People see the plate — garlic butter salmon, a scoop of cauliflower rice, no bun in sight — and assume I’m keto. I get it, and I get why they’d assume it: I’m the guy who built ZeroToHero (zerotoherofit.com), so surely I’m running some optimized low-carb protocol behind the scenes. I’m not. I tried, actually, and the reason I quit is a better story than the diet itself.

Back in April I ran keto for real — 16 days, carbs capped under 20 grams, logged every gram in ZeroToHero (zerotoherofit.com) because I wanted actual numbers, not vibes. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, salmon or ground beef for dinner, cheese as a snack, a tablespoon of peanut butter felt like a luxury. I lost 3.4 pounds in those 16 days, which sounds great until you look at what came with it. By day 6 I was flat — not hungry, just foggy, like my brain was running on battery saver. My gym sessions fell apart: I dropped from 185 for five reps on bench to barely grinding out 155, and I wasn’t recovering between sets. I told myself it was keto flu and it would pass. By day 12 it hadn’t.

Here’s the part that actually changed my mind, and it’s not the fog or the gym numbers — it’s what I found when I pulled the logs afterward. I compared those 16 keto days against the 16 days right before I started: same rough calorie deficit, about 550 a day under maintenance in both stretches. The weight loss rate barely moved — 3.4 pounds on keto versus 3.1 pounds the two and a half weeks prior, eating rice, oats, and fruit right alongside the same protein targets. The carbs weren’t the lever. The deficit was doing all the work, and keto had just made hitting that deficit harder, because cutting out an entire food category at 6pm on a Tuesday when you’re tired is its own kind of decision fatigue.

So why do half my dinners still look keto? Honestly — I just like them. Salmon with garlic butter and roasted vegetables is fast, it’s protein-dense, and it doesn’t leave me hunting for a second plate an hour later. That’s a real advantage, but it’s a food-preference advantage, not a metabolic one. The difference between April-me and now-me isn’t that I’ve relaxed my standards. It’s that I stopped treating rice and bread as a threat that had to be engineered out of every meal.

Two weeks ago my daughter had a birthday party and there was cake — real cake, buttercream, the works. I had a slice, logged it in about ten seconds with a photo, and moved on. There was no negotiation with myself about whether I’d “earned” it or whether it would knock me out of ketosis, because I wasn’t in ketosis to begin with and I wasn’t trying to be. My calories for the day landed about 200 over target. My weight the next morning was up half a pound, which was gone again within two days, same as it always is after a normal high-sodium, high-carb meal. Nothing about that felt like a setback, because nothing was broken to begin with.

I think the keto-or-nothing framing sticks around because it’s a simple story — cut the carbs, unlock the fat loss — and simple stories travel well. But my own numbers said otherwise, and I’ve talked to enough people using ZeroToHero to know my experience wasn’t unusual: the app doesn’t push anyone toward a specific macro split, and the people losing weight steadily are mostly just eating less than they burn, in whatever ratio of foods they can actually stick with for months instead of weeks.

If you’re staring down a keto start date because you think it’s the only path to real results, I’d just ask you to run your own 16-day comparison before you commit to it long-term. Track a normal stretch, then track a strict one, and look at what the deficit alone was already doing. For me, that was the number that mattered — not the grams of carbs on the label.