On to Ketogenic Eating

 So after my body adapted to this way of eating, no sugar and around 50 or so other carbs a day I began to lose weight. Water weight at first but then a gradual but consistent weight loss that ultimately totaled around 70 lbs after about a year. I didn’t really cut calories of the non-carbs. And I tried to add more exercise to my life which was easier the more weight I lost. I started walking to the fast-food places where I would eat, having as ketogenic a meal as I could. However the addiction to eating just for the pleasure of eating wasn’t being addressed so falling off the program became a limiting factor and slowly but inexorably I gained back about 40 lbs. You kid yourself into believing that if you can make a keto version of your addictive foods you can literally have your cake and eat it too. The reality is you still want the real thing and eating a sham version of your favorites only deepens your desire for the real thing. You just yo-yo back and forth with your weight going up and down five or so lbs and not making any real progress. More about that later.

The story continues

 Well, the neck issue resolved itself enough that it was no longer a problem though it left some weakness in my shoulder that may be permanent. I started taking blood pressure meds that at first had little effect, after a change in dosage they had a better outcome but it was only for a short time while they were in my body. At that point I got fed up and thought this ridiculous, high blood pressure isn’t the problem it’s a manifestation of the problem which is you can’t be 100 lbs over weight especially in your late fifties. Although I knew I had to lose some weight I had a long journey with diets and knew they just didn’t work. You would stick to it scrupulously with little effect till you inevitably would just give up. But I was willing to try again so I went to the internet trying to find something that showed me something I could try. At first I found the same clap trap that I knew was wrong and I knew exactly what would happen if I were to go down that same pointless path. But then I came across a video on YouTube from a doctor all the way on the other side of the planet in Australia called Doctor Phinney. The video had a title something along the lines of  Why Low Calorie , Low Fat Diets don’t work. It was a shock to find someone saying straight out what I knew to be true. The video was somewhat science heavy but I’m a science oriented guy and had little problem following what he said. Once it was stated outright I knew it was correct and knew immediately I would give up sugar entirely and start living in a sugar free lifestyle. I didn’t cut out all the carbs just the pure sugar and tried to keep all other carbs below about fifty grams per day. I didn’t cut the calories either, my feeling was just cut the sugar and then we’ll go from there. Cutting out the sugar was hard at first be cause I had both a psychological addiction to the pleasure of sugar and a actual physical addiction where I would get tremors and my brain was screaming at me that we need it we need it! I discovered I could placate my brain by using sugar free candies that would pacify the cravings until I would eat again. I went several days with a pocketful of Wethers sugar free hard candies always at hand and might go through a dozen a day. Within a week I needed them less and less and finally stopped carrying them at all. I lost a lot of water weight initially, which was not surprising but it also drained me off electrolytes and I experienced was is now called the Keto Flu where the lack of Potassium and Magnesium leave you weak and with very low energy. It does really feel like your coming down with something. Once I figured out what was happening and started supplementing them it quickly went away. The loss of eight hundred to a thousand kcals a day from no sugar was a caloric deficit and even without trying to control any other calories I began to lose weight consistently. The blood pressure problem also starting abating as well and over the next year I lost around seventy lbs. I’ll go into more details about that next time.

The start of it all

 So I set up this blog space a long time ago and after a few posts abandoned it. I never deleted it and decided recently to use it to chronicle my own transformation from a low carb and probably eighty percent carnivore to a complete carnivore. 

A brief history relevant to the subject at hand. When I was in my mid-fifties, I’m sixty five at this point in time, I began to experience difficulties with my health. I have been generally healthy with few serious health issues but I have always been over weight and much of that time as obese by definition. In my mid fifties my body started sending me memos that things were not going to continue on the same way. It was if my body was saying to me, ‘ Buddy, you may have good genes and all but we just can’t keep this up’. I was eating the standard American Diet with no smoking and no alcohol but a lot of sugar. I look back and estimate at least eight hundred kcals of sugar a day over everything else that I was eating. 

Part of the problem was I was becoming pre-diabetic from the high sugar intake and a lack of exercise was making high in body fat and low on muscular development. I looked big but rather than a muscular athletic build gone soft the reality was a skinny guy gone fat. One of the issues I was dealing with was high blood pressure and with it came edema, where my swollen lower legs would literally weep water out of them to the point I would put folded paper towels in my socks to absorb the water so wouldn’t have wet spots on my pants legs. 

I was having problems with a stiff neck and shoulders from a repetitive work issue that was stemming from having to work as a cashier sometimes for hours on end and the register was too low for my body, I’m six foot tall which is good to hide how really fat you are but you also fool yourself  that your not as fat as you really are. Well, something about the continuous stooping and twisting back and forth moving items through the register giving me muscles spasms. They were bad enough it was beginning to affect my work, so I went to Urgent Care to see about that and maybe do something about the edema, which I was still denying that it was a big issue, when it was in reality a urgent telegram from my body that things were going south. The urgent care X-rayed my neck and didn’t find any issues and prescribed prednisone and some muscle relaxer, but they were more concerned about the high blood issue and put me on some blood pressure meds and felt it would relieve or help with the edema. I think I’ll stop here and in the next post relate what happened and how it lead to me following a low carb diet.