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.
Most people come to keto with two hopes in roughly equal measure: to lose weight and to feel less wrung out during the day. Both are reasonable, and both tend to arrive, but not on the schedule the before-and-after photos imply. The first few months follow a fairly predictable shape once you know what you are looking at, and knowing that shape in advance is the difference between staying the course and quitting in week two when the scale stops moving and your legs feel like lead.
Ask people what surprised them most about keto and a lot of them will skip past weight and talk about their head. Steadier focus, fewer energy crashes, and a working afternoon that no longer falls apart around three o’clock. Plenty find this. Some notice nothing. A smaller group feel distinctly worse for a while before anything improves. All three experiences are normal, and it helps to understand why before you decide which one applies to you.
If you start keto and keep training, the first few weeks will feel like a downgrade. Your usual run drags, your normal weights feel borrowed from someone stronger, and you finish sessions wondering whether you have broken something. You have not. What you are feeling is your body rewiring its fuel system, and the slump is temporary. Knowing roughly how it unfolds, and why, is what stops people quitting in week two when they were three weeks from feeling fine.
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.
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.
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Brasseries are your friend The classic Brussels brasserie is built for keto without knowing it.
Keto gets explained in two unhelpful ways: either as a miracle that melts fat while you sleep, or as a joyless slab of bacon and butter. Neither is right. When I first looked into it, most of what I found sat at one of those two extremes, and neither matched living it. The ketogenic diet is a fairly simple metabolic idea with some real evidence behind it and a few genuine catches, and once you understand the mechanism the rest of it stops feeling like a list of arbitrary rules.