What I Learned After 30 Days of Keto in Brussels

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. The tartines at the hotel breakfast. The sandwiches that are the default work lunch for essentially everyone. You end up declining something bread-related roughly twice a day, which gets easier but never fully stops requiring attention.

Work lunches specifically were the awkward part. Belgian office culture involves collective lunches and the default is sandwiches. Explaining without turning it into a whole conversation is a skill you develop over the first couple of weeks.

Belgian beer is its own problem, which I knew but felt more acutely once I was actually navigating bar situations. The social context of being in Brussels and not drinking Belgian beer is genuinely strange, a bit like being in France and not drinking wine. You can do it and people adjust, but it takes a few rounds to stop feeling conspicuous.

What was easier than expected

The quality of meat and fish in Brussels is good enough that eating well on keto wasn’t difficult or expensive. The halal butchers in Saint-Gilles and Molenbeek have good fresh meat at reasonable prices. The Marché du Midi on Sundays solved most of my protein and vegetable shopping in one go.

Brasseries, which are the default format for a lot of eating out here, turned out to be genuinely accommodating. Asking for vegetables instead of frites at a brasserie is a normal request and was never once refused. Nobody made it weird.

Cooking Belgian classics without the carb component was also easier than I expected. Stoofvlees without frites is still good. Waterzooi is already keto. Moules are already keto.

What actually changed

Energy levels evened out. The 3pm slump that I’d assumed was just what afternoons were like mostly went away after about two weeks. Weight came off steadily for the first month, around four kilos, though some of that was clearly water weight in the first week.

The most unexpected change was around hunger. Eating less frequently and not thinking about food between meals is a real effect that people describe and that I was slightly sceptical about. It’s accurate.

The craving for a proper Trappist never fully went away. Still hasn’t.