Going keto means cooking with more fat, and the moment you start looking into which fat, the internet appears with tubs of premium coconut oil, jars of ghee and bottles of MCT oil, all promising special powers and all carrying special prices. Here is the liberating truth, and the one I settled on after buying a few of those jars myself and using them up: you do not need any of it.
Nuts and seeds are the default keto snack, and for good reason: they travel well, need no cooking, and feel like a treat. But they are not interchangeable. Some are genuinely low in carbohydrate and easy to keep within bounds, others creep up fast, and a few are high enough that a generous handful can nudge you out of ketosis without you noticing. They also share one quiet trap that catches almost everyone.
Fruit has such a wholesome reputation that ruling most of it out feels wrong, almost like cutting back on vegetables. The catch is that fruit was bred over centuries to be sweet, and sweet means sugar. A banana or a couple of apples can quietly use up an entire day’s carbohydrate allowance on keto, which is why fruit is one of the first things people get tangled up on. The good news is that some fruit fits comfortably, and a few of the most useful keto foods are technically fruits people never think of that way.
Legumes are one of the most frustrating foods to weigh up on keto, because they are genuinely good for you and yet undeniably carby. Lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans and the rest are packed with protein, fibre and nutrients, the sort of food every other diet tells you to eat more of. So the honest answer to whether they are keto is a proper “it depends”, and the detail is worth understanding rather than just writing them off.
Japanese food feels like it ought to be a keto dream. It is light, full of fish and vegetables, and a world away from heavy, floury cooking. Then you remember the rice. Sushi is built on it, and sushi rice is not just rice but rice with added sugar, which makes a plate of rolls one of the quieter carb traps out there. The good news is that Japanese cuisine has plenty that suits keto beautifully once you know what to order and what to leave.
One of the stubbornest myths about keto is that it means a plate of meat and cheese with nothing green in sight. It does not, and doing it that way is how people end up sluggish, constipated and bored within a fortnight. Cutting carbohydrate does not mean cutting vegetables; it means swapping the starchy ones that grow underground for the watery, leafy, above-ground ones that carry vitamins, minerals and fibre for almost no carbs at all.
The supplement industry has made keto into a commercial opportunity. There is now a product for every stage of keto: keto-start capsules, exogenous ketone drinks, MCT oil in seventeen formats, electrolyte powders in forty flavours, and various combinations thereof. Most of it is not necessary. A few things genuinely help. Here’s the honest breakdown.
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Belgian chocolate has a genuine claim to being the best in the world, which makes it either a comfort or a problem depending on what you’re trying to eat. The honest answer is: some of it is fine on keto, most of it isn’t, and the distinction is simple enough.
Dark chocolate at 70% cacao or higher has a small enough amount of sugar that moderate consumption, a few squares rather than a bar, fits within a sensible keto day.
You don’t need a specialty health food shop to do keto in Belgium. Everything essential is available at a standard Belgian supermarket: Delhaize, Colruyt, Carrefour, Lidl, Aldi. This is genuinely useful information because there’s a tendency in keto circles to make the shopping sound complicated, and it isn’t.
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Belgium doesn’t get enough credit for its cheese. You hear about French cheese, Dutch Gouda, Swiss everything, but the Belgian stuff is genuinely good, and for keto purposes, it’s also convenient. Cheese is fat and protein with minimal carbs. Belgium happens to produce a lot of it and sell it everywhere.
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