Like to start your day with a cup of joe in hand? Mocha Keto Chow has just the chocolatey caffeinated taste you’ll love–and this week (through August 8), Go Packs of this classic flavor are 36% off.
Mocha Keto Chow makes foolproof rich, creamy shakes, and is also a baker’s best friend. Did you know that mocha enhances the flavor of chocolate, making it extra chocolatey? That’s why our Mocha Pie and other mocha recipes taste so lusciously perfect!
The concept of a “Protein Sparing Modified Fast” or PSMF can sound a bit complicated at first, but it can be a fantastic way to break through a stall and cut body fat. PSMF isn’t for everyone and, depending on how you implement it, isn’t typically used for extended periods of time. You’re doing a sort of “fast” that’s designed to keep muscle protein intact (or “spare” it) while still letting your body consume stored fat for energy. The PSMF subreddit sums it up as:
PSMF is a ketogenic diet designed to jump-start a weight loss program (either for rapid fat loss for a body builder or those with some weight to lose) or break a stall. It is a modified fast and as such is not a lifestyle. The idea is basically to only eat to prevent lean muscle loss (protein).
With a typical Ketogenic diet you will be getting 20-50g of carbohydrates as an upper limit, with anywhere from 90-160g of protein (depending on goals, activity, and other factors), with fat as a variable that can come from the food you consume or from your body’s fat storage. For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using numbers from Maria Emmerich’s Macro Calculator. I’m setting the calculator to give numbers for a 220 lb, 40-year-old female with 35% body fat that we will call “Jane”; YOUR numbers will be different so please make sure you pull up the page and enter in YOUR measurements. The Calculator says that if Jane wants to lose weight quickly, she should use 2 different calorie/fat/protein/carb combinations (click to embiggen!):
If Jane had selected regular “Fat Loss” instead of PSMF, it would have told her to do 1659 calories with 118g of fat, 130g protein, and 20 total carbs. There are a few important points that I would like to cover here:
How you can use Keto Chow for PSMFOK, we’ve covered some of what PSMF is and how to do it. How can you use Keto Chow as a tool to help you be successful with PSMF? First things first: we need to address the TOTAL carbs situation.
Most flavors of Keto Chow contain around 7.6g of total carbohydrates. If you wanted to use 3 meals of Keto Chow on your PSMF days, that would be 22.8g of total carbs before you even add any other food and 22.8 is more than 10! Here’s the thing about the total carbs in Keto Chow: 5.71g of that is acacia and xanthan gum fiber (mostly acacia). Acacia gum is some REALLY cool stuff, especially for a keto diet. There’s a long explanation of the benefits of acacia gum on keto on this page, but the short version is: your body can’t digest acacia gum, but your gut bacteria DOES and it turns the former carbohydrate into short-chain fats. Carbs in -> turned into fats = happy gut biome with energy for your intestinal cells. All of this is why I, personally, do not count acacia gum (or xanthan gum) towards my total carbohydrate limit. With that acacia and xanthan gum quantity removed, the result is 1.8g of fiber and lactose carbohydrates – let’s call it 2g just for fun. 6g of carbs from 3 meals of Keto Chow still leaves me with 4g and that’ll be taken up by the incidental carbs in mostly meat that I’m eating to cover the rest of my protein goal after 3x Keto Chow meals made with 10g of butter each.
Enough about me, let’s go back to Jane and her goals! Jane needs to get 159g of protein, under 30g of fat. For Jane, that means 78.6g of protein from 3 meals of Keto Chow (or 52.4g if she uses 2 meals of Keto Chow – the number of meals of Keto Chow is entirely up to you!). Jane will be 80g of protein short doing 3x Keto Chow, but she knows that she got a full 100% of her vitamins and minerals because of the Keto Chow. How can Jane get that additional 80g?
We love Cron-o-Meter around here! More info here about using Cron-o-meter to track your net carbs. The key difference between Cron-o-Meter and most other tracking programs like MyFitnessPal and Carb Manager is the Cron-o-Meter uses a curated database. That means every entry you find has been verified to be correct. I switched from MyFitnessPal after I tried entering butter into my tracking and there were 7 different entries that were wrong, one even said “butter (net carbs)” butter has 0.01g of total carbs per tablespoon, it doesn’t need a “net carbs” entry! Anyhow, the intricacies of Cron-o-Meter are beyond this particular blog post, but Jane took the numbers from Maria’s calculator and put them into Cron-o-Meter as custom targets:
Jane goes ahead and enters the food she’s planning to eat that day. In this case, it’s 3 different flavors of Keto Chow, along with the 10g of butter that she’s having in each meal to make sure that she will be able to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins in the meals:
Wait a minute: the fat is a little high when she uses 10g of butter in each shake! 10g of butter has 8.1g of fat and each of the skinless chicken breasts also 6.1g of fat. Let’s change the amount of butter in each Keto Chow to 7g. That will make for 21g of butter in total. Jane still wants to get around 10g of fat per meal so she can either have a chicken breast as part of 2 meals, or actually split up the 2 pieces of meat into 3 portions and have 2/3 of a breast with each meal. Check out Jane’s targets NOW!
That looks REALLY good. Jane is half a gram over on fat and 3g over on protein, but both are exceptionally close to her targets. For her non-PSMF days, Jane could take the approach of maybe doing 2 Keto Chow and having some beef for her 3rd meal. In fact: Jane decides to go to have 2 of the same 7g of butter Keto Chow shakes she had the previous day and then she’s going to go to Texas Roadhouse and get a 12oz Prime Rib along with a side salad.
Honestly, that’s phenomenal. Jane has a good plan in place! Additional PSMF Resources:
If you haven’t had a chance to stock up on Orange Cream yet, now’s your chance!
Go Packs are 36% off and the bulk meal bags are 10% off this week only, through August 1. Don’t forget, this is a seasonal flavor, so it won’t be available for much longer! Do your future self a favor and get it while you can. Trust us.
When you’ve had all the Orange Cream shakes your heart can desire, you can always use it in our melt-in-your-mouth, lighter-than-air Chocolate Orange Mousse. (Be sure to check out our other insanely delicious recipes, too!)
Life is complicated, but here’s one simple truth to consider today: there’s a reason that Vanilla is classic.
Seriously, it’s light enough for every day, familiar enough to bring a smile. And this week (through July 25), it’ll bring an even bigger smile, with bulk meal bags at 10% off and Go Packs at 36% off.
Be sure to take a look at our recipes to level up your Vanilla game.
When researching keto online, you generally won’t get very far without running into information about intermittent fasting (IF). The two ideas are spoken about together so often that it’s no wonder some people feel like they have to go hand in hand.
What *IS* Intermittent Fasting?
Most commonly, this term refers to skipping one or two meals, and/or eating during a small window of time each day. Think of it as the complete opposite of snacking! This is more accurately referred to as “time restricted eating.” You may hear people refer specifically to something 18/6 fasting or 20/4 fasting, etc. (This would be fasting for 18 or 20 hours, with an eating window of 4 or 6 hours), but we’re not going to get into the weeds here. In the context of this article, we’re going to stick to the more common term (“IF”) where we’re talking about skipping breakfast and sometimes lunch and compressing your eating window.
Keto and Intermittent Fasting
IF is popular in the keto community because it reinforces some of the main benefits of keto: reducing brain fog, lowering insulin and blood sugar, and supporting weight loss. But is it necessary?
The easy answer is no! Your keto journey is yours and you can decide what will work best for you. Although IF is flexible, you may still find that your schedule, family or living arrangements, job, or other factors make it difficult or impractical for you to implement IF consistently. Or you may decide it works best for you to only fast occasionally. You may even find you just enjoy keto more without IF. However you feel about IF is totally valid! No matter how many of your fellow keto-ers are using it in their journey back to health, it doesn’t mean you have to. No “keto police” are going to knock on your door and say that you’re doing keto wrong because you are not fasting.
Will I still get the benefits of keto without intermittent fasting?
Absolutely! IF is simply an additional tool you can add to your kit if you choose to. It’s a tool that many people find extremely helpful to speed up or increase some of those benefits, but it’s certainly not a requirement.
Is IF right for me?
It is always best to talk with your doctor or other healthcare professional before making a decision like this. One important thing to remember, however, is that there’s more to IF than the physical aspect! If intermittent fasting for you results in a negative relationship with your keto journey in any way, it may be helpful to take a step back. Keto on in the meantime, of course! But if you decide to come back to IF, you may want to consider how to change your mindset in approaching it so that it’s more successful, sustainable, and enjoyable for you. Remember, staying keto long term (without fasting) is ultimately more beneficial than giving up after combining it with IF short term.
How can I have a healthier mindset when it comes to fasting?
Nobody wants to feel deprived, but that can be the default emotion when you implement IF. Sometimes even just being aware of that can help! When that feeling comes up, you can remind yourself, “I’m not depriving myself. This is a choice I am making because it makes me feel healthier and happier.” And instead of “I can’t eat until 6:00 tonight,” perhaps a simple reframing can help. “I’m choosing not to eat quite yet.” Always be kind to yourself, and take a break when you need to.
Sounds great, but how do I get started?
We have a whole article all about that but the tl;dr version is you just wait a little longer between meals. Easy peasy!
As always, keep calm and keto on!
Chocolate Go Packs are 36% off. Yep, you read that right: Chocolate is on sale!
Chocolate Keto Chow is our number one bestseller, so it’s rarely discounted (it’s hard enough to keep it in stock even when it isn’t on sale)! BUT just this week, live out all your chocoholic dreams.
As if being the ultimate keto shake isn’t enough, this flavor is also a keto baker’s best friend. It’s the perfect way to add flavor in everything from cakes to cookies. Click below to view all our Chocolate recipes and get creative in the kitchen.
Through July 11th, you can get 36% off Natural Strawberry Go Packs. Normally, the Natural Strawberry is $99.75 for 21 meals, this week it’s discounted down to $63.00 – that’s only $3.00 a meal! Natural Strawberry differs from most of the sweet flavors of Keto Chow in that we use Monk Fruit (a “natural” sweetener) to sweeten it. It’s a way for us to gauge the actual market for Keto Chow using something besides 0.08g of pure sucralose as the sweetener. It doesn’t taste exactly the same as the sucralose-sweetened Keto Chow, but it gives those that can’t have, or don’t like the idea of, sucralose an opportunity to use a convenient and customizable complete meal replacement.
We sometimes get asked: “what can I do with Keto Chow besides make shakes?” The best place to start is our Keto Chow Recipes page, here are some of the recipes that can use Natural Strawberry Keto Chow:
Fried foods are delicious and almost everyone loves them, but they have a reputation for being unhealthy. That reputation is based on the fear of fat and a history of fried foods being made as cheaply as possible in places like chain restaurants, street fairs, and carnivals. The great news from a keto perspective is that fat is our friend, so the only reason to fear fried foods is poor quality, overused oils, and cheap ingredients that are high in carbs and low in nutritional value.
Many cuisines contain fried foods that are wholesome, delicious, and a treasured part of the food culture, without negative associations or fear of fat. The simplest way to ensure the quality of the fried foods you eat is to fry your own. Frying at home means having complete control over the quality of the fried foods you consume and is well worth a little extra effort.
What is deep fat frying? Deep fat frying and pan frying are often discussed interchangeably but they are two different cooking techniques. Deep frying means to cook a food completely submerged in hot fat. When properly done, deep fat frying results in a crisp, crunchy exterior and a juicy, tender, flavorful interior. Pan frying or shallow frying refers to cooking a food in an inch or two of hot fat in a frypan. Pan frying works well for more delicate foods, like fish filets. Pan frying results in a lightly crisp product.
Deep frying takes a bit more finesse so here are some tips on becoming a fry master at home, so you can make delicious keto friendly fried goods to make any occasion special.
How to fry:
Follow these guidelines, experiment, and have fun and soon you’ll be frying delectable foods with ease.
A word about kitchen safety: There is no reason not to fry at home, but every home cook should have a first aid kit and a portable fire extinguisher appropriate for grease fires on hand in case of emergency. Regulating the temperature of hot fat, using stable fats, and following the recommended guidelines for frying are good ways to stay safe, but being prepared for the unexpected is part of being a smart cook. If you don’t have a fire extinguisher available, covering the pot of grease with a tight-fitting lid to cut off the oxygen to the fire is the next best choice. For small fires, baking soda poured directly on the flames can smother the fire. Never use water to put out a grease fire—it will only spread the fire. Don’t try to smother the fire with a towel or fabric as these can easily catch on fire and burn you too. When in doubt, get away from the fire and call for help from a safe place.
Cookies and Cream is in the spotlight this week, with Go Packs at 36% off!
This subtle, creamy, and luscious flavor is equally fabulous as a shake and used in recipes, like our Cookies and Cream Brownies. View that and other recipes here
Amy Berger
Scrolling through keto social media, it would be easy to think that intermittent fasting (IF) is required if you want to eat keto. It’s not! But since they do go hand-in-hand so much, let’s take a closer look at IF and how to incorporate it into your life if you choose to.
What is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting is just a fancy phrase for “going longer than usual without eating.” There’s nothing complicated about it. You just eat less often than you did before. People implement IF for different reasons, but it’s important to know that IF is different from extended, multi-day fasting or therapeutic fasting for medical reasons.
Something people commonly report after adopting a ketogenic diet—sometimes within days of starting—is that they’re less hungry. They don’t need quite as much food to feel full, and they can go longer between meals than they’re accustomed to. They skip meals here and there not because they’re intentionally fasting, but because they’re just not hungry. So IF often happens naturally without someone even deliberately trying. And when hunger does come on, it’s a gentle feeling rather than an urgent sensation that comes out of nowhere and demands that you cram something down your piehole immediately.
It’s not an exaggeration to say this freedom from constant hunger is life changing for some people. Being able to go several hours without even thinking about food can be liberating if you were someone who needed to snack every few hours or had to have an “emergency” candy bar stashed in your purse or briefcase when you were on a higher carb diet.
Why do you feel less hungry on keto?
Two main things are at work here. First, when you eat very few carbohydrates, your blood sugar stays steady and you don’t have wild fluctuations that cause you to feel irritable, shaky, light-headed, and hungry. (Some people call this “hangry”—the combination of hungry and angry. We’ve all felt it!) The signals that fat and protein send to your brain are very different from the signals carbs send—especially refined carbs.
The second reason people tend to feel hungry less frequently on keto is lower insulin levels. You might be used to thinking of insulin as a “blood sugar hormone,” but insulin does a lot more than lower blood sugar. One of its other jobs is to keep fat tucked away in fat cells. That’s right: insulin inhibits fat burning. Eating keto keeps your insulin level lower throughout the day, so your body has easier access to its fat stores. This means that even when you’re not consuming food, you’re “eating” your stored body fat! Your cells still have plenty of fuel available to them. Nice, huh?
How do you intermittent fast?
However you want to!
There are no hard-and-fast rules and there’s no right and wrong when it comes to IF. There are as many different ways to do it as there are people doing it. If you’re brand new to keto, it’s best to not do any IF at all for a while. Give your body time to adjust to going without carbs. Once you’re accustomed to being off the blood sugar roller coaster, the easiest way to start IF is simply to wait a little longer between meals. However long you used to go between meals, push it out an extra 30 minutes. Do that for a few days, then wait a full hour. Stretch the time out a little further every few days and before you know it, you’ll be an IF ninja.
Some people choose to implement a specific strategy for eating just one or two meals a day, sometimes based around an “eating window.” This is a window of time during which you have meals and you don’t eat outside that time frame. (You might choose to have coffee, tea, broth, sugar-free gum, or mints, but no food.)
Many people do 16:8. This means consuming meals in an 8-hour window and staying in a fasted state the other 16 hours of the day. This strategy typically means having two meals per day. (For example, having breakfast around 10am and finishing dinner by 6pm, or having lunch at noon and finishing dinner by 8pm.) Some people have an even smaller window, like 20:4—a 4-hour window during which you eat and 20 hours during which you fast. Other people find hunger so well-controlled and their appetite so reduced that they feel best eating just one meal a day. (You’ll see this abbreviated as OMAD on social media. It’s fine to do OMAD as long as you’re getting enough protein and nutrients in that one meal.)
Don’t let specific times of day or numbers of hours control you. If you intended to go 16 hours without eating but you’re ravenous at 14 hours, eat! It’s okay to have a shorter or longer eating window than you intended.
Fit IF around your life; don’t fit your life around IF
Should you skip breakfast or dinner? The morning meal or the evening meal? Do what works best with your schedule and your family dynamics. Some people find it easy to skip breakfast because they’re up and out of the house before the rest of the family is awake anyway. Or they can sit with their family and have a cup of coffee or tea while everyone else eats. Be flexible. If family dinner is important—the only time everyone gathers together on a daily basis—then you wouldn’t want to fast through dinner.
Maybe eating dinner works best on weekdays but on weekends you like to have a leisurely breakfast. Or you like sharing breakfast with your spouse during the week and going out for dinner on Saturday nights. Intermittent fasting is entirely customizable. The way you implement it might look very different from the way someone else does it, and that’s totally fine.
Be flexible on a daily basis, too. If you normally eat a meal or two early in the day and skip nighttime eating, or you restrict food in the early part of the day and skew your food later, it’s okay to change this up now and then. What if something unexpected comes up and you’re not able to consume your meal at the usual time? Maybe an emergency at work pulls you away from your normal mealtime, or you get called for an unexpected social event where it’ll look odd if you don’t eat anything. It’s okay to do things earlier or later than you had planned. There is zero black and white to this. It’s 100% customizable and you can change it up at any time.
IF in the real world
The custom of having three meals a day is completely artificial. Nothing about human physiology or metabolism suggests that you must eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner plus snacks in between. Don’t eat by the clock. Let your hunger—not the time of day—dictate when you eat. If keto controls your appetite so well that you’re only hungry for one or two meals a day, you don’t need to have three.
Intermittent fasting may be easier to do if you’re single and live alone. If you live with your family, it can feel a bit awkward if everyone is sitting down to a meal and you’re fasting. But it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. You can join your family at the table and enjoy their company and conversation. Sip on coffee, tea, or some other noncaloric beverage if you like. You don’t have to eat just because others around you are.
And if you’re new to IF, don’t worry about whether it’s better to eat breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner, or better to have two meals or one meal a day. The quantity and type of food you eat matters more than “when”. Intermittent fasting is really just a way to help your body flex its metabolic muscle and cruise along happily burning fat for a little longer between meals.
The content of this website is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader. If you are on any medication, please consult with your family doctor before starting any new eating plan. Keto Chow is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any disease. Pregnant or breast feeding women should consult their health care professional before consuming.
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