Keto Continues

Since my last blog post on the subject a month and a half ago I’ve been eating a ketogenic diet (as I noted in that blog post: I’m in ketosis but haven’t been replacing carbs with fat but eating more protein). Generally I eat two meals a day. The first is after midday and consists of meat, veg and eggs – say three strips of belly pork, three eggs and a pile of broccoli. The second sometime between 6 and 8 consists of a small plate of preserved sausage, cheese, a handful of nuts, some pickles and perhaps stuff like cucumber, radish or tomatoes. Time between last meal and first is about 16 to 18 hours so there’s a bit of fasting involved too, though a dirty fast since I drink coffee with cream and tea with milk. I don’t count calories – can’t be bothered. 

On top of this I’ve been hitting the weights in the gym and putting in some long mountain walks. It’s interesting that the expected target of a ketogenic diet is to get your ketones to between 1 and 2mmol/L and maintain them there while enjoying the benefits, meanwhile mine seem to have stabilized at about 2.7mmol/L. Sometimes they go down directly after exercise to between 1 and 2, sometimes in the morning after a day of exercise, lower food intake and a night’s sleep they go above 3. I don’t know whether this indicates I’m well fat adapted or whether my body is struggling against insulin resistance. But I’ll take it as a win.

In that time my weight has dropped another 5lbs on average though is bouncing between 182 and 187. It seems like a bit of a plateau yet my belly measurement has continued declining. Putting a tape around my middle at the level of my belly button when I was near 200lbs gave me a measure of 39 – 40 inches, and it is now down to 36. I take this another win and will continue along this course. As I noted in a social media post: that area is where fat clings stubbornly, so losing that girth probably means I’ve lost it to a depth of half an inch all over those other parts of my body where it is stored.

Ill effects have been minimal. I sometimes think I feel colder but that might be because of living in a house in the Cretan mountains where the weather this year has decided not to adhere to the Global warming religion. Occasionally I’ve been dizzy and lacking energy, but these are usually cured by hydration and electrolytes. My main concern is that I might be lowering my BMI, which is the bugbear of any diet and why people start layering on fat again the moment they stop. However, I intend to continue regardless while I’m getting positive results.

What are my goals here? Of course fat loss is one of them. Fat is not aesthetically pleasing and feeling bad about your appearance has its knock-on effects on general mood. Having lost a lot of weight in the past I also know that fat saps your energy. The difference a loss of 20lbs of the stuff makes on an 8-mile walk through the mountains is huge. With the weight I trudge back utterly knackered. Without it I contemplate running sections of the home stretch. You just have to imagine that difference as a backpack filled with ten bags of sugar, while adding in that the sugar does not require your heart pumping blood around it. But the big objective here is health. 

Having spent most of my life eating crap carbs, drinking to excess and smoking, I would like to reverse some of the damage. I am almost certainly insulin resistant and have resistant and fat around my internal organs. Getting rid of that will reduce inflammation, which is one of the main problems we have as we get older. Be nice too to clear it off my liver to get whatever remains of that organ, after forty years on the piss, as functional as possible. The autophagy and other clearance of the body’s junk is a damned good idea too. Listing all the benefits of this way of eating (along with all the exercise) I’ve gleaned from hundreds of video and blog posts would just go on and on. In the end I want to feel and be better. 

As has become an aphorism in many parts of the social media: I want to become the best version of myself.