Zero, With an Asterisk — The Keto Restart

What’s actually in the flavour drops, and an on-ramp back to keto that doesn’t wreck week one. Two months off the wagon is a pause, not a failure — you already did this once and dropped 16 kg. Now do it without living on bars.

Part one — what’s actually in the bottle

MORE and AHEAD converge on the same short cast, and the interesting ingredient turns out not to be a sweetener at all.

MORE Nutrition Zero Sirup, ingredient list as printed:

Glycerin, Wasser, Säuerungsmittel (Äpfelsäure, Citronensäure), Säureregulator (Natriumgluconat), Pfirsichsaftkonzentrat 5,4 %, natürliches Aroma, Süßungsmittel (Acesulfam K, Sucralose), färbendes Lebensmittel, Farbstoff, Konservierungsstoff (Kaliumsorbat).

The syrups and drops run on a glycerin base with an acesulfame K + sucralose blend. The powders swap glycerin for inulin as bulk carrier and sweeten with sucralose + steviol glycosides. AHEAD’s Just Like Sugar is the outlier: 99.9 % erythritol.

The bit the label doesn’t tell you

Glycerin is a gluconeogenic substrate. It carries about 4.3 kcal per gram and your liver can convert it into glucose. Under EU labelling it counts as neither a sugar nor, usually, a carbohydrate — and a drink can legally be called “calorie-free” at under 4 kcal per 100 ml as consumed. So a syrup can read zero, zero, zero while its main ingredient is a polyol your body can burn.

Don’t panic about it. At an actual serving — a few millilitres in a litre of water — the conversion is slow, rate-limited and far too small to end ketosis. The point is that “zero” means below a threshold, not nothing. One or two servings a day is noise. Six is a habit worth noticing, and it’s the syrups that stack up, not the powders.

Erythritol, honestly

In 2023 a Nature Medicine study linked high blood erythritol to heart attack and stroke risk, and a 2024 follow-up found platelet reactivity rose in healthy volunteers after they drank it. The counter-argument is real too: your body makes erythritol internally from glucose, so high blood levels may be a marker of existing metabolic trouble rather than a cause — a point the FDA’s own review and a Frontiers in Nutrition analysis both press.

Unresolved. Erythritol won’t touch your ketosis, and occasional use isn’t worth losing sleep over. But you have four other sweeteners with no such question mark, so there’s no reason to use erythritol by the kilo.

So does any of it break keto?

No. Not at label doses. None of these meaningfully raise insulin or blood glucose.

The risk isn’t metabolic, it’s behavioural — and it’s the thing you already named. Intense sweeteners keep your sweetness set-point high. The evidence on whether they drive people to eat more is genuinely mixed, but you don’t need the literature: you ended up living on high-protein bars. That’s a sweet-seeking loop with a macro-friendly disguise, and the drops are part of the same circuit. Fix the loop and the drops become harmless.

Part two — the on-ramp

Keto restarts hurt because people go from 200 g of carbs to 20 overnight, drain liver glycogen in a day, and lose a litre of water and a pile of sodium with it. That’s the headache, the fog and the dead legs. Almost entirely preventable.

Phase 1 — the taper (31 Jul → 2 Aug) ✅

Friday: drop the starches, fruit stays. Saturday: drop fruit too, berries excepted, roughly 80–100 g carbs. Sunday: under 50 g, and start salting food heavily before you need to.

Phase 2 — week one (3 → 9 Aug)

Carbs under 30 g net. But the number that matters is sodium: 4–5 g/day. Keto flu is sodium depletion — when insulin falls your kidneys dump sodium and the water with it. That’s the headache, the light-headedness and the cramps, and it’s fixable with salt rather than endurance.

• No training beyond walking. Fat adaptation takes about three weeks; hard sessions now just feel awful and teach you keto is miserable.
• Expect 2–3 kg in week one. It’s water, not fat. Enjoy it, don’t get attached, and don’t panic when it stalls in week two.
• Eat to full. Week one is not the week to run a deficit as well. One change at a time.

Phase 3 — week two (10 → 16 Aug)

Carbs hold under 30 g. Energy should come back hard. Movement returns — see The Squat Project: daily mobility plus two 20-minute strength sessions.

Phase 4 — week three onward (17 Aug →)

Carbs can drift to 30–50 g on training days without losing ketosis. Three strength sessions a week. Electrolytes stay permanently — this isn’t a transition thing, keto runs lower sodium the whole way through.

Electrolytes

Everything needed is already in the kitchen: potassium chloride (1 kg), magnesium citrate, plus nightly magnesium glycinate, glycine and vitamin D. Nothing to buy.

The drink — per 1 litre of water

• ½ tsp salt (~1,200 mg sodium)
• ¼ tsp potassium chloride (~700 mg potassium)
• a small scoop of magnesium citrate
• a few flavour drops

Two or three of those a day in week one. That’s LMNT for about 15 cents a litre.

⚠️ Potassium chloride is 52 % potassium — 1 g of powder ≈ 520 mg potassium, and a level teaspoon is nearly 3 g in one hit. Over-the-counter potassium tablets are capped at 99 mg precisely because large boluses can disturb heart rhythm. Max ¼ tsp at a time, 2–3 times a day, always dissolved in a big glass of water, never dry or on an empty stomach. If you’re ever on an ACE inhibitor, an ARB or a potassium-sparing diuretic, or have any kidney issue, supplemental potassium stops being casual.

Go easy on the magnesium citrate. It’s well absorbed and osmotic — a polite way of saying it’s a laxative. You already take glycinate nightly. If things loosen up, that’s the citrate, not the keto.

Hold the inulin until week 3. It’s the same chicory fibre that bulks out the MORE and AHEAD powders, so you could mix your own flavour powder. But it’s a FODMAP, and adding fermentable fibre while your gut switches from carbs to fat causes bloating you’d pin on the diet. Start at 3–5 g and work up.

Getting off the bars

A protein bar does two jobs: it’s convenient and it’s sweet. Ban it and both jobs go unfilled, which is why banning fails. Replace them separately.

• Kill the cupboard box. Two bars live in your bag for genuine emergencies. Zero at home. Availability is most of the battle; willpower is the wrong tool.
• Fill the convenience job in advance. Boiled eggs, cheese, olives, tinned fish, jerky. If there’s nothing grabbable in the fridge at 4pm on a low-energy afternoon, the bar wins — and 2–4pm is your known dip.
• Fill the sweet job on a schedule, not on impulse. One deliberate sweet thing a day at a fixed time. Scheduled sweetness is a treat; grazing sweetness is a loop.
• The high-leverage option: two weeks of nothing sweet at all. No drops, no bars, no sweeteners. It resets your sweetness set-point, and afterwards a strawberry tastes like dessert. Optional. Also the single thing most likely to make this attempt different.

Coaching, not medicine. Keto shifts fluid and sodium balance quickly — if you’re on any medication, particularly for blood pressure, have a word with a doctor before starting.

Sources: Nature Medicine (2023) on erythritol and cardiovascular events · Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (2024) on erythritol and platelet reactivity · Frontiers in Nutrition (2023) and the FDA’s evaluation of the 2023 paper · ingredient lists as published by MORE Nutrition and ahead®, July 2026 · Verbraucherzentrale NRW on EU “calorie-free” thresholds.