We don't visit my Japanese in-laws that often, since we usually live in another continent. And, since I switched to Low-Carb-High-Fat/keto several years ago, there's now the embarrassing problem that I will no longer eat many Japanese dishes that I used to love: sushi, udon, soba, takoyaki, gyoza, not to mention all the delicious Japanese sweets: daifuku, dorayaki, yokan and so forth. Kind as they are, they always want to treat me, but they're uneasy at not having many food options left. Even the common word for "meal" in Japanese ("gohan") literally means "rice".

So I offered to cook some Italian food for everyone. I volunteered to prepare some authentic ragù alla bolognese (takes about 3 hours). If I made enough of it, I'd cook spaghetti for everyone while I would eat just the meat sauce, without the pasta, as my main course. (Decent recipe at giallozafferano.com, BTW.)

This plan went down very well. If we ignore a slight hiccup along the way (I got distracted and burnt the first batch of ragù about two hours in—so I had to go out, buy the ingredients again and start from scratch; whoops), which fortunately they were kind enough to forgive me for, they all loved the end result. Everyone happy.

My daughter, wife and in-laws are all quite thin: between them, they ate less pasta than would normally satisfy two Italian adults. I had made about 1 kg of ragù and I ended up eating about 3/4 of that. I was very full when we got back home.

Then, the magic of keto. Next morning, my scale said my body fat had gone down.

'nuff said.