Just a quick update for Father’s day. The scale told me was down 6 lbs. in 3 days. My ketone meter says my ketones were up to 1.8 mmol/L – which is def in ketosis. My blood glucose was 98 in the afternoon. My older daughter, out of college and in her first real job, bought me a pair of Airpods Pro wireless earbuds and cooked me an Italian Chili Father’s Day meal. All of this made for a nice day.
As to what I ate: I had coffee and cream, of course, then mid afternoon I had some leftover stir fry without the rice. I gorged on a lot of celery spotted with beef as well as ground pork and Winter Melon. I did not count nor attempt to weigh – which admittedly caused me some anxiety.
Father’s Day dinner was a bowl of the aforementioned Italian Chili, accompanied with grated cheese and Ricotta cheese. It was mostly ground beef with an onion, garlic, mushrooms, frozen red peppers, olive slices, and some Rao’s Pasta Sauce. I not only enjoyded it, but my entire family did as well. They ate it with bread, which I skipped.
I had taken a nap in the afternoon as the first wave of ketone effects leave you tired physically but more mentally alert. I woke and despite my better judgement had a half cup of coffee. While I enjoyed it, it kept me awake well past 1am. Before finally conking out, I had a hankering for some bologna and cheese so had maybe 3 or 4 slices of bologna on a slice of cheese as my well-past-bedtime snack.
My start date for this try was June 17, 2020. I’ve been pretty strict to the point that it might resemble an eating disorder if I didn’t have the science-y terms ‘Intermittant Fasting’ and ‘Autophagy’ to comfort me that I am doing the right thing.
I suppose that ‘disordered eating’ is in the eye of the beholder. There are so many different diets to choose from that someone is bound to frown upon the eating habits of most people – especially those of us with excess adipose tissue who comprise nearly the only group left where it is mostly ok to be prejudiced against. I mean, why don’t we just put the fucking fork down, get up from the table, and go for a run? Huh?
If there is a Hell, there is a special ring for the people who say that. It is filled with healthy, portion-controlled food. Every time they take a bite they gain 20 pounds, their pants don’t fit, and slim people question their character while eating fast-food burgers and fries and sucking up choclate shakes.
The day I started this I had cream in my multiple coffees, a cheese sandwich with lettuce and mayo as well as some ‘keto granola’ that someone bought prior to the scale weighing that prompted me to start. I ate nothing the remainder of the day. The remainder of the day was seltzer with added MiO ‘flavor enhancer’. (Note to MiO company: water has no ‘flavor’ – it’s kind of the zero-point for determining flavor. Maybe you should calll it ‘flavor creator’.)
Disordered eating? If you believe in 3 squares a day – yeah. Calorically I’m a little low but not in the ‘disorder’ range for one day (under 1000 every day would strike me as disordered for me), the protein is low, and while the carbs are high for a keto diet, a lot of people would consider this ‘low but ok’.
Yesterday however was a different matter. I had gone over 24 hours before eating 2 cans of tuna with mayo – and other than my coffe and cream, that was it. I wasn’t particularly hungry and was feeling the onslaught of ketones which might have helped to suppress appetite.
That’s a little disordered in my book for me. YMMV. The calories and protein too low but the fat is right about perfect and the carbs – well, anything under 20 is ok in my book.
Then there’s today. I’m feelin’ it. What they used to call ‘The Atkins Flu’. Your sodium goes out of whack and you get headaches and feel sick. My gut has also noticed the change in volume and macronutrient proportions and I woke up with stomach pain that I soothed with a few tablespoons of plain yogurt, 2 cheese sticks, and a little pasta sauce for dipping. This made the top part of my alimentary canal feel better but the lower part was preparing for fireworks.
This always happens. I have never entered ketosis without a sudden purging bout of ‘the trots’. Ketosis is a big change – you are literally changing the fuel your entire body runs on – so I don’t get too concerned over this as long as a bathroom is handy.
My excuse for eating somewhat disordered is that I started without a plan and didn’t have the foods in the house I usually would have if I had planned this out. If I did, I might have eaten closer to the macros I’m tracking for (or maybe not).
At 5am I put in an order for food from my local grocery store to be delivered later in the morning. Reflecting on this purchase, I’m not sure I made the best choices:
2 lbs. ground beef
frozen sliced peppers
sliced olives
Ricotta cheese
Shredded mozzarella
pickles
American cheese
Bologna
Lindt 78% Dark Chocolate
Romaine lettuce
I planned to make an ‘Italian Chili‘ of sorts by browning the beef, adding some garlic, pasta sauce, the peppers, and olives to make an Italian-inspired keto dish I can put mozzarella and ricotta on.
American cheese is a necessity in my life. I don’t buy the processed stuff (which isn’t cheese) and find it works ok in moderation. Cheese is like that. Atkins said no more than 4 ounces per day. He’s been dead for nearly 20 years and I think that’s still good advice.
The bologna *could* be problematic. Being a Boomer, I have a warm spot for this Depression-era mystery meat that has lost its popularity. If I can moderate my consumption I should be ok. We’ll see.
Took the kid out for an errand and felt a bit woozy but I survived. Started to get hungry about 5pm and I had an Atkins Shake – freshly arrived from Walmart and on my porch this morning. I drank a tanker’s-worth of this stuff in the early 2000s and thought I’d give it another go.
I was still hungry after that and I had some romaine lettuce leaves with Ken’s Steakhouse Ranch Dressing. A number of Ken’s sald dressings are very low carb and were a staple on my first go-round. I also had a Claussen pickle half.
Not too long after I had another ketogenic ‘poopsplosion’. Like a thunderstorm it moved in quickly, produced great violence, then quickly passed – leaving only menacing rumbles that faded away.
I seemed fine after that – and still hungry. That bologna called to me. Problematic, enigmatic – the taste of being a kid again, my Mom giving me a sandwich at lunch (That’s a lie, actually. I have no recollection of eating the stuff as a kid but bologna has always seemed part of my life. It never made a memory unlike my Mom boiling hot dogs for my lunch or making me pastina – a grain-like Italian pasta in the shape of tick-sized little stars – drenched in melted butter. Home for lunch, I would eat that stuff – or a grilled cheese or Campbell’s Tomato Soup with Premium Crackers or some other kid-friendly stuff I don’t remember – and watch the terrible cartoon ‘Corageous Cat and Minute Mouse‘ because there were only 7 channels in those days.)
Where was I – oh – I’m writing about keto on a diet blog in 2021. Us Boomers and our digressions, eh? Transported to 1968 and back in a flash. Time travel is real, kids.
ANYWAY – I entered the bologna in my Cronometer app and found I could have about 3 ounces of this false-memory-producing food. I weighed out 3 ounces and ate each slice with great pleasure, actually.
An interesting observation that isn’t about cartoons or false memories is once finished I ran upstairs and noticed a non-event: I wasn’t that winded.
Huh? Like – ok – I’m close to 300 lbs. and don’t exercise – I expect to be winded, and when I dash down the staris for some coffee before a meeting, when I’m back at my desk I’m winded. But not so much this time.
The ketosis perhaps? The poops, the headache, the mild wooziness, and the overall reduction in heartburn were expected. I was not expecting any impact on how winded I might be.
Maybe a fluke. I’ll have to see if it’a a pattern – can carbs make you winded? We’ll see.
My macros for 06/19/2021 – Calories: 1051 / Protein: 38g / Net Carbs: 23 / Fat: 89. Calories too low, protein too low, carbs ok, fat ok. I didn’t prepare for this at all and it shows – hopefully I can dial in these macros a little better in the coming days. I hope to cook my first batch of low carb food in a long time tomorrow – maybe that will help.
I decided the evening would be just seltzer with MiO. I was having the Strawberry/Watermelon flavor, which I’m OK with. It actually tastes like neither – and that’s the point: if they created a ‘Strawberry’ or a ‘Watermelon’ flavor on its own it wouldn’t taste like the real deal so market them as a blend and nobody will complain that they don’t taste like what they’re supposed to taste like.
Anyway. That’s that for that – this is my last post forever. Or maybe not. If I had an evolved sense of shame I would definately stop.
This is kinda sorta day 2. I had some bread at noon yesterday then ate nothing until 4pm on 6/18. That made my weight descend enough to put me at 299.6 lbs. I never thought I’d be happy t see that number on my scale – but here we are.
While I had coffee and cream prior I broke the fast with 2 cans of Wild Planet Tuna and 4 tablespoons of mayonnaise. I feel weird and have a headache, and just for fun I tried testing my ketones – expecting them to be at zero.
They were at 1.3.
Now my body has been in and out of ketosis so many times it probably is used to it. So instead of struggling against giving up that sweet, sweet glucose-fueled lifestyle, it just sighed: ‘Here we go again.’ and cranked up the generator for ketones right away.
Those of you not professional stunt dieters would probably never experience such a quick transition to ketosis.
So anywho, I’m slowly making decisions about what form this diet attempt will take. Perhaps an umbrella rule for all that follow is:
I will not practice orthorexia
The definition that pops up at the top of Goole search defines this as: Orthorexia is an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way. Eating nutritious food is good, but if you have orthorexia, you obsess about it to a degree that can damage your overall well-being. Steven Bratman, MD, a California doctor, coined the term in 1996.
I’ve found that being too perfect can be dangerous to the longevity of my diet, so I am going to Chill The Fuck Out (CTFO) and not think thoughts like:
Is that egg organic?
Is that beef grass-fed?
Does that diet soda have aspartame in it?
Should I have spinach since it has oxalates?
Should I eat eggplant as it contains goitrogens?
Should I avoid chicken because it has arachidonic acid?
Should I avoid sucralose because it might disrupt my gut biome?
Should I eat 2 cans of tuna at the same time because of methylmercury contamination?
Should I avoid all omega-6 seed oils to minimize inflammation?
My answer to each of these questions is: I’m not going to worry about these things now! I’m going to CTFO and not indulge in hand-wringing over the type of thinking above. I didn’t worry about this sort of stuff when I first lost 80 lbs. on Atkins. These were nutritional barnacles that adhered to my thinking as I read and researched.
And maybe like barnacles they slow me down.
Maybe they’re not that important now. Maybe if I CTFO and just focus on doing keto like I did Atkins in 2003 I’d be better off.
Please note that each item in that list is worth considering – many I have blathered on about on this mess of a blog – but taking these and many other…let’s call them ‘micro-considerations’ – and set them aside for the time being. The stuff I see myself eating will be better than what I was eating – and it’s not like I’m going on a fat-bomb laden caloric-extreme lazt/dirty keto trip. It might resemble lazy/dirty keto a bit, but have more structure. I’ll do my best to keep an eye on calories and look for a window between 1400 and 1800 per day. I’ll *try* to keep my protein around 100 grams. i’ll *try* to keep my carbs under 20 grams per day.
I can always add these food restrictions – or fears – or beliefs – back in at a time in the future when I’ve lost enough weight to want to fine-tune my diet for better health – or Orthorexia Nervosa – whichever it is.
I am SO glad no one visits this dump anymore. Blogs are so early 2000s – nobody really wants to read long-form stuff unless it’s good – and while I might have had flashes of inspiration here and there, my 14 years of blather ends up not much better that one fat monkey banging on his IBM Selectric he got off of EBay – another relic of the early aughts.
Excuse me while I make a ditto of the fax I need to send. I have the phone number in my PDA.
OK, I’m back. Forgive me – a little high from the ditto fumes and the correction fluid I use while typing. What was I saying?
Oh yeah – I’m fat – I mean FAT. I MEAN FAT.
I MEAN FAT!
No excuses for me. The pandemic and a remote job left me such an opportunity to exercise and eat right and exit the pandemic lean, healthy, and vaccine-enabled. Of course I didn’t use the opportunity for good – I used it to indulge in what might have been the food habits of a 10-year-old kid who does the grocery shopping. I’m not a sweets person but there sure are a lot of savory crap foods!
I stopped weighing myself. Stopped checking my blood glucose. My commute from the bedroom to the desk to the kitchen to the bathroom and back to the bed made the Big Lebowski look like a real go-getter.
Well, I was actually *working* – which The Dude did not abide – a lot of hours and weekends as well – but in between the work and sleep and the potty breaks was plenty of guilt-free crap food and elastic sweat pants.
It’s not hard to predict where this would lead. Checking my glucose levels and weighing myself daily were important feedback loops that I discarded. At the beginning of December, with zero fucks to give, I threw in the towel on Low Carb / Keto / Wheat belly and ate whatever I wanted.
Now I’ve been controlling my intake of food and what I eat with varying success since 2003. I was artifically thiner than I would be otherwise for many years because I did those things, and while I might have had my transgressions, there were enough occasions in between of diet adherence that kept me from What Might Have Been.
And here I am at the amazing weight of 303 lbs. Way to go loser! My fingers and toes are like a giant baby’s – chubby and cute. While I am nearing 60 I have no wrinkes because the fat fills them all in.
I took a shower today and decided to give my old friend and old enemy the scale a try. It told me that number I will not mention again, but after the shower I weighed myself again just in case It was a false memory I was suffering from – they are very fashionable in the US these days.
Nope. Pretty much the same.
So I decided that now might be a good time to start a diet – which ruined my plans for an evening of wine and pizza – that’s for sure.
But what *do* I eat?
I gotta tell you – knocking around in the Atkins / Low Carb / Keto / Wheat Belly world for most of 17 years, reading every book and article I could find and writing 1,000 blog posts (of which I’ve probably only posted half) and written 2 or 3 bad books I never published – I am fucking SICK OF THE TOPIC!
So here I am, writing to nobody, sick of being fat, sick of dieting, and just plain sick (I’m not the picture of health nor energy) and yet I’m yoked to this diet approach because…why exactly? Sunk-cost fallacy maybe?
Maybe I can join WW (formally known as ‘Weight Watchers’) or Nutrasystem is still out there – right? Or maybe one of those ‘I’m too busy coding to eat!’ meal replacement crap like Soylent for bro developers who think it’s cool to drink this shit while hoping their stupid iPhone apps gets bought by Facebook for a billion dollars Mark Zuckerberg finds in an old couch under the seat cushions.
I really don’t have a plan. And part of me doesn’t *want* a plan either. But I guess for me – for better or worse – I long ago was baptized in olive oil into the church of Low Carb and despite my roundness I continue to believe. I no longer need science – it only exists to confirm my biases.
Low Carb Confidential 