221 Keto Diet Foods (+ Keto Cheat Sheet)

I bet you sometimes feel like it’s tough to both eat delicious food and also stay keto, right?

Well, I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I can promise that it’s easier than you might think.

In this article, I’m going to show you exactly what to eat on a keto diet and what to avoid.

Below are over 200 keto foods – the same foods that I’ve eaten to lose weight and feel better.

Basically, keto friendly foods include most meats, most vegetables, most seafood, and healthy fats.

More specifically, you can eat all the foods listed below. In fact, you could probably use this as a short and easy keto shopping list…

Ok – now that you have the short list of keto foods, let’s go a little more in depth…

To make things easy for you at the grocery store and in the kitchen, I also put together a printable “cheat sheet” of keto foods. To get my cheat-sheet, just click the button below:

Just click the button, print it out, and you have a keto grocery list for next time you go to the store. 🙂

‘Ketosis’ is a state where your body relies primarily on ‘ketone bodies’ for energy, rather than on sugar.

That sounds complicated, but it’s really pretty simple. And here’s why it should matter to you…

Your body has 2 primary sources of energy – fat and sugar (aka glucose).

A ketogenic diet (AKA, a keto or ketosis diet) is designed to help your body burn more fat for energy rather than glucose.

Ketones (or ketone bodies) are produced by your liver when your body breaks down fats. And the increased levels of ketone bodies in your blood puts you into the metabolic state called ketosis.

Here’s a VERY simple infographic explaining what you need to do on a keto diet…

Please pin this infographic! And here’s the embed code for your blog or website:

The basics of what you eat on a ketogenic diet are pretty simple:

In other words, you eat only low-‘glycemic’ foods. Low-glycemic foods are foods that don’t cause your blood sugar to rise very much.

When you eat this way, it forces your body to start relying on fat for energy, rather than just sugar.

And when that happens, you gain ‘metabolic flexibility’, which is a complicated way of saying that your body regains the ability to get energy from multiple sources.

The result is that you feel increased energy, greater mental clarity, and weight loss.

The ketogenic diet has been used for a very long time. It was originally developed to treat epilepsy in kids. (2) Today, though, the benefits are often much greater…

There is a lot of emerging research on the keto diet. Some of the most exciting research is around cancer and neurological diseases, but most people use a keto diet for much more common issues (weight loss, diabetes, etc.).

Here’s a brief list of the potential benefits of a keto diet:

After limiting carbohydrates and eating a moderate amount of protein, the rest of what you eat should be healthy fats like ghee, coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil, and animal fats.

If you’re trying to lose weight, then you may find it easier to increase the amount of protein you eat. This may especially help you if you’re not used to eating a lot of fats.

A keto diet is pretty simple, and most people see results fairly quickly.

But there are a few things to remember that can help make sure you get the most out of your keto diet. (These tips will also help you avoid ‘keto flu’ – the lack of energy that some people experience in the first 3-5 days of a keto diet.)

1. Drink Plenty of Water. When you eat fewer carbs, your body retains less water. That’s normal, but if you’re not drinking enough, you can get dehydrated. Also, water will help you feel less hungry and more energetic.
2. Get Plenty of Sodium. This might sound counter to what you’ve been told before, but your body really needs sodium. It’s one of the ways that your cells transport nutrients in and out of cells. And when you stop eating processed grains and sugar, you often get much less sodium. So when you go keto, just be sure that you’re eating salt or sodium-rich foods. If not, you will often experience fatigue.
3. Eat Enough. Normally, this probably isn’t a problem for you. But when you go on a keto diet, it’s actually easy to start under-eating. So every few days, just check in that you’ve been eating enough food.
4. Eat Enough Fat. Remember, most of your calories (70-85%) should be from fat. So don’t skimp on the fat. If you’re feeling hungry or like you need to snack, then eating more fat at meals will normally solve that problem. In general, choose the fattier cuts of meat.

With all of that in mind, here is the complete ketogenic diet food list…

Below is a full list of foods to eat on a keto diet.

To make it easier for you, we’ve arranged the foods into 12 groups (vegetables, meats, etc.).

In general, you can just not worry about how much of a particular food you’re eating. However, some foods on this list are a bit higher in carbs – such as carrots or tomatoes.

It would have made this list way too long to list the # of carbs in each food, so just be aware that if a food tastes a bit sweet (like a carrot or tomato can), then it likely has more carbs than foods that don’t taste sweet (meats, olives, avocados, limes, etc.).

Knowing what NOT to eat on a keto diet is at least as important as knowing what to eat. So this keto diet food list wouldn’t be complete without a list of non-keto foods.

Here is a list of all foods to definitely avoid:

I hope that you find this keto food list useful. But there are a few more things you should keep in mind…

To avoid or treat these symptoms, here are 4 tips that commonly help:

One other thing worth mentioning is that there are different ‘types’ of keto diets.

The ‘traditional’ keto diet is usually called the Standard Ketogenic Diet (SKD). This is the diet that was originally created for epileptic children.

The SKD version of the keto diet typically requires that you eat less than 20-30 grams of carbohydrates. It also requires that you closely monitor how much protein you eat, so that you don’t go over 12-15% of your calories from protein.

This is a great version of keto, and if you’re using the diet for therapeutic purposes, it’s the best way to go. But if you’re more interested in weight loss and boosting your energy, then you might also want to consider what’s commonly called the “Modified Atkins Diet.”

The primary difference for this diet is the amount of different ‘macros’ that you can eat. Your net carbs can be a bit higher (50-75 grams per day), and your protein intake can also be a bit higher (up to 20% or so of calories).

This “modified” version of keto can be very useful to try if either (a) you find that the stricter version isn’t working for your or (b) you want a slightly more lenient diet to use after you’ve achieved your goals.

If you want an easy-to-print version of the keto food list, just click the button below. It’s perfect to use or modify as a keto diet grocery list.

Please pin this detailed Ketogenic diet food list infographic on Pinterest. If you have a blog or website and would like to embed the infographic, please credit us for our work or use this embed code: