Sunday, August 16, 2015

BODY FAT DOWN - LEAN MASS UP - NUTRITIONAL KETOSIS AND WEIGHT LIFTING UPDATE

Here is an update on how things are going in the past two weeks:

Basically, up and down.  I did do some water fasting, some fat fasting and some Low Carb High Fat eating.  My weight has fluctuated up and down.  I have more pounds of lean mass than when I started, and I'm sure that the weight lifting is responsible for that.

I have not been tracking food very much, and I think that is the reason that I have gained some body fat.  I just can't seem to be able to keep my weight under control unless I track every bite of food that goes in my mouth.  It's like I have a mental block about it!

Here is where I started five weeks ago:
July 15, 2015
Neck - 12"
Bust - 36"
Waist - 31.75"
Belly - 39.75"
Hips - 40.25"
Thigh - 22.5"
Calf - 14.25"
Scale weight - 146.2 pounds
Body fat - 52.7 pounds - 36%
Lean mass - 93.5 pounds - 64%
 
Here is where I am now:
August 16, 2015
Neck - 12"  (no change)
Bust - 35.75"  (lost 1/4")
Waist - 31.5"  (lost 1/4")
Belly - 39.625"  (lost 1/8")
Hips - 39.875"  (lost 3/8")
Thigh - 22"  (lost 1/2")
Calf - 14.125"  (lost 1/8")
Scale weight - 146.2 pounds  (no change)
Body fat - 51.6 pounds - 35.3%  (lost 1.1 pounds)
Lean mass - 94.6 pounds - 64.7%  (gained 1.1 pounds)
 
I still need to lose 10.8 pounds of fat and gain 0.6 pounds of muscle to reach my goal of 136 pounds with 30% body fat.
 
Here are a few charts.  These charts actually go back to April, because that is when I started weighing and measuring and tracking my food again after a long break of keeping track.  So only the last five weeks of that have to do with my recent posts.
 
 
 Here is my chart that shows the progress I'm making with The Big Five weight lifting routine according to Body By Science:


 For each of these exercises, I am attempting to reach total muscle failure in less than 90 seconds.  Each time I reach failure that way, I increase the weight by 10% the next time I lift.  The column to the right of the column for 8/12/2015 shows the weights I will use the next time I go in, which will be 8/19/2015.

Anyway, that's where I'm at this week.  Onward and Downward!  And thanks for reading!
 

Monday, August 3, 2015

NUTRITIONAL KETOSIS WITH FASTING FOR INSULIN CONTROL

I have had an interesting past two weeks since my last post.  The week following my last post was a normal week of three meals a day.  The only unusual day was Saturday, when I went to my grandson's birthday party and tried very hard not to eat the picnic food that the party offered!  I did pretty good, but did have a little lemon bar and a little jello dessert.  But I did not have the cake and ice cream, so I am calling it a victory!

I tracked my food every day that week except for the party day, and here is what my macros of fat, protein and net carbs looked like, along with the averages:

(click to enlarge)










As you can see, I kept it pretty ketogenic, with lower protein and higher fat, and, of course, very low carb.  On Sunday, July 26, I ate pretty much the same way, and the same on Monday.  Any time I tested my blood glucose, it was right where I wanted it.  That's when things got interesting...

I've been reading the blog posts and watching the videos of a doctor from Canada that I found several weeks ago.  His name is Jason Fung, and his patients are diabetics that he treats with ketogenic diet and fasting.  Fasting!  The last time I fasted was a couple of years ago, and it was Alternate Day Fasting.  Dr. Fung also uses this kind of fasting, but sometimes uses longer periods with the purpose of lowering insulin levels and increasing insulin sensitivity.  I have been very much intrigued by his research and practice, and, about a week ago, I decided to give it a whirl.

By the way, I highly recommend that you read everything on Dr. Fung's website and watch all of his lectures.  He explains why fasting is important for insulin control, why calories in/calories out is a crock, and other topics that explain obesity and diabetes and why they happen.

Here is what the past week has looked like:

Tuesday, July 28 - I water fasted all day.  By that, I mean than I only drank water, coffee, tea and chicken broth all day.  It was a challenge, but it was not as hard as I imagined it would be.  Since the last meal I ate was Monday evening, by the time I went to bed, I had fasted for around 28 hours.

Wednesday, July 29 - I water fasted until dinner time, then ate a normal low carb, high fat dinner, so the total time that I fasted was around 44 hours.  Not bad for a first try!  During this fast, I checked my blood glucose a couple of times, and it was always in the low 70s.  So far, so good!

Thursday, July 30 - This day was a challenge.  After fat fasting by drinking a Bullet Proof Coffee for breakfast at work, I joined in the annual potluck that the Ladies League held at the golf course where I work.  I ate a couple of Italian sausages, a little bit of green salad, a couple of bites of cucumber salad (only a couple of bites, for it was very sweet and obviously contained sugar) and a little appetizer of tomato, fresh mozzarella cheese and basil leaves.  My downfall was a small square of cheesecake.  But, if you saw the piles and piles of sugary salads, gelatin desserts, cookies, cakes and candy that I did NOT eat, you would be proud of me!  For dinner after work, I just had a few small snacks of fat, like a fat bomb and a chunk of butter, etc.  By the time I went to bed, however, I was in big trouble!  As I got undressed for bed, I caught sight of my profile in the mirror, and my stomach was distended like a beachball!  I looked seven months pregnant!  I don't ever remember looking like that since I was, well, seven months pregnant.  I was in so much pain that I took a bicarb, which did not help.  I had a lot of trouble trying to sleep, and had a fitful night.

Friday, July 31 - When I awoke on the day after the potluck, I found that I had gained over two and a half pounds and was still bloated and in mild pain in my abdomen.  Although it had not been my original plan to water fast again so soon, I made the decision to do just that.  I spent the day drinking water, coffee, tea and chicken broth.

Saturday, August 1 - Still weighing over a pound and a half over my weight before the potluck, I decided to water fast again for the day.  This was a little bit of a challenge, because I had company coming to spend the night.  They stopped and got gyros and brought them to eat at my house.  Man, they smelled good!  But I did not have any.  I made it through my second full day of water fasting without a hitch.

Sunday, August 2 - I broke my fast with a wonderful breakfast of baked eggs and kiszka with my houseguests.  The total time of my water fast was 62 hours!  When I weighed that morning, I had lost all the water weight from the potluck and then some, my stomach was flatter, and I felt much better!  I even got to eat a little bit of the leftover gyros meat around lunchtime, then fat fasted for dinner after my company left.

Monday, August 3 - I worked today and had a Bullet Proof coffee for breakfast, egg salad with lots of my homemade mayo for lunch, and a nice LCHF dinner of broiled steak with butter and an avocado cole slaw.  For dessert, I had a few Brazil nuts and a small amount of 85% dark chocolate.  Two hours after eating this meal, I tested my blood glucose and it was 91.  Very nice!

Here is where I started two and a half weeks ago:

July 15, 2015
Neck - 12"
Bust - 36"
Waist - 31.75"
Belly - 39.75"
Hips - 40.25"
Thigh - 22.5"
Calf - 14.25"
Scale weight - 146.2 pounds
Body fat - 52.7 pounds - 36%
Lean mass - 93.5 pounds - 64%

Here is where I am now:

August 2, 2015
Neck - 12"
Bust - 32.75"  (lost 1/4")
Waist - 31.125"  (lost 5/8")
Belly - 39"  (lost 3/4")
Hips - 39.75"  (lost 1/2")
Thigh - 22"  (lost 1/2")
Calf - 14"  (lost 1/4")
Scale weight - 142.2 pounds  (lost 4 pounds)
Body fat - 49.4 pounds - 34.7%  (lost 3.3 pounds)
Lean mass - 92.8 pounds - 65.3%  (lost 0.7 pounds)

As of yesterday, I need to lose 8.5 pounds of fat and gain 2.3 pounds of muscle to reach my goal of 136 pounds with 30% body fat.

Here are a few charts.  These charts actually go back to April, because that is when I started weighing and measuring and tracking my food again after a long break of keeping track.  So only the last two and a half weeks of that have to do with my recent posts.




In the coming week, I am going to mix it up by water fasting some days, fat fasting some days and eating regular LCHF the remaining days.

I am so close to my goal weight at this point, that I am tempted to just water fast for a few days and break on through.  We'll see if I decide to do that.

Another change, and I've forgotten if I have mentioned it recently, is that Bill and I started back at the gym.  We are doing Body By Science slow motion weight lifting.  We go once a week and each of us takes around 12 minutes to do the five different machines that compose The Big Five.  More about that later...

I'll keep you posted!  Thanks for reading!



  

Sunday, July 19, 2015

NUTRITIONAL KETOSIS SHORT WEEK UPDATE

Since I only started Nutritional Ketosis again four days ago, I just want to post this update and talk about how I will eat in this coming week.

On the first day - July 15, 2015 - I did a full day's monitoring of my blood sugar, to get a baseline for the future.  Here are the results:

(click chart to enlarge)

As you can see, my average blood glucose for the day was only 79, which is great, and the highest it went all day, even after eating, was only 90.  Well within optimal range!  I also added a chart above that shows what I ate at each meal, so I can see how the macros of fat, protein and carbs impacted my blood glucose.  The levels that I ate on this particular day did not cause any problems.

Here is what I actually ate on that day:

(click chart to enlarge)


So food is good, blood glucose is good, but what happened to my body composition in the past four days?

July 15, 2015
Neck - 12"
Bust - 36"
Waist - 31.75"
Belly - 39.75"
Hips - 40.25"
Thigh - 22.5"
Calf - 14.25"
Scale weight - 146.2 pounds
Body fat - 52.7 pounds - 36%
Lean mass - 93.5 pounds - 64%

July 19, 2015
Neck - 12"
Bust - 36"
Waist - 31.625"
Belly - 39.5"
Hips - 40.125"
Thigh - 22.25"
Calf - 14.125"
Scale weight - 144.4 pounds
Body fat - 51.6 pounds - 35.8%
Lean mass - 92.8 pounds - 64.2%

In the past four days, I have lost 1.1 pounds of body fat, but I have also lost 0.7 pounds of lean mass.  I would rather have lost less weight on the scale in order to have not lost muscle.  This muscle loss came after eating only 66 grams of protein for the day.  I was basically having only Bulletproof Coffee for one meal and splitting my protein allowance for the day between the other two meals.

The reason for partitioning my macros this way is to make sure that I am eating at least 30 grams of complete protein at each of my two main meals.  The idea for this came from Dr. Donald Layman, PhD.  In this video, Dr. Layman explains why it is necessary to eat at least 30 grams of protein at each meal in order to achieve protein synthesis.  Dr. Layman says that it is necessary to eat three meals per day, with at least 30 grams of protein at each meal, but I am questioning if this is a good idea for a Type 2 Diabetic.  Most of the ketogenic diabetes blogs I am following say to eat much less than 90 grams of protein per day to keep high blood sugar at bay.  So I am going to experiment on myself with a new n=1.  I am going to "sneak up" to eating more protein at each meal, until I get up to the 90 grams of complete protein (this would be protein that contains all the essential amino acids, but not the protein that comes as part of the vegetables that I eat, which are incomplete proteins), or until my blood glucose starts increasing, whichever comes first.  So here is my plan for this coming week:

Breakfast (Bulletproof Coffee with whey protein isolate):
437 calories
43.5g fat (89.7%)
10.7g protein (9.8%) of which 10g are complete protein
0.6g net carbs (0.6%)

For lunch and dinner, I will eat whole foods.  For each of these two meals, I will budget 30g of complete protein, plus whatever small amounts of incomplete protein are contained in vegetables.

I will budget no more than 5g of net carbs for each meal.  If I fall short on carbs at lunch, I will not try to make it up at dinner.

As far as fat goes, I am a little on the fence about it.  Part of me thinks that I should hold the fat low in order for my body fat to get burned, and part of me thinks that I should keep fat higher, to make my food more palatable, and to keep more in line with a true ketogenic diet.  Two schools of thought.  Looking back at my old food and weight loss logs, I see that having more fat did not stop weight loss or muscle gain, so I am not going to restrict fat.  I am also not going to force fat in order to get it up to a certain percentage of my food intake.

What I am going to do is eat the amount of fat that seems right for each meal, and let the grams fall where they may.  For instance, I am having quite a bit of fat at breakfast.  If I eat a salad with protein for lunch, I will add enough oil in my homemade salad dressing to balance the apple cider vinegar I use.  That seems to be about 4-1/2 teaspoons of oil for the 4-1/2 teaspoon of vinegar.  If I eat protein with a cooked vegetable, I will use a tablespoon of fat of some kind on my meat, and another tablespoon on my vegetables.  For "dessert", I will treat myself to one of my fat bombs, which is one of the recipes I contributed to "The Fat Fast Cookbook".  (shameless plug)


Lunch (green salad with homemade dressing and some sort of protein):
560 calories
43.9g fat (70.6%)
36.1g protein (25.8%) of which 30g are complete protein
5g net carbs (3.6%)

Dinner (cooked protein and vegetables with butter, oil, lard, etc.):
621 calories
52.2g fat (75.6%)
32.8g protein (21.1%) of which 30g are complete protein
5g net carbs (3.2%)

The total for the day, based on this example:

1618 calories
139.7g fat (77.7%)
79.5g protein (19.7%) of which 70g are complete protein
10.7g net carbs (2.7%)

(Edit at the end of the day)  Here is a chart to show how I ate today and how it affected my blood glucose, which is not much!

(click to enlarge)

My plan for the future is to try to keep increasing protein each week.

Week 1:  70g of complete protein (10 breakfast, 30 lunch, 30 dinner)
Week 2:  80g of complete protein (20 breakfast, 30 lunch, 30 dinner)
Week 3:  90g of complete protein (30 breakfast, 30 lunch, 30 dinner)

By the time I get to Week 3, I should be up to the 30g of complete protein per meal that Dr. Layman recommends that I eat.  It remains to be seen if my blood glucose will stay under control doing this.

Oh, I almost forgot...

WHAT ABOUT HUNGER???

As soon as I started eating this way, I noticed that the only time I am hungry is first thing in the morning on the days I have to get up at 4 am but do not have breakfast until 8 am.  Why do I wait to eat?  Because I just can't eat a full breakfast before dawn, and if I did, it would mean getting up even earlier that 4 am to prepare and eat before leaving for work at 5 am.  Not only that, but I am not able to have lunch until I get home around 1:30 pm, and if I ate at 4 am, there would be a 9-1/2 hour break before lunch.  So, I have a cup of broth at 6 am at work, then have a cup of coffee at 7 am, then eat the breakfast I brought from home at 8 am.

Calorie reduction makes me hungry.  This way of eating suppresses hunger.  On the four days a week that I do not leave the house to go to work, I eat around 8 am, 1 pm and 6 pm.  I do not snack at all in between, and I am never hungry.  Being in a state of ketosis will do that for you!




I'll try to post again in a week to let you know how it went for the week.

Thanks for reading!

This photo, by the way, was taken by my wonderful husband on our 40th Wedding Anniversary on October 27, 2014.

Monday, July 13, 2015

NUTRITIONAL KETOSIS REVISITED

It's been so long since I wrote a real post here on the big blog, that I doubt that anyone is still reading!  But, even if it is just for myself, I'm going to write a little bit about how things have been going.

As is my pattern, I seem to get ridiculously close to my goal body fat, and then it all falls apart and I gain some of the body fat back.  Sigh.  And here is the reason it always happens:  I stop tracking what I am eating and try to eat instinctively.  That seems to work for a lot of people, and it seems to be the advice that is always given to people eating the LCHF way.  The only problem is that when I can't seem to do that, I feel like a failure.


I suspect that there are a lot of people like me, that are so messed up, metabolically speaking, that they will have to be vigilant for the rest of their lives if they want to stay trim and healthy.  So why does everyone say that, after an adjustment period, a person should be able to let their appetite be their guide?  This is my theory about that:  If the LCHF experts told people that there was a chance that they were going to have to micromanage their food intake for the rest of their lives, they would probably not even try to begin with!

Anyway, since getting back from vacation at the end of February of this year, I have been trying to return to some of my old "systems" of eating.  I have even tried a new one, called "Optimal Ketogenic Living" which a friend told me about because it has been working for her.

Two small problems with this plan:

1. I did not lose any significant weight doing it, and

2. The plan involves eating almost three times as much protein as I had been eating when I was doing Nutritional Ketosis, as recorded in this blog.  It also involves eating a lot less fat.  All lean meats and virtually no added fats, so no butter, mayo, coconut oil, fat bombs, etc.

Ninety-nine per cent of the research I have read has said that too much protein will knock you out of ketosis.  Not only that, but excess protein will be converted to glucose and raise insulin and blood glucose.  The Optimal Ketogenic Living group (OKL) says that this is a lot of hooey, and there is no research that supports those ideas.  My regular readers might remember that I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes three years ago, so keeping my blood glucose low has been a priority.

In the OKL way of looking at things, the small (in their opinion) amounts of protein that are recommended by the "popular keto" advocates are way too small.  The last time I was seriously doing Nutritional Ketosis, I was only eating 54g of protein per day, along with 135g of fat and 27g of total carbs.  The recommendation for my height of 5'3" by the OKL group is 63g of fat, 91-136g of protein and 23g net carbs.

I tried this, and eating only 63g of fat per day was impossible without eating lots of egg whites, skinless chicken breast and 95% lean ground beef.  The thinking is that a person is still eating high fat, but the fat is coming from their body and not from their plate.  As a person nears their goal weight, they will start to increase fat until weight stabilizes.  But until it does, it felt very low fat to me!  But eating more grams of fat than protein while trying to lose weight with OKL was anethema.

I do want to mention that there are a LOT of people in that Facebook group that are doing wonderfully well with this way of eating, including the friend that suggested it to me, and if anyone wants to try it, I would say to go for it.  I do not think it was a bad plan.  I was just not enjoying it, and my weight was going up and down.

The thinking about protein is that a person must eat at least 30g of protein with each meal, in order to signal mTOR (the way that the body rebuilds, but others say to keep it below that, because signaling mTOR is a bad thing, which will cause other growth, such as body fat and even cancer!).  There is so much mixed research about this, that I am totally confused.  Is signaling mTOR good or bad?  All I know is that when I was eating less than 30g of protein at each meal, I was losing body fat and gaining lean body mass.

As I was trying to adjust to OKL, I also got involved with a couple of Diabetes Facebook groups.  In each one, when I told them that I was eating over 100g of protein per day, there was horror all around!  My blood glucose will go through the roof (they warned) and I will develop breast cancer!

Well, I have been checking my blood glucose, and that amount of protein was not causing any spikes.  And, the last time I checked, I have not developed breast cancer.  Of course, their answer to that is that I won't know until it's too late!  Sigh.  Again.

Here is the thing:  I have been pouring over my vast records of every LCHF plan I have tried, and the fat loss that resulted from each one, and the one that seems to have been the most successful was - you guessed it - Nutritional Ketosis.  For me, that is 135g of fat, 54g of protein and 27g of total carbs, not net carbs.  I knew I didn't want to do this again, because my memory tells me that it was no fun and that I was hungry all the time.  But, today I looked back on every post that I wrote about it, and was reminded that I was happy, healthy and un-hungry while I was doing it.  Hmmm...

So, I guess I'm going to start doing that again.  And we will see what happens.  From what I have read, I was eating a pretty fatty breakfast, a fat snack around lunch, and a LCHF dinner in the evening.

Looking back, I also noticed that since I re-engaged NK in 2013, I changed my goals to varying amounts of fat and protein, with the fat being between 110g and 137g and the protein being between 56g and around 100g.  I'm not sure why I was fluctuating that much with my goals from week to week, but when I looked at the resulting weight loss, it was working, even when the fat was slightly lower and the protein was slightly higher.

To get me started, I guess I will start at the beginning, the way I was doing it then, back in the summer of 2012.  As I go along, I will continue to monitor my blood glucose, and if it is possible to begin raising protein without  raising blood glucose and/or gaining body fat, I will raise protein.  I can say that I will miss eating the amount of protein that I have been eating.  It was fun! 

I can't promise when I will post again, because I'm sure I will have similar results as the last time I did this, and I don't want to bore anyone with identical details, but I will leave you with this:

April 15, 2015 stats:
Neck - 12.125"
Bust - 37.5"
Waist - 33"
Belly - 40.5"
Hips - 41.25"
Thigh - 23"
Calf - 14.5"
Scale weight - 149.6 pounds
Body fat - 57.6 pounds - 38.5%
Lean mass - 92 pounds - 61.5%

July 8, 2015 stats after 12 weeks on OKL:
Neck - 12.125"
Bust - 36"
Waist - 31.75"
Belly - 39.75"
Hips - 40.25"
Thigh - 22.5"
Calf - 14.25"
Scale weight - 146.4 pounds
Body fat - 52.6 pounds - 35.9%
Lean mass - 93.8 pounds - 64.1%

So, in the past 12 weeks on OKL, I lost 5 pounds of body fat and I gained 1.8 pounds of lean mass.  That's less than a half pound of body fat per week.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but eating lower fat was making me unhappy, and I lost better and quicker eating more fat and less protein.

To reach my goal of 136 pounds with 30% body fat, I need to lose another 11.7 pounds of body fat and gain another 1.3 pounds of muscle.  The muscle should be the easier part - I'm starting back at the gym, lifting weights, this week.

So here goes...

Wish me luck!

(If you are a first time reader of my blog, click on the tag below for Nutritional Ketosis, and it will take you to other posts from my past experiences with that way of eating.)