What happens when you don’t eat carbohydrates?

“When you say no carbohydrates, what exactly are we talking about?” my friend asked carefully. Our family — my husband, our 14-year-old Louie, 13year-old Selma and 11-year-old George — had just embarked on a monthlong ketogenetic diet and she was “checking in.”

“It means even no onions,” I told her.

“Onions have carbohydrates?”

“Everything has carbohydrates,” I snapped. “Do you realize if you are hungry enough, a raw onion can taste like an apple?”

She graciously avoided the obvious follow-up question. Why were we doing this? Why had the Haft family yet again embarked on a journey that mirrored some kind of postmodern version on the Donner family expedition?

“Jeffrey Dahmer?!” Louie yelled with enthusiasm.

“Look, the only way I have ever been able to lose weight,” Ian announced from on high, “is going on a ketogenic diet. It’s the only thing that works.”

“Then why are you still fat?” Selma asked.

If you are not familiar with this term it’s pretty basic: a ketogenetic diet is one that limits all sugars forcing your body into a metabolic state where you burn fat for energy instead of sugar (glucose). The idea is that your body gets into the habit of eating fat, but here’s the kicker: while you may not be able to consume brioche buns with wild abandon, you CAN eat bacon.

“Works for me,” George informed us.

On a “keto” diet, you are encouraged to eat predominately fat, a little bit of protein and as little carbohydrates as physically possible.

How can you lose weight from eating eggs, cheese, bacon, butter and cream you may ask? Well it turns out that if you eat enough of it, you won’t —until you get so sick of the stuff, you just don’t want to eat at all.

Doubt it? Then try it. And while you’re at it, try it with two teenagers, a tween and a compulsive 51-year-old bio-hacking man. Not only will you not want to eat eggs, cheese, bacon, butter and cream — you won’t want to be alive.

Look. I want to be really careful about this. The last time I wrote about issues of body image I got schooled by my faithful, long-suffering readers —and rightly so. “Fat” is not a word we use (despite my grandmother’s heightened appreciation for the term). Expressions like “thunder thighs” (as in the nickname my dad gave my brother, repeatedly yelling it in the Junior’s Slacks Department at the JCPenny off Flatbush Avenue circa 1983) is a term of the past.

But we Hafts like to eat — and we have a genetic disposition toward putting on weight. I’ve struggled with this all my life, from an eating disorder to “not caring.” So anytime this issue comes up, I tend to shut down, knowing my vantage point is unreliable. The problem is my husband is basically Jack LaLanne gone Tim Ferriss; Ian exercises like a fiend, diets so he can binge, bio hacks everything and loves to talk about it. Constantly.

During the pandemic, the Haft family reached some kind of nutritional freefall that left its mark. Meals didn’t really exist; time of day was like an anachronistic concept from a distant place as we walked around with Buffalo Wild Wings in one hand and a caveman club in the other.

We all had “disordered eating”— and it wasn’t just superficial; high cholesterol, high blood pressure, off the charts triglycerides — we needed to take action ... and Ian was pumped.

The thing you realize several days into a ketogenic diet is that the American food industry is five steps ahead of you, as always. There are entire aisles at ShopRite dedicated to the “Keto Lifestyle” — with brands like Duncan Hines Chewy Fudge Keto Brownie Mix. Just when you think you can’t buy bread, you find “keto” bread, right next to the Wonder. Keto bread even looks like Wonder bread — and while the taste doesn’t quite match up, it works.

Dig a little deeper and you will find entire empires built upon the keto lifestyle; companies like ChocZero with their Keto Nutella, Good Dee’s Red Velvet Mug Cake and Kiss My Keto gummy worms that come pretty darn close to the real thing.

“This isn’t so bad,” George announced on week two, his mouth overflowing with Kiss My Keto worms.

But what the keto empire doesn’t tell you is that too much keto sweets equals major gastric distress. Like major. If you were to search Reddit by typing in, say, “Atkins Endulge Caramel diarrhea?” you will find many keto soldiers have fallen before you here; they openly refer to this stuff as “colon blow.”

Also eating nine “endulge” keto caramels equals over 1,000 calories, so even if your body is burning fat, it won’t be burning yours. In fact, it will be welcoming visitors.

“But children need carbohydrates, Claire,” my pediatrician told me — at which point I explained that given the “tragic” extent of the sugar lobby in the United States, I was working “hard to responsibly lower my family’s carbohydrate intake,” at which point she said: “You are such a good mother; you know, whenever people tell me about kid’s weight issues, I always say: just look to the mother.” ... At which point I hung up.

At the end of the keto day I have no clue what the answer is. I DO know that I have a heightened awareness for how much sugar is in everything, and that everyone’s moods seem more stable around here (even mine). I also have a heightened awareness of how “embracing the ketogenetic diet” means you have to be rich. At some stage, I broke it all down and realized that our favorite keto cookies were costing us $4 per wafer. But we lost weight and our labs never looked better.

As luck would have it, just as we started our keto diet, the guidelines on treating childhood weight issues were updated in a spectacularly ill-timed announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics. It was like they were on to us via balloon surveillance.

Among other things, the AAP sent a message that weight was a medical issue that required attention and care; we needed to take our body mass index seriously because there was a genetic component that could not be ignored. The AAP’s updated guidelines recommend kids as young as 2 undergo a 26-hourminimum, face-to-face, familybased, multi-component treatment. Have fun with that one. For kids 12 and older, injectable semaglutide like Ozempic and Wegovy are now recommended and the real shocker is that the AAP now suggests kids as young as 13 be viable candidates for bariatric surgery, or what my grandmother called stapling your stomach shut.

Obviously this is a loaded issue — and it’s important to note the AAP is addressing significant weight issues involving a BMI of over 95 percent (or what they term “obesity”), not girls obsessing that their thighs are too “fat.” But how do you untangle the two? Isn’t image created from societal norms and judgement?

As you can imagine the news headlines were endless, but there was one interview that particularly stuck with me.

Gina Kolata from the New York Times podcast was being grilled on the idea that perhaps kids should just be themselves regardless of size — wasn’t that the “Free To Be You and Me” way of our generation?

What about Lena Dunham and embracing your body as beautiful? What about “Little Miss Sunshine” and the shaming of my grandmother’s generation by way an epidemic of horrific eating disorders?

Were we not beyond all of that — and wasn’t the AAP moving us back in time? Our kids now have shows like “My Big Fat Fabulous Life” and plus-size models in J. Crew catalogs — and didn’t we fight for that?

Why not ask ourselves the obvious question: If our society put less attention and judgement on weight, our kids (and adults) would never be forced to feel such toxic shame … right? As The Daily host Michael Barbaro put it: “Suddenly, doctors are saying something’s wrong with you in a way that perhaps they didn’t have to feel before.”

“I think they felt it,” Gina said calmly, as I sat eyeing my stupid Chewy Fudge Keto Brownie Mix. “How could they not have felt it? You can’t escape it. People stare at kids with obesity.

They do. You are judged, and everywhere you go, people assume it’s your fault. You’re out of control, and you’re not a virtuous person.”

And somehow that stopped me dead in my tracks.

The thing you realize several days into a ketogenic diet is that the American food industry is five steps ahead of you, as always. There are entire aisles at ShopRite dedicated to the “Keto Lifestyle” — with brands like Duncan Hines Chewy Fudge Keto Brownie Mix.