the 60-mile mark. They were all sure that we wouldn't be able to keep up. The route was a little rolling but had no serious elevation gain, so the heavy frame was no disadvantage. And the tandem did give us a slight advantage even in our upright position.
This was my wife's first century but she had been on plenty of 40-mile rides recently. A rule of thumb is that if you plan it out you can typically ride three times as far on a long ride as your usual training ride without difficulty. And I knew that riding in a group would give her extra energy.
The group had no idea how competitive our spirit was, so we ended up leading the group the entire way and pushing the pace a little faster than we normally maintained and apparently a little faster than they told us they usually rode. Since my wife had never been on a ride quite this long I set a timer on my watch that went off every 10 minutes. It was a pleasant day. Every time the alarm went off, I made her drink ice water from our hydration pack and take a couple of chomps out of a caffeinated energy bar.
When we got to the restaurant the rest of the group was pretty beat looking. But my wife was still looking fresh. None of them could believe that she had never ridden a century before.
As soon as we got to the restaurant, we started eating food that we had brought with us and ordered some big sandwiches. While we were scarfing down our jumbo-sized sandwiches, the rest of the group almost unbelievably were pretty much all eating trendy high protein diets, eating salads and meat without any buns. And several told us how well this had been working out for them. They were telling us that we were going to be “sluggish” because of all the “carbs” we were downing.
It was over an hour before they were ready to get back on the saddle to finish the ride. My wife and I were feeling good and ready. Like a machine we got right back into our routine pushing the pace again. Within 1/2 an hour the group started fragmenting with people falling off the back. We had to wait for some of them. The guy who had invited us had some sort of diabetic problem and we had to stop at a convenience store and try to nurse him back to health so he could limp the last few miles back to his car.
We were never invited to go riding with them again. The reason that they performed so poorly was because of poor planning and inappropriate food and drink choices. My wife and I had carbo-loaded the night before to make sure the glycogen stores in our muscles would be topped off. We ate carbohydrates for breakfast and continued eating them during the ride. At the restaurant we were eating carbohydrates as soon as we got off the bike, so our muscles had already begun replenishing their glycogen stores while we were resting. Just as importantly we were drinking cool easily absorbed water every ten minutes and staying hydrated.
Why did we know to do this? I had years of experience riding up to 200 miles and more in a day. If knew from this that if you are well trained and maintain your carbohydrate and hydration levels that you can maintain your speed and comfort even while metabolizing a great deal of stored fat. Eating a bunch of protein and fat while trying to maintain high energy output may not hurt that much, but it certainly does not help.