The standard Belgian breakfast is tartines — bread with butter and jam, or butter and speculoos spread, or cheese. Maybe a boiled egg if someone is being ambitious. It’s perfectly nice and also entirely off-limits on keto, which means you need a different approach from day one. The good news is that the alternatives are straightforward and the ingredients are easy to find. The bad news is that you will eat a lot of eggs.

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The Marché du Midi runs every Sunday morning under and around the elevated railway at Gare du Midi. It’s one of the largest markets in Belgium, it covers several city blocks, and it sells an enormous range of food — a lot of which is excellent for keto and costs significantly less than the supermarket equivalent. It’s also loud, crowded, and parking anywhere near it on a Sunday morning is a genuine ordeal.

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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. What Belgium actually makes Herve is the one most people haven’t tried. It’s a washed-rind cheese from the Liège area, soft and pungent, somewhere between a strong brie and something that will clear a room.

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Belgian hospitality is generous and it expresses itself primarily through food. If someone invites you to their home for dinner, there will be a lot of food, and refusing it will be noticed. If a colleague has a birthday, there will be cake in the office kitchen at 10am, and standing next to it with a coffee while not eating any will attract comments. If you go to a family dinner, there will be potatoes in some form, probably bread on the table, and possibly a waterzooi or a carbonnade flamande that you can eat around but not entirely avoid.

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One of the more commonly reported effects of keto is improved mental clarity — sharper focus, more consistent energy, less of the afternoon brain fog that makes 3pm at a desk feel impossible. A lot of people find this. Some people don’t notice much difference at all. A smaller number feel worse, particularly during the adaptation period. The evidence behind this is real but not as dramatic as it’s sometimes presented.

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The first two to four weeks of exercising on keto are genuinely harder than normal. Your body is used to burning glycogen — stored carbohydrates — as its primary fuel during exercise, and when you remove carbs, it takes time to adapt to using fat instead. During that transition, you will feel sluggish. Your runs will be slower, your weights will feel heavier, and you’ll probably need more recovery time. This is normal and temporary, but it’s worth knowing about in advance so you don’t decide keto is broken when you’re struggling through a run in Sonian Forest feeling like you’re moving through wet concrete.

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Sticking to keto and still wanting a drink are not mutually exclusive, but they do require a bit of planning. Some drinks barely register on your carb count, while others will spend your entire day’s budget in a single glass. And beyond the carbs themselves, alcohol does a few things to a fat-adapted body that are worth understanding before you order. Living in a place like Brussels, where beer is practically a civic institution, sharpens the question further.

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Brussels is a surprisingly good city for eating keto, with one obvious problem: frites come with everything. Once you make peace with asking for a salad instead, you’re mostly fine. Brasseries are your friend The classic Brussels brasserie is built for keto without knowing it. Steak, grilled fish, mussels, salads with proper toppings — the protein options are solid and portions are generous. The trick is the side dish. Frites are the default answer to everything here, but almost every brasserie will swap them for a salad or vegetables if you ask.

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The basic idea is simple: eat very few carbohydrates — under about 20-30g per day — and your body runs out of its usual fuel source. After a few days, it shifts to burning fat for energy instead, including producing molecules called ketones that your brain can use as fuel. That metabolic state is ketosis, and it’s what the diet is named after. That’s the mechanism. Here’s what it means in practice.

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