The diet is administered like medicine, and parents need to work with their neurologist and a keto dietitian to come up with an appropriate caloric intake for the child. A sleepover takes two hours, because she labels all the food and writes out heating and serving instructions for the parents. One drug gave him hand tremors, another made him a zombie and a third made him hallucinate, thinking that bugs and worms were crawling out of his skin. To jump through these arithmetic hoops, Evelyn, who gave up her career to take on the now full-time job of feeding Sam, plans meals on the kitchen computer using a Web-based program called KetoCalculator. Unexpected events that barely register in most families - like the fact that I recently ate the applesauce that was to be part of Sam’s breakfast - create mad scrambles to recalculate and reweigh meals so Sam gets out the door on time. But administering the diet for three meals and two snacks a day, seven days a week for two years is relentless. Make your protein intake a goal to meet each day, but more than that is not better. The main goal of this diet is to achieve the ketosis stage, which has many benefits including that you become a fat-burning machine.
