Keto-a-go-go

Hi, I'm just starting this diet too (day 3 currently) :) I have a tumblr blog aswell, I hadn't see yours before i made it! Since this is your second time though I was wondering whether you had any tips or pitfalls/experience that might help me? Good luck with your diet :)

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:36:00 -0500

I already failed out. I have a lot of stuff going on right now and keto is just too much for me to handle right now. Cooking is a nightmare right now, once we move and I have my own kitchen again, I’ll be back on board.

I do have a few words of advice though, and I do very strongly support this diet as a lifestyle change.

First and foremost - give it at least a month with no cheating, no replacing sweets at all. Give yourself that time to try adjust and to really feel what your body is like without sugar. I really really believe that sugar is killing us all. Once the month is over, you should be well adapted and your cravings should be pretty much gone. Then if you want, you can start experimenting with things like keto cheesecake etc. I personally don’t lose when I eat wheat, so even if the carb count works for me, I don’t eat wheat when I’m trying to lose and I really don’t feel that people should be eating wheat anyway, but that’s another story.

Another thing I would suggest is to exercise - and don’t kill yourself jogging or doing an elliptical Do strength training - higher resistance, fewer reps. Do planks, get some resistance bands or a little weight set. Look into body weight exercises etc. Muscle burns calories and you will be more successful (and look better naked) if you lift/weight train as opposed to only doing cardio. Cardio is great for your cardiovascular system, but strength training will better help you lose weight.

Thirdly, measure. The scale won’t always budge, especially if you start lifting, but your waist line will. A lot of people think they have plateaued and get very discouraged - only to find out they’ve lost 2 more inches even though they haven’t lost any weight. Focus on how your clothes fit, take pictures weekly/monthly and stick with it. It takes time.

4thly, water. Drink a shit ton of it. Like more than you could possibly imagine needing, then drink more. If the water in your toilet looks like urine, instead of looking like water with a little urine in it, you should drink more. I personally don’t drink diet soda or Mio or any of that crap, some people are fine with it, some people do better without it.

5th - electrolytes. Keep them up. Use lite-salt for sodium/potassium and take a magnesium supplement. Most of the keto-flu symptoms can be avoided by drinking enough and taking in enough elecrolytes. Take a multivit too, it can’t hurt.

6 - Fiber. Eat your veggies and/or take a carb fee supplement like pure psyllium husk. You should poop less on keto, but you should still poop. Even on keto, I still go daily, some people don’t though. Just don’t allow yourself to get backed up - fixing it can be painful. This is especially true if you have to take anything like Vicodin or oxys.

7 - plan your meals. A little planning goes a long way. Pack a lunch or decide what you’re going to order before work so you’re not stuck ripping buns off of dollar menu shit from McDonald’s or just saying “fuck it, I’m hungry” and breaking the diet.

8 - use a calorie tracker, measure and weigh your food. I use myfitnesspal.com, my username is kaisawheel on there, feel free to add me! A lot of people just guestimate at their calories and end up eeating waaaayyyy too much. On this diet, you should naturally fall at a calorie deficit, that’s part of the beauty of it. But you should track your food always just to be sure.

9 - Always have something you can make quickly on hand. We all have days where we don’t feel like cooking and having a frozen bowl of keto friendly soup ready to nuke, or something you can toss right into the oven for a half hour takes a lot of the stress out of bad days.

10 - Get a cast iron pan. I would really classify this as life advice more than keto advice. Get one, learn to season it, and keep it seasoned and you’ll never go back. You can cook literally any piece of meat in a cast iron pan over medium heat. Spoon melted/caramelized button on top and you have something better than what you’d get at a restaurant and you know exactly what’s in it, and you get a nice little fat bump. This is by far the best way I’ve ever prepared steak.

11 - use real fats. I cook with lard and butter when I keto. Coconut oil is also good, avoid vegetable oils (olive oil is fine, olives actually have fat after all) and margarine.

12 - Experiment. You are after three things basically - 1: Moderate protein. Find your lean body mass and find out how many grams of protein you should be eating. You can google for this pretty easily. 2: Low carbs. Get your carbs from leafy green veggies, eat veggies daily. Sometime’s I’ll make one of those 16oz bags of steamer broccoli and just have that a couple tablespoons of butter and (too much) salt for lunch. It’s keto friendly and good for you. 3: High fat. Butter, cheese, beef, pork, dark meat chicken, organ meats. You want real fats. Fat is key to this diet because fat is what makes your body feel full, and slows appetite.

13 - Eat enough. Don’t get trapped eating only 700 calories per day - even if you feel full at that. It’s not enough to run your body and even though you might feel full, other things will start to suffer and you’ll start to feel like shit. If you ever get the point where everything you think of eating makes you feel sick to your stomach - get some electrolytes/vitamins and minerals in you and make sure you’ve had enough water. I’ve read that magnesium deficiency can especially add this “Yuck food is gross.” thing. This has happened to me and upping my electrolytes and minerals helped me stop hating the sight or thought of food.

14 - And I will get shit for this, but I think it’s important - Weigh daily. Track your weight daily. ACCEPT THAT SOMETIMES IT WILL GO UP AND THAT A SMALL INCREASE DOES NOT INDICATE FAILURE. Weight fluctuates. What you are looking for is an overall downward trend. Day to day increases happen. Tracking my weight daily allowed me to see exactly, in real time, how my food choices affected my weight loss and my water retention. I honestly weigh 2 times per day. Once in the morning after going to the bathroom and once before bed. It is amazing how much your weight can fluctuate during the day, and then again while you sleep. Weighing daily gave me a much better understanding of how to be successful and I found it very motivating because once I got my ducks in a row, I lost every. single. day. That shit feels gooooooood.

15 - Learn to cook if you can’t already. Experiment in your kitchen. Try not to get stuck in a rut where you eat the same things all the time. Make something you might not like (this is where ready to microwave stuff comes in handy!) and try things you’ve never tried before. After your first month, try the veggies you used to hate. Then try them steamed, slathered in butter and topped with a generous amount of salt. Then melt some cheese on it. If it still tastes like crap, toss in olive oil, salt/pepper and garlic powder and bake. Then try it. If you still don’t like, then you can probably cross it off your shopping list.

16 - Salt - I personally think a lot of ketoers put too much emphasis on limiting salt intake. Since we are not retaining glycogen stores and are (or should be) drinking shit tons of water, the salt gets flushed right out. I honestly find that if I try to limit my salt intake, I stall. I put lite-salt in my water, I put enough salt on my broccoli to make my nurse of a MIL faint and I lose and my BP is fine. If I try to cut down on those to a more “recommended” amount, I stall. Salt is good for you. Unless you have a medical condition that requires limiting, try not to worry about it unless you run into a loss problem.

17 - Keep calm and keto on. This is a lifestyle change, not a miracle diet. Remember that your first week/week and a half is going to see major losses and they are because of your body flushing out glycogen. That first week is probably very little fat lost, but because the glycogen takes up space, you’ll probably find your pants fit better anyway. Losing that water, and the bloat that comes with it feels really, really nice.

Keto Take 2, Day 1

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:06:00 -0500

Restarting keto, officially. Have been off of it since mid October.

Just had my first meal, 3 eggs, 4 links of Sausage, butter. 700 calories, 2 carbs. Lots of water so far.

And I also finally found something that would get the rust off of my shower. Having a good Tuesday so far.

Just Another Ray of Sunshine: People promoting ketogenic diet for weight loss.

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:35:00 -0500

Just Another Ray of Sunshine: People promoting ketogenic diet for weight loss.:

justanotherrayofsunshine:

This annoys me so much. The ketogenic diet is a high fat, moderate protein and very low carb diet. By restricting carbs your body is forced to produce ketones and use fat for energy instead.

The ketogenic diet (KD) does have a use in medicine - to treat drug resistant epilepsy. For many children…

The ketogenic diet promoted by dieters is (typically) not at all similar to the ketogenic diet used to control seizure disorders. A diet that restrictive and precise should always be used under the supervision of a doctor. The difference in what a child on a seizure controlling ketogenic diet eats, and what keto dieter eats is stark.

The keto diet that people most often practice just promotes eliminating high GI foods like grains, sugar and certain fruits. There is still a wild amount of variety in a keto diet from LOTS of veggies and moderate amounts of low GI fruits.

I started keto because my doctor recommended it to me. The benefits go so far beyond weight loss it’s not even funny. No one will ever be able to convince me that we should use grains as the basis of our diet. Most of the “horror” stories that you hear are problems that people could have easily avoided if they researched the diet better beforehand. Once you’re acclimated to a ketogenic diet and then go back to eating grains, you really see how different (and better) you feel eating in this fashion.

There is a great deal of emerging science that keto diets are safe and effective for a variety of things - not just losing weight. Cholesterol reduction for instance. That’s the reason my Doctor put me on this diet. I truly believe that in a couple decades our recommendation of a grain heavy diet is going to be seen as a blight on the health of our nation. Politics and lobbyists play a major role in why grains are pushed so heavily in the US.

shineyourlightandguidemehome: size10plz: just-a-skinny-boy: ...

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:41:00 -0500

OH,REALLY?????!!!!

Scarlett Johansson

Ashley Olsen

Jessica Biel

Keira Knightley

Miley Cyrus

Natalie Portman

Sienna Miller

Lady Gaga

shineyourlightandguidemehome:

size10plz:

just-a-skinny-boy:

b4dmau5:

someone add pictures of the VS Angels on here

Gisele Bundchen

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

Alessandra Ambrosio

Candice Swanepoel

Fucking best.

I have not been doing my diet or anything at all since like mid October BUT....

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:51:19 -0500

Everything is still going okay. I put back on water weight from eating carbs again, but that’s all so far. All of my thin(ner) clothes fti still and my belt still fits the same way, so really it’s just stopped my loss rather than reversing it. I’m okay with that.

We were super tight on money for a couple months because I had to get a lawyer to file for bankruptcy - but that is paid for in full now so I will be able to afford decent food again. I found ketoing on a very small budget to be really difficult. You really can’t get cheaper than beans and rice…

But anyway. I’ll be back in the swing of things for the new year if not sooner. I’m starting to really feel the effects of eating carbs again now and I feel like crap. But I’d like to spend the extra bit of money that would go to restocking my keto foods on Christmas, so come the new year I’ll be back to ketoing strong again.

I hope everyone is well! Merry Christmas…soooooon.

It is spicy, spicy as foo-ock, lol. So good tho!

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:48:16 -0500

Hmm. I will have to get some. Everyone in the world seems to love it.

You mentioned a video about running that you watched. Can you give a link to it?

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:15:49 -0500

Sure! It’s here on the Natural Running Center’s site.

I desperately need some money.

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:40:35 -0400

Being sued sucks.

zellington: adreamthatwillendsometime: The ultimate...

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:59:15 -0400

zellington:

adreamthatwillendsometime:

The ultimate realization

SO RELEVANT.

Aaaannnnddddd pizza. Oh well.

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:20:15 -0400

Three days early, but it was free and I’m poor. Pizza hut was going to be my diet breaking meal on Tuesday, I’m okay with it.

It was good.

New picture that I took today.

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:22:02 -0400

New picture that I took today.

10-11-2012 scale update

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:58:00 -0400

My month long keto challenge (started 9/17) is still going along. Finally got my shark week bloat off and I’m down to a new all time low of 224 on the nose. That brings me to a total of 42 (exactly) pounds lost.

Food is becoming somewhat of an issue though and it’s getting a little tough. Everything I think about eating makes me feel nauseous and I am really dying for some battered and fried food. Today is a birthday day at work and we are getting enormous platters of fried calamari and mozz sticks. It’s super tempting. I am going to make it to my birthday though, that was the goal, no slips for one solid month. Second goal was to get into size 18 jeans. I have and they are loosening. Down another belt loop.

I started the month at 244, but that was with water weight from a week or so of being off keto. Before that cheat week I was down to 234, so I’ve lost about ten pounds this month, which is pretty fucking good.

Overall I’m really happy with the progress that I’ve made and I think I have a good plan for the future that will keep me sane and thinning. I’m going to keto 3 weeks of the month and eat what the fuck ever I want during shark week. Because fuck everything about that.

The 16th is my birthday and carbs are all on for about a week or until I feel like shit, whichever happens first. Next Saturday we’re going down to West Palm for sushi and to see a gecko exhibit at one of the museums. Looking very forward to it all.

Photo

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:31:10 -0400

Next year I'll thank myself for not quitting now.

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:05:26 -0400

In the 220's!

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:37:36 -0400

Down to 229.4 this morning. Been a long time since I weighed that little. Can’t wait for onederland!

Update

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:17:22 -0400

Down to 230.2 bringing me to a total weight loss of 35.8 pounds. This is definitely my lowest weight in a long while. On the 17th of September I started at 244, but was carrying about 10 pounds in water weight. I was 234.2 before I had cheated/fell off the wagon for a couple weeks. So far my month long uber committed challenge is going swimmingly.

I have been exercising every day - riding my bike one day and using resistance bands the next. The resistance bands are really nice and I definitely feel like I’m getting a workout. I highly recommend them. I got the Black Mountain 5 band kit that came with a door mount, ankle strap and carry-all bag. It’s still on sale. It was packaged extremely well with no wasted space or unnecessary packaging and was delivered on time and in perfect condition. I have been incredibly pleased with the workout I’m getting with the bands, I have had them for a few weeks now and have used them every other day since receiving them. I’ve already worked up to the blue band and I definitely feel stronger.

Running is out for now. I might try again once I get lighter, but as much as I enjoy it, it seems my ankles do not. Biking is working out really well though and I’m much more successful at it than I was 36 pounds ago.

Looking into getting a yoga mat and procuring some DVD’s. I’d like to improve my range of motion and flexibility as Arthritis has already done a number on me. The weight certainly did not help either!

Once I get down to around 220 I’m going to make an appointment with my Dr. and have my cholesterol and everything redone and impress him by having lost weight and lowered my cholesterol without medication.

"I think," she says to herself....

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:45:10 -0400

“I would like to lose another dress size by my birthday next month.” Then shoves another cookie into her mouth.

In other news, I found my absolute favorite cookies again for the first time in about a year.

Scale Update

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:15:00 -0400

Fell off and on the wagon a few times over the last month or so. Back into keto full time this week and after the water weight came off, turns out I’m at an all time new low. Total weight lost is up to 31.8 pounds and I’ back on the wagon.

Had a great experience doing HIIT running last night. Improved all of my high intensity phases by at least two minutes per mile and my fastest was over 4 minutes per mile faster than last week.

I’m going hardcore in September, I’d like to be down another dress size by my Birthday in mid October. I’m currently down two full dresses (and about a half probably).

I’m thinking of trying out a PSMF for the rest of the week once my food runs out and seeing how that feels. Fasting is easy for me, so I imagine that would be okay as long as it doesn’t do weird shit to me like the fat fast did.

Running for real now

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:11:16 -0400

I watched a video on how to properly run. LIFE CHANGING. It was amazing, I only ran for abut a minute and a half, but I only stopped because my dog was done pooping and wanted to go back inside. I wasn’t even out of breath. I could previously barely run for thirty seconds and even then it felt like HELL.

Yes yes yes. Running for real starts tonight.

7-23-12 Day 74 of Keto…awkwaaaaard. MFP Doesn’t have...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:39:00 -0400

7-23-12 Day 74 of Keto…awkwaaaaard.

MFP Doesn’t have an exercise added for sex. So I choose “general aerobics” because, fuck not getting credit for that. Sometimes it’s a lot of work. It’s awkward when someone unknowingly comments with “Good burn” on my sexercise.

No, burning isn’t good then. Not good at all.

——————————————————————————————————-

Additionally and less awkwardly I have been reading a lot more about how much macros matter and what not. I think I am going to rearrange some things and try to get more protein. Going through even my higher protein days, I don’t think I’m getting enough. My LBM is about 123 lbs, so 55 kg. Depending on who you ask, I should be getting about 20-30g more protein every day. I’ve been concerned with getting enough fat, but I’m going to worry less about that, keep my carbs low and up my protein a bit. A lot of what I’m going to base this on is found here: Reddit talks macros and in the links provided there. A lot of people who have major success have also talked about not worrying about macros and just keeping carbs low and protein moderate. So we shall see.

I did lose 1.2 more pounds over the weekend. Down to a new all time low with 29.2 pounds lost in total. Can’t wait for that to tick over 30….