The myths that almost made me quit keto.

I want to be honest about something. Reading the things I've written here, you might think I started keto, lost the weight, fixed my labs, and never looked back. That isn't how it happened.

The truth is that for most of the first year, I was constantly tempted to quit. Not because the diet wasn't working. The diet was working. It was working better than anything I'd ever tried. The problem was that everyone around me, and everything I read online, kept telling me I was poisoning myself. That I was going to have a heart attack. That my kidneys were going to fail. That I was going to ruin my liver. That nobody could live like this forever. That I was being antisocial and difficult.

I almost listened.

So I want to tell you about the five things that almost made me give up, and what I know about each of them now, ten years later, with my arteries still intact and my body still working.

Myth 1. Saturated fat is going to clog my arteries.

This was the loudest one. Every time I ate a spoonful of ghee, every time I cooked steak in tallow, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear forty years of public health messaging telling me I was committing slow suicide.

Then I started actually reading.

There's a meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010, led by Dr. Ronald Krauss, one of the most respected lipid researchers in the world. They combined the results of 21 studies that had followed 347,747 people for between 5 and 23 years. The conclusion was direct. Saturated fat intake was not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or cardiovascular disease.

Then in 2020, a group of senior researchers published what they called a State-of-the-Art Review in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, where they revisited the entire framework that said saturated fat causes heart disease. Their conclusion was that the evidence does not support general restriction of saturated fat for cardiovascular prevention, and that real foods containing saturated fat, like unprocessed meat, eggs, dairy, and some plant oils, can be part of a healthy diet.

I'm not telling you the science is settled. There are still researchers on the other side, and they argue back, and the debate is real. What I am telling you is this: when I heard "saturated fat will clog your arteries" said as if it were obvious fact, the science had stopped agreeing with that statement years before. I just didn't know.

Myth 2. My cholesterol is going to skyrocket and I'm going to have a heart attack.

This is the one that scared me the most, because my numbers were already bad when I started.

What actually happened, and you can read the full story in my lab results post, is the opposite. My triglycerides came down hard. My HDL went up. My ratio improved dramatically. The total cholesterol number, the one everyone obsesses over, became less interesting once I understood that it's the breakdown that matters, not the total.

Here's what nobody told me at the beginning. The total cholesterol number is a sum of several things, and some of those things are protective and some are not. Looking at total cholesterol alone is like judging a meal by the weight of the plate. The ratio of triglycerides to HDL turns out to be a much better predictor of heart risk than the total number. Mine went from terrible to good.

I'm not saying this happens to everyone. Some people on keto see their LDL rise, and that's a real conversation to have with a doctor who actually understands lipidology, not one who just looks at one number and writes a prescription. What I am saying is that the simple story, "fat in equals cholesterol up equals heart attack," is not what plays out in real bloodwork for most people who do this right.

Myth 3. I'm going to destroy my kidneys and my liver.

This one came at me constantly. Friends, family, articles online, everyone seemed to know somebody who knew somebody whose kidneys had failed on keto.

The data tells a different story. There's a clinical trial that followed 92 patients on a very low-calorie ketogenic diet for about three months. They lost on average close to 20% of their body weight. The researchers specifically measured kidney and liver function before and after. There were no clinically relevant changes. In fact, 27.7% of the patients who had started with mild kidney problems saw their kidney function normalize.

There's another study from 2023, published in Cell Reports Medicine, on patients with polycystic kidney disease, the worst possible test case for "is keto bad for kidneys." The ketogenic diet group showed improved kidney function while the control group continued to decline. The liver volume also decreased. Side effects were mild and went away.

None of this proves keto is good for every kidney. People with serious pre-existing kidney disease need to talk to a nephrologist before changing how they eat. What this does prove is that the casual claim "keto destroys your organs" is not supported by what's actually been measured.

Myth 4. It's impossible to keep this up for the rest of your life.

This was the one that made me doubt myself the most, because it sounded reasonable. Diets fail. Everybody knows this. The before and after photos always come with a sequel where the person gained it all back.

I've been doing this for ten years. I started in 2016.

I don't count anymore. I don't measure ketones. I don't track macros. I don't suffer. I just eat the way I eat. Real fat, real meat, real vegetables, real food. The cravings that I used to feel for bread and sugar are gone. They didn't fade. They left. There's a difference.

What I learned is that the reason most diets fail is because they're built on willpower against hunger. Keto isn't. After the first few weeks, the hunger stops driving the bus. Your body finally has access to its own fat for fuel, and the brain stops sending you constant emergency signals to eat. That's not willpower. That's biology working the way it was supposed to.

I'm not going to pretend everyone can do this forever. Some people quit after six months and that's their truth. But "nobody can do this long term" is a story, not a fact, and I'm one of the people walking around showing it isn't always true.

Myth 5. It's an antisocial diet. You can't live a normal life.

I left this one for last because it's the one nobody talks about, and the one that almost beat me.

The other myths I could read about. I could fight them with data. This one, I had to fight in restaurants, at birthday parties, at family dinners in Chile and Miami. The cake comes out and you don't eat it and suddenly you're the difficult one. The wine bottle goes around and you skip it and suddenly you're not fun. The bread basket arrives and you push it away and the whole table looks at you.

I'm not going to lie. This was hard. There were nights I ate the cake just to not be the weirdo at the table. There were times I drank because everyone else was drinking.

What changed wasn't the world. What changed was me. At some point I realized I was negotiating with a version of myself that was unhealthy, foggy, tired, and slowly killing himself, just so other people wouldn't feel uncomfortable for an hour. That trade stopped making sense.

Today I go to dinners. I order steak instead of pasta. I have a glass of wine sometimes and I leave the bread. Nobody really cares. Most of the social pressure I felt back then was a story I was telling myself. The few people who actually had a problem with what was on my plate turned out to have a problem with me, not with the food.

You can live a totally normal life on this. You just have to decide that your normal is the one you choose, not the one the table chooses for you.

I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who almost quit.

I want to leave you with this. Every single one of these myths came at me, hard, in the first year. If I had listened to any one of them, I would have gone back to the way I ate before, and I'd probably be on three medications by now with worse numbers than I started with.

I didn't listen, and that's the only reason I'm here writing this.

If you're starting out, or if you've started and you're scared because someone told you that what you're doing is dangerous, I want you to know what I now know. The science you're afraid of has moved. The horror stories are usually anecdotes. The social pressure is usually projection. And the version of you that's slowly improving every week is more important than the version of you that fits in at a dinner table.

I cook with ghee every day. I sear in tallow when I want crispy. I eat real food. I'm ten years in and I'm not going back.

Fat never felt so right.

Gustavo Rodriguez, Founder