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Keto and intermittent fasting turn up together so often that people sometimes assume they are the same thing. They are not, but they complement each other neatly, and plenty of keto eaters drift into some form of fasting without ever deciding to. If you have reached the point where breakfast no longer appeals, you are most of the way there already. This guide explains why the two fit, what the common patterns actually involve, and how to add fasting without making yourself miserable or losing hard-won muscle.

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Plenty of people start keto, feel grim by day three, and quietly decide the diet does not agree with them. Most of the time what they are feeling is the so-called keto flu, a short and largely avoidable patch of feeling off. It has very little to do with the diet failing and almost everything to do with salt and water. Knowing what it is, roughly how long it lasts, and the handful of things that fix it turns the worst week of keto into a non-event.

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People talk about “hitting their macros” on keto as though the meaning were obvious, and for a beginner it usually is not. Macros, short for macronutrients, are the three things in food that supply energy: protein, fat and carbohydrate. A ketogenic diet works by keeping carbohydrate very low so the body shifts to burning fat for fuel, which makes the way you divide your calories between those three matter more here than on almost any other way of eating.

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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.

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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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