It's been a week on the keto diet. I have not touched any added sugar the entire week, although there may have been a couple days where I surpassed my 50-gram carb allowance (pretty much all food has carbs, even leafy greens; carbs can't be avoided). I'll have to get a better grip on that situation. So how'd I do? All in all, not that well, but also not that badly.
Blood Sugar: 98 (with metformin taken before bed)
Blood Pressure: 142/86 (up for sure)
Pulse: 65
I had water-fasted at least 24 hours the day I got a blood-sugar result of 75 (the end of Newcastle), so a 98 strikes me as a more "normal" or "honest" reading. My belt-hole situation remains about the same: I can still tighten my belt to the second-to-last belt hole, meaning I didn't gain or lose any inches around the waist. While it's disappointing not to lose, it's reassuring that moving to keto plus increased calories on eating days didn't move the needle enough to register as a belt-hole change. Blood pressure remains bothersome, and I know it's going to be higher when I get my reading done at the hospital. I'm happy about my resting heart rate, though; a 65 seems to indicate continued progress (I've been as low as 63 before).
So while I'm not the happiest camper with these numbers, they're not too tragic. I'm continuing to tweak the new lifestyle, and one thing that might go is all the 24-hour fasts in favor of something a bit more reasonable, like having a morning shake, then a handful of nuts plus beef jerky for lunch. (I also finally figured out how to make an awesome chia-blueberry-yogurt pudding with no added sweeteners, just a bit of vanilla and almond butter. That's another lunchtime possibility.) And on the days I eat big, well... I won't be able to eat so big. Calories need to remain reduced, possibly below 1500 per day.
My buddy Charles suggested something I'd been thinking about: moving my eating time to lunch-dinner instead of breakfast-lunch. There are problems with this, though: if I eat during a six-hour window, and I do this too early, then I'll be eating lunch and dinner at the office (noon and 6 p.m.; I'm still at the office at 6 p.m.), which isn't desirable. If I shift dinner to a later hour, then I have to shift lunch to a later hour as well (say, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.), but because I go walking right after work, I can't really eat anything until I'm back home, which is often after 10 p.m. So for the moment, if I'm to continue with the 18:6 intermittent-fasting paradigm, I think I have to stick to breakfast-lunch. Sucks, but that's the reality. (Coach Greg Doucette pooh-poohs all this and says to eat small meals often throughout the day. He's the little devil on my shoulder right now.)
I could also, in theory, go OMAD—one meal a day, which will likely mean cutting out my beloved smoothies and cramming all my daily calories into a one-hour period: 23:1 intermittent fasting, basically. This could be almost as bad as doing 24-hour fasts, though. Deprive myself of my smoothies? What's life without a little daily chocolate? (Instead of SlimFast, I now use unsweetened coca powder, monkfruit sweetener, almond butter, and some combination of nut milk, real whole milk, and heavy cream for my weekday smoothies.) Still, I might give it a try, at least for a week, to see how it feels and whether it helps any.
As I continue to explore dieting alternatives (what I'm really seeking are plausible lifestyle choices), I'll continue tracking my numbers and reporting back here. I have a feeling that keto is a good path forward for me—not for everybody, but for someone with my sweet tooth, keto's sugar-minimal lifestyle may be the best choice. So I'll probably stick with keto. As I wrote before, I'll also be looking into intuitive eating, although I suspect that that strategy may require more self-control than I possess. Left to my own devices, I eat like a ravenous dog—gobbling food until I'm about to burst. I don't stop at satiety; I stop at absolutely stuffed. I realize that that's a psychological issue, but that's the reality. Why have two slices of pizza when I can have five?
More positively, I'm looking forward to the weight loss that will come with walking across the country. I'm not expecting to drop ten kilos (if I do, I'll be very surprised), but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up somewhere in the 90s (low 200 pounds).
Thanks for reading along with my ongoing adventure. More later!
I think it's a good thing that you are considering options that may work better for you. Those fasting days would not be possible for me--I don't have that kind of self-discipline. Your idea of maybe having light snackage throughout the day is what worked for me when I was on the low-carb kick. I didn't have to feel hungry all the time that way. It was more about what and how much I ate versus a strict fast. Anyway, I'm sure you'll find what works best for you.
ReplyDeleteRe: your stats--I think a weekly weigh-in is the way to go, but you might want to do the BP more often. I check mine every morning and it is surprising to see how it changes from day to day. One day it will be 120/80, the next 140/70. I look at a weekly average to get a true sense of any concerning trends. Just a thought.
With BP, I usually do two readings, one right after the other. The second reading is always better. BP varies from minute to minute. It can be worse than measuring blood sugar.
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