Brussels Keto

Two people can both say they eat twenty grams of carbs a day on keto and mean quite different things, because one is counting total carbohydrate and the other is counting net carbs. Knowing the difference, and which to follow, saves a lot of confusion. The basic idea Net carbs are the carbohydrates that actually raise your blood sugar and so matter for ketosis. You arrive at them by taking the total carbohydrate in a food and subtracting the parts your body does not absorb as usable sugar, chiefly fibre and most sugar alcohols.

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Plenty of people start keto, feel grim by day three, and conclude the diet does not agree with them. Most of the time what they are feeling is the so-called keto flu, a short, avoidable patch of feeling off that has very little to do with the diet failing and almost everything to do with salt and water. What it actually is When you cut carbohydrate hard, your body stops holding on to as much water, and a lot of sodium leaves with it.

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A common worry about keto is that it means no vegetables and no fibre. It does not. It means choosing the vegetables that grow above ground over the starchy ones that grow below, and once you know the rough map you can fill half your plate without a second thought. The ones to lean on Anything leafy and green is essentially free: spinach, lettuce, rocket, kale, chard. Then the cruciferous family, which does a lot of work on keto: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts.

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Menssa is on Avenue de Tervueren in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, in a neighbourhood that’s more embassy than restaurant district: residential, quiet, the kind of address that means you’re going specifically rather than stumbling in. Chef Christophe Hardiquest ran this address for years as Bon Bon, with two Michelin stars, before rebranding to Menssa with a sharpened focus on sustainable and organic cooking. It currently holds one star. The rebrand wasn’t a step down in ambition.

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Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with. There are two Belgian waffles and they are different problems. The Liège waffle is made from a yeasted dough enriched with butter and eggs, studded with pearl sugar that melts and caramelises against the iron during cooking. The pearl sugar isn’t a topping. It’s structural. It’s what makes the outside crispy and the inside soft and the whole thing taste like it does.

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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. What’s actually useful Magnesium is the one supplement that’s hard to argue against for people on keto.

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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.

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Most people who come to Belgium think of beer first, and fair enough. But Belgium has another drinking tradition that predates most of its famous abbeys and that is, for keto purposes, considerably more useful: jenever. Jenever (also spelled genever, and the etymological root of the English word “gin”) is a malt wine spirit flavoured with juniper and other botanicals. It originated in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century and has been made continuously ever since.

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Hochepot, also called hutspot in Dutch or pot-au-feu à la gantoise if you’re being formal about it, is one of those dishes that exists in every northern European peasant cuisine under a slightly different name. Flemish hochepot is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and root vegetables, traditionally made with whatever cuts were available: oxtail, pig’s ears, lamb shoulder, beef shank, pork belly. All of it goes into a pot with root vegetables and water and cooks for a long time until everything is tender and the broth has absorbed three or four different animals’ worth of flavour.

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The Plaisirs d’Hiver market spreads across Place Sainte-Catherine, the Bourse area, and several surrounding streets from late November through early January. It’s one of the larger winter markets in Belgium, it’s extremely crowded on weekends, and the food stalls are primarily selling things you cannot eat on keto: Liège waffles with Nutella, hot chocolate, churros, crêpes with sugar, speculoos everything, and at least three stalls selling nothing but variations on waffles with fruit and cream.

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