I Started Keto to Lose Ten Pounds. Then My Brain Got Quieter.

When I stepped off the plane from Alaska, I was carrying more than my suitcase.

My ankles were swollen. I'd gained ten pounds of water and cruise food. I was tired the way everyone is after a long vacation, and I was also tired in another way.

It was my first extended trip since spending thirty days in a psych ward three years earlier.

The days in Alaska were clear and breathtaking. I wouldn't have traded them for anything.

But staying well took constant attention. I protected my sleep. I watched my schedule. I thought about stimulation, crowds, whether I was pushing too hard. I took my medication exactly as prescribed, and Klonopin when the nights wouldn't settle.

From the outside, I looked like a woman enjoying Alaska.

On the inside, stability was a full-time job.

That's been the arrangement for three years. Stable, medicated, hospitalizations behind me. I've learned my own warning signs well enough to smell mania a mile away. It works.

It's also exhausting. Stability costs something every single day. Am I talking too fast? Did I get enough sleep? Should I go to this party? Do I speak if they ask me? Is the universe conscious — and is that an actual question? What if I get too excited? What if I get happy? I carry that background noise everywhere. It has just become routine.

None of that is why I started keto.

When I got home, I just wanted to tie my shoes without holding my breath. The cruise weight had to go. I'd heard about keto and figured it was as good a plan as any. I wasn't looking for a miracle. Just ten pounds.

What really set things in motion was a foot injury I'd ignored throughout my vacation. One doctor's visit later, I was stuck in a boot with a prescription to keep my foot elevated. Bored, immobile, and with a phone in my hand, I started reading. There was a rumor that keto had a connection to bipolar, but I'd always brushed it off as wellness-world fluff: a gimmick to sell diets to people on psych meds. But I had nowhere to go, so I pulled the thread.

I expected wellness blogs. Instead, the trail led to Harvard psychiatrists, published research, and the Baszucki family, who started a nonprofit called Metabolic Mind after their son's bipolar crisis, because the information they needed didn't exist when they went looking for it.

That was more than I expected to find. The idea that got me was simple: ketones are brain fuel. They burn clean. Sugar burns like a match — bright, fast, out. What I pictured in my head for keto was an old-fashioned oil candle instead: a sturdy wick, a steady flame. I have bipolar 1. I know what an unsteady flame feels like from the inside. The image made sense.

I'd already cut my carbs to twenty grams a day to shed the weight. For most people, that's the threshold where the body switches fuel and goes into ketosis. The experiment I wanted was already running.

The weight came off. Fine. That's what I'd come for. But after everything I had learned, I was watching for something else. Let's see what ketones do to my brain.

The answer came faster than I expected, and it didn't come from the scale. It came from the Klonopin bottle. On the Alaska trip I had taken almost nightly doses — coming home meant tapering back down, and I was dreading it. That familiar discomfort. I'd already resigned myself.

The discomfort never came.

I didn't white-knuckle anything. I didn't decide to be stronger. The thought simply stopped showing up. Days turned into weeks before I realized I hadn't reached for one at all.

Here's the part that gave me pause. Klonopin works on the GABA system: it makes the brakes more sensitive. And one of the things ketones seem to do, at least in the epilepsy research, is help the brain make more GABA to begin with. Nobody told me that. I found out afterward, reading about why any of this might work.

Does that explain why it was easy? Maybe. It's still kind of a mystery to me. And if you found your way to this site, I'm guessing you're comfortable with mystery too.

What we do know is this: keto wasn't dreamed up by a wellness influencer or a drug company. Fat as fuel is as old as human history. It wasn't invented. It was remembered. And the brain likes it.

Then something else.

For months I'd been struggling to find words. Names would disappear mid-conversation. I'd stall out greeting someone I'd known for years. That frightened me more than I admitted.

I was getting close to talking with my prescriber about it. Was this the price of admission to a life without psychosis? The medications that gave me my life back might also be taking something from me.

I thought I was headed toward a choice no one wants to make. Stability or clarity.

Instead, a few weeks deeper into ketosis, the words started coming back. Not perfectly. I still have occasional lapses. But the change has been dramatic — and I've had lower doses and good sleep before. The words didn't come back then. The only thing different this time is ketones.

With the fog lifting, I decided to tackle something I'd wanted for years: cutting down my antidepressant. Antidepressants are risky business for us bipolar 1s — they can tip us the wrong way fast — and I'd never felt steady enough to try. Forty days in, I made a plan with my prescriber and began my taper of Wellbutrin. I braced for the dip.

It never showed.

And then came the thing I didn't expect at all.

The background noise turned down.

Not off. I still know my warning signs. I still check. But the questions come up less, and they leave faster when they do. I went to the party. I talked. I got excited, and then I got happy, and nobody had to worry about it, including me. I decided to let myself keep wondering whether the universe is conscious. Turns out so did Plato.

The managing got smaller. If there was a little more noise, a few more people, or a change of plans? It wouldn't cost me the next two days. Even the quiet moments stopped costing so much — I hadn't known the meter was running there too.

That's the part I want you to hear. Not that I got better. I was already stable. Ketones made stability feel less like constant surveillance — and more like the simple freedom of not having to think about thinking. That's worth the investigation.

Medication helped me become stable enough to build a life I love. It's been part of my path. I know it isn't part of everyone's. My recovery has many pillars: my prescriber, Josh, my recovery community, daily spiritual practice, service to others, exercise, and a nightly personal inventory.

Keto isn't replacing any of them. It's making all of them work better. Three years of recovery tools I'd been using faithfully started landing differently, and I don't have another explanation for it.

I brought my prescriber into the keto loop early on. She didn't have a lot of clinical guidance for me — medicine moves slowly, and this field is young. But her exact words were: "Keep doing it." If your prescriber shrugs, don't read it as a stop sign. You still need them in your corner to run labs and manage doses safely.

The rest of my education came from the pioneers doing the work: Metabolic Mind, Dr. Chris Palmer's "Brain Energy," and Dr. Georgia Ede's "Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind." Amongst many others. The science is real, and it's finally gaining ground.

Today marks sixty days in ketosis. Long enough to change what I think is possible for my brain.

I'm just one woman. A woman who once spent days dancing to music no one else could hear. A woman who came home from Alaska hoping to lose ten pounds.

Tell me where you are with this in the comments. Curious, skeptical, already trying it. And if you're doing this quietly and haven't said so out loud, say so. There are more of us than anyone knows, and sixty days of one woman is a small sample.

Years ago, Josh and I were mapping crisis plans and talking about telepathy. Now we talk about what I eat for breakfast, and whether ketones could actually be the future of mental health. With the occasional sidebar on whether extraterrestrials are vegan. They are.

See you in thirty days.

— Raquel