Month: December 2022

Can binging on carbs while on a keto diet kill you? Maybe?

So this Sunday finds me exploring the rabbit hole that is anti-keto blogs, videos, subreddits, and science papers. Why? I don’t know. I am just a dumb keto dieter and I really doubt that something like *science* will convince me to try something else. For me though, I find this tidbit a motivator as I’ve been in ketosis for nearly a month and the holidays are coming.

So anyway, reading one comment, the poster said that sudden introduction of carbs on a low carb, high fat diet can cause heart damage.

Had to look that one up.

The paper has the catchy name: Short-Term Low-Carbohydrate High-Fat Diet in Healthy Young Males Renders the Endothelium Susceptible to Hyperglycemia-Induced Damage, An Exploratory Analysis

From the abstract:

Postprandial hyperglycemia has been linked to elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. Endothelial dysfunction and/or damage may be one of the mechanisms through which this occurs. In this exploratory study, we determined whether acute glucose ingestion would increase markers of endothelial damage/activation and impair endothelial function before and after a short-term low-carbohydrate high-fat diet (HFD) designed to induce relative glucose intolerance.

then some blah blah blah – and then the conclusion.

One week of low-carbohydrate high-fat feeding that leads to a relative impairment in glucose homeostasis in healthy young adults may predispose the endothelium to hyperglycemia-induced damage.

So it seems these nice folks are saying that your body kinda forgets how to regulate glucose once you are off them for a week and one high carb spluurge can make you blood sugar zoom, whereas if you were a sensible person and ate carbs like normal people do your body wouldn’t allow the blood sugar to go that high – and that blood sugar spike because of that stupid keto diet could cause heart damage.

Want an excuse not to go off your diet for those relatives who tell you that you MUST have a piece of grandma’s pie?

Tell them it might give you heart damage. Bet that’ll stop them in their tracks.

Also – a good reminder when you feel like cheating.

Keto is like the famous song lyric from ‘Hotel California’: You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

What brings you here?

Welcome weary web traveler! If you didn’t subscribe to my posts some time ago and still haven’t opted out, I don’t know how you found this place.

Like Menudo, Route 66, CB Radio, floppy disks, dittos, webrings, website guest books, avocado green appliances, Dippity Do, hula hoops, Carrot Top, chrome bumpers on cars, and 8-track tapes, ‘blogs’ are a part of the past.

And yet you have bypassed all the obstacles and landed here. I’m sorry to say there will be little reward beyond maybe few gems hidden within mostly mediocre-to-awful contents with plenty of link rot scattered within.

So why am I here? I would say I’m a drinker with a writing problem but I don’t drink anymore. So now I’m just an old fuck who likes stringing words together, hiding in plain sight, writing whatever my fingers type, for reasons that aren’t clear. I don’t care if anyone reads this stuff and oftimes I’m glad you don’t – some of the things feel very personal and I don’t know why I post my thoughts for strangers to see. I’m not making money, I’m not trying to be an ‘influencer’. I don’t have some larger plan to launch an ambitious website on the topic of low carb/keto. It’s been done over and over already by people far more devoted than I, with quality standards and good content. I would have figured you’d have gone to any one of them before coming here.

I do tend to focus my posts on dieting and low carb / keto diets. I haven’t had the greatest results in the past 10 years since my appendix came out. I gained 70 pounds in about 9 months after that and my stupid doctor’s explanation was ‘lack of exercise’. He was one of those people who had to have an answer for everything, even if wrong. Hey doc – I didn’t exercise *before* the surgery. At least my new doc will shrug and say ‘I dunno’, which is the best answer I’ve gotten so far and I can respect that answer.

I used to really be interested in the science but not so much anymore. Nutrition science is so hard to do right, and so many people have an emotional (and possibly financial) interest in certain nutrition ‘facts’ being true, that the cherry-picking in the field of nutrition is beyond belief.

And people argue so much! The topic of what a ‘right diet’ is has been a blood sport for way longer than US politics.

And what to you call a low carb / keto dieter that can’t seem to actually lose weight on the low carb / keto diet?

The most charitable label I’ve come up with for myself is: ‘Stunt Dieter’.

I get some motivation and I try stuff. I write about it. I give up. And then, since I have nothing to write on the topic – I don’t write here. I journal a lot and keep most of my thoughts there – it’s only the diet-related stuff that gets posted, though sometimes the line blurs.

Months or years pass until I come up with another angle and give the ‘ole diet another try. Then I write here again.

If / when my current attempt crashes and burns then I won’t write anything until I try yet again or I exit this mortal coil.

And then this blog will just disappear the first time my credit card is rejected. It will be gone like much of the old internet already has – and that’s OK.

So – no obligation – but if you have stumbled over this fossil and you feel like it, leave a comment as to just what wrong turn you took on the Internet Superhighway to end up on this dead-end dirt road with a junkyard dog barking in the distance amid boarded up buildings, and a car on blocks on the front lawn of the abandoned house with a hole in the roof. This place across the street from the house still has a neon ‘Open’ sign flickering in the dirty window and while the front door is open there’s little activity going on. Yet you still came in.

What’s your story, stranger?

Chicken thighs baked in bacon fat

Just a reminder that the original purpose of this blog when I started it in 2007 was to collect my personal recipes so that I could refer to it at work to get meal ideas for that evening. I’m not recommending this to anyone and apologies if this feels like a waste of your inbox space. It is part of a much larger and wacky experiment I am trying that I *won’t* go into at present but will eventually. Maybe.

So I’ve been cooking bacon for almost 2 weeks now and I keep pouring off the fat and putting it in a jar to do I dunno with. I was baconed out today, however, and did have like 8 chicken thighs that needed to be cooked lest they become a biohazard. They weren’t old by any means but I wanted to make sure they got used during their useful lifespan without playing some game of chicken (pardon the pun) with the expiry date.

So caveman brain here looked at the chicken, then the bacon fat still in the pan on the stove from the bacon I cooked the day before, and got an idea so lacking in effort I should get some sort of prize. So…

  • 8 chicken thighs with skin and bone in
  • 1 pan of bacon grease with all the drippings and crumbly bits from the previous day

I set the oven for 350 and plopped the thighs into the grease-filled pan. Then shoved it in the oven without even preheating because I don’t care. I set a timer for 20 minutes then came back, took the pan out of the oven and turned the thighs over. Crumbly bits had stuck to the bottom, which did not seem a bad thing. Put it back in the oven and it got another 20 minutes. I tested the temp and in some places it was 190 degrees F so it was certainly cooked. Then I had the bright idea to turn them upright again and try to crispy up the top part. I set the oven to broil and the time for 10 minutes.

It got to 5 minutes when the fire alarm went off and I put on the exhaust fan as the alarm screamed ‘Fire! Fire! and the dog barked. Note to self: in the future, turn on the vent fan and broil for 5 minutes.

They came out looking like this:

They came out juicy and had some crunchy parts on the skin, the crumbly bits from the bacon added a nice flavor, as did the bacon fat, and the grease contained enough salt that adding additional salt was unnecessary.

The kid texted she was hungry and I told her about these. She seemed excited. When she came home she didn’t go near them. Didn’t tell me why, just ate leftover pasta.

Would I make it again? Yeah. Except for the fire alarm part it was a pretty darn easy recipe to make. I did have to pour off some of the bacon grease/chicken juice when I turned it over because it was too high for the shallow pan.

But is it keto? Trick question. Of course. The is zero carbs – I had three today and my ketones are at 2.1 mmol/L right now and I had the last one an hour ago.

EOM