Dietary Adventures Part 3: Where I give you an update
by
, 07-30-2012 at 01:01 PM (3172 Views)
I haven't had time to get to the follow up for my last post, so I thought I'd give a quick update instead.
My first week was something of a wash. My wife was in the hospital for some minor surgery in the middle of the week so I was grabbing meals where I could get them and wasn't always making great choices due to general fatigue and disinterest since I was spending my time either working, or with her in the hospital for a few days. But of course, the most important thing to do when you fall of the wagon is to simply shrug and say, "oh well, time to get back to it again." Too many people fail because they have a minor setback and then figure why bother?
Last week went much better though. I've been eating almost nothing but steak, ground beef, almonds, some parmesan, a few vegetables here and there and Caesar salad dressing. I also supplement with a multi-vitamin and fish oil. I might not bother with the vitamin if I could count on my meat being grass fed and if I liked organ meat, but neither of those is the case so I'm playing it safe on that front since I get little in the way of nutrients from plants now. I'm also testing my urine for ketone bodies daily. Ketone bodies are formed from fat by the body and used as fuel in the absence of carbohydrates providing glucose, usually as a result of diets extremely low in carbs. Since I'm getting, by my estimates, less than 20 grams of carbs most days, if my body were still burning only glucose I probably wouldn't feel too well.
So last Monday I noticed the first trace amounts of ketone bodies present in my urine meaning I'd started down the path of my body using fat for fuel instead of glucose. The levels increased gradually for the first few days and seem to have leveled off now. And the good news is that a week later, I've dropped from 298 lbs. on Thursday night, to 295 lbs. this morning. I actually didn't weigh myself at the start (needed to dig out the scale) and based on how loose my clothes are feeling already I think I was probably over 300lbs. when I started this whole process. So far though, it looks like I may be losing a pound a day or a bit less, and I'd like to point out that I've been to the gym once in the last month. This is all diet. My depression is also almost non-existent now. My bad days (or at least the one bad day I had) are better called mediocre days, and most days my mood could almost be described as cheerful.
One other interesting side effect I've noticed is that I don't crave carbohydrates anymore. It used to be the case that even seeing the candy aisle in a grocery store, or smelling the bag of chips my wife just opened would get my mouth watering and have my brain screaming at me to eat some. That's actually stopped completely now. Whereas it used to take a surprising amount of willpower to turn down these cravings, and I would fail more often than I care to admit, it's now pretty trivial for me to say no and go back to eating what I usually do. It's one of the things that surprised me the most. I thought it would be difficult to avoid the foods that would kick me out of ketosis faster than an olympic sprinter finishes the 100m, but it's actually become the easiest part so far.
Now for the bad news, though it's not really bad news I suppose: there's a transition period when you go on a ketogenic diet where your body stops burning glucose for fuel and starts using ketone bodies instead. I'd read about it before, it lasts about 48 hours and most people describe it as being in a kind of fog for that period. I don't know if it just hit me harder, but I felt like trout Thursday and Friday. I had plenty of energy, wasn't hungry, but felt like I had no energy and was hungry. It's very hard to describe because I've never really felt anything like it. It was like that feeling you get when your blood sugar crashes, minus the crashing blood sugar and shakiness that usually accompanies it. Luckily, a short 18 hour fast from Friday night to Saturday afternoon seems to have set things straight and now I feel great. Better than I have in years actually.