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Belgian winter food is stews, braises, roasted meats, cheese, and things cooked for a long time in red wine or beer. Most of this is excellent for keto. The season does most of the work for you, in terms of aligning what you want to eat with what you’re supposed to eat. February is also grey and cold in a specific Brussels way: not dramatically cold, but persistently damp and dark in a way that makes you want to eat something heavy and sit near a radiator.

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A month is long enough to know whether something is working and short enough that you haven’t adjusted your life completely around it. Here’s what I actually found out. What was harder than expected The bread. I knew intellectually that Belgium is a bread culture and that every meal would involve bread somewhere nearby, but knowing it and living it are different things. The basket of bread that appears automatically at Belgian restaurants before you’ve looked at the menu.

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Belgian food has a reputation for being heavy, which in keto terms actually works in your favour more often than you’d expect. A lot of the classics are built around meat, fish, and cream-based sauces, and the problem is usually the accompaniment rather than the dish itself. What adapts well Stoofvlees, beef slow-cooked in beer with thyme and bay, is the Belgian comfort food. The dish itself is fine on keto, but the traditional pairing with frites is obviously not.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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