One of the most persistent and damaging myths in keto is that protein is something to fear. The story goes that excess protein gets turned into glucose, which knocks you out of ketosis, so you should keep protein low and fat high. Acting on this, people eat too little protein, lose muscle, stay hungry, and undermine the very results they are after. The myth is wrong, and understanding why frees you to do keto far better.
Both onions and garlic fit into keto, but they sit in very different places, and lumping them together is where people go wrong. Garlic is so low-carb per clove that you can more or less ignore it. Onions are the sneakier one: they feel like a plain vegetable, yet they carry more sugar than their savoury taste lets on, and they end up in almost everything you cook. The trick is not to ban either, but to know which one needs watching and which one does not.
Keto carries a reputation as a rich person’s diet, all ribeye steaks, smoked salmon and tubs of almond flour. That version is indeed pricey, but it is a choice rather than a requirement. Strip keto back to whole foods and it becomes one of the cheaper ways to eat well, because the most expensive things on the plate, the processed convenience foods and the speciality “keto” products, are exactly the ones you can do without.
A well-built keto plate is not short on nutrition. Eggs, fish, meat, dairy and green vegetables are among the most nutrient-dense foods there are, and people often eat better on keto than they did on a beige diet of bread and cereal. Even so, cutting carbohydrate changes which vitamins and minerals you need to think about, and a couple of them slip low often enough to be worth naming. Here is what to watch and, more usefully, how to cover each one from the food already on your plate.
Condiments are where a careful keto day tends to spring a leak. The food on the plate is fine, and then a generous squeeze of something sweet turns a low-carb dinner into a middling one. The good news is that the split is easy to learn: some condiments are almost pure sugar in disguise, while others are essentially free and can stay in daily rotation. Here is which is which, with rough carb counts so you can judge for yourself.