I sort of slipped up and missed a post here, but I didn’t have much to say until now so I’ll combine two weeks into one update.
Ketones:
I quit taking exogenous ketones 2 weeks ago to see what would happen as my diet varies day-to-day and what happened was when I over shot my carbs or proteins my ketone level dropped. I got down to .3mmol last week before it began to climb again. I started back on exogenous ketones this week and my levels have sky rocketed. My weight loss (which had stalled) also kicked back in. None of this is unusual; it’s exactly what you would expect.
Just for reference, I have started monitoring my blood glucose as well as blood ketones. When my ketone level bottomed out last week, my glucose was just below below 100. Yesterday, when my ketones hit 1.4, my blood glucose was 65. Once again this is the parallel you would expect and it’s not an impressive thing to chart but the glucose strips are cheap (thank you, free market nation full of diabetics).
Charts:
Calories are trending up, Carbs (& Weight) are going down, protein is flat, and fat is up.
I am consciously reducing my fat intake as my energy levels are good and I want to lose another 10 pounds or so. My protein still varies daily but not too bad and my only real complaint is that every few days I get way too many carbs. This led me to consider why I am charting this so carefully and then not using it to drive my food intake. I then realized it’s a social problem. (says the man with no social life). I plan out and prepare my meals but inevitably I am presented with unplanned or externally prepared food and BAM! I’m over my carbs or over my protein. I lack discipline. (Also I drink)
Exercise:
I don't mention it but aside from walking a couple miles per day, I am also doing pull-ups, push ups and sit-ups at home each night. I am seeing improvement but nothing to brag about.
I was sore and tired last Saturday but I took the bicycle out anyway for about 30 miles. It was windy and I gassed a little bit. I did fine at a reasonable pace but I wasn’t sprinting anywhere and the hills were tough (if you read above then you know my ketones were low so that explains that). I am really learning to like my road bike. If nothing else the clip shoes/pedals have changed the whole bicycle experience. This Saturday, by comparison, I broke a presta valve airing up my tires, then replaced the tube with one that was iffy (slightly the wrong size) and ended up with a flat 10 miles from the house. Oh well. I went home, switched to my old bike and finished my 30 mile ride. There’s the discipline! (I deserve a drink)
Social stuff:
My boss was asking me about my diet this week. He’s a guy who has had weight issues his whole life. He’s also a guy who is incredibly inactive an undisciplined in what he eats. His attitude is “Oh well, I’m old now. Nothing I can do about it.” He’s a diabetic, cancer survivor in his late 60’s who buys crazy gimmick things like super-water in an effort to he healthy without working at it. I’m not sure, but I feel like if he started walking every day, cut out the damned sugar (which he's not supposed to have anyway) he could go out at 80 healthier than he is now. But what do I know? It’s only the first optimistic opinion I’ve had in years.
Anyway, he was asking me about my diet and seemed absolutely perplexed by what I could and could not eat. I summed it up like this:
1) NO sugar, which means nothing that ends with –ase or –ose
2) If it was made from seeds, don’t eat it.
3) If it was made from full grown plants, eat it with meat.
He still didn’t seem to understand.
Personal Stuff:
I have been listening to a lot of people talk about ketogenic diets and they all stress organic, grass fed, this and that. I haven’t been pushing that and I’m sure that my reader wants to know why not. Well, because that opens a whole other series of conversations about “what is organic” and how do we offset the efficiency of modern agri-business with the more generationally sustainable model of modern subsistence farming. There are important arguments about this and as someone who lives in the country and has actually raised the majority of his own food at one time I feel I have the moral high ground regardless what I eat.
Finally, I turned my calorie-counting-low-carb diet into a full blown ketosis experiment because of the Dom D’Agostino episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast but a few weeks after I started Joe Rogan had Mark Sisson on who basically said all the same stuff and convinced Joe to start a similar diet. Since then Joe has been commenting about his diet on almost every podcast episode. This shared experience has had a profound effect on me. I was listening to experts talk on podcasts and reading a bunch of well written web sites but when it was time to execute the plan, I was basically on my own. I know one other person who used a diet like this to lose weight but he didn’t concentrate on being active with fat as his energy source and he certainly didn’t chart his results. So, I started this thing off with the same on-my-own feeling I have for pretty much everything I do. Listening to Joe Rogan talking about the affects of making this dietary change to his day-to-day life is reassuring and supportive. That might seem a little sad, but it makes me feel good.
That ought to do it for this week. Time to go for a walk in the woods.