Edible San Diego E Edition Issue #51 Winter 2019

FEATURE |
Tony Cohen
54, KETO DIET
Tony Cohen, founder of the San Diego Keto Club, calls himself
one of the first human guinea pigs for exogenous ketones.
He received a FedEx package filled with two clear sandwich
bags of white powder from a friend in San Diego. There were
instructions about how to pee on a ketone testing strip (a practice
that is no longer in favor) and more instructions on what
to eat and when.
It says a lot about Cohen’s life at this time that he started
ingesting the mystery substance without knowing much about
how the keto diet worked. He was living in New York and he
was broke. “I probably suffered from some type of depression,
although I wouldn’t have said that at the time,” Cohen admits.
He lived in a tiny studio above a pizza and ice cream parlor
in Spanish Harlem with no natural light and was teaching Krav
Maga, a relatively obscure mixed martial art, at the time. While
he previously trained to be a chef in Northern Thailand, he
didn’t have a kitchen, so most of his meals were of the typical
New York commuter variety. He had a bacon, egg, and cheese
bagel for breakfast, a slice or two of pizza in the afternoon,
more pizza for dinner, and ice cream for dessert. Every day.
“It was a downward spiral that I couldn’t work my way out
of,” Cohen says. “So when that package came in the mail, I was
ready to make a serious change.”
He says that timing is everything. It also helped that he
didn’t consider it to be a “diet”; it was more of an experiment.
It wasn’t a fad yet, and Cohen, a born contrarian, seemed to
embrace it.
“When I started three years ago, people thought I was an
idiot,” Cohen says.
But it was the right diet—or should we say eating regimen—
at the right time.
“If you had told me to diet, I would have told you where to
go,” Cohen says. “Gradually, I only had pizza and ice cream a
few times a week instead of every day. Then I’d eat the pizza
and skip the ice cream or eat the ice cream and skip the pizza,
and then I just stopped eating them both altogether. But it
didn’t happen overnight.”
The keto diet consists of eliminating refined sugars and eating
low carbohydrates with a proper balance of high-fat foods.
Ketosis occurs when there isn’t enough glucose, the body’s primary
fuel source, so the body starts to break down fat stores to
produce energy. There’s a lot more to it, and taking exogenous
ketones is entirely optional. Tony recommends starting with
small changes, such as cutting down on processed food.
“It can be really overwhelming. You have to do it in steps,”
he says.
Favorite restaurants
Bare Back Grill in Pacific
Beach for burgers
Second Nature North
Pacific Beach for clean
steak and bacon
Cívico 1845 in Little Italy
for great cheese and
salami plates
Wheat and Water in Bird
Rock for bulletproof
coffee
Shops
Sprouts
Little Italy Farmers’
Market
Treats
Yez Foods, local keto
bread and cookie
company
Dry Farms Wine
Instagram
@therealtonycohen
OLIVIA HAYO
30 ediblesandiego.com