Keto Success Stories & Experiments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 20, off to S.F., Grape Seed Oil results

This entry is part 20 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

I’m heading off to San Francisco in a few hours. Rather than worry about how to transport my shakes, I’m just going to do time-restricted feeding (“intermittent fasting”) by drinking all my meals this morning and afternoon, then I’ll eat again after I get home tomorrow. I had to bring everything I need with me to work, including an umbrella. Fun fact: I’ve been to San Francisco almost 10 times now, I’ve never been rained on (misted on, yes, but no rain) looking at the forecast, this might break that streak.

This morning I got back my blood tests from the week of doing Grape Seed Oil. Feel free to head over to the spreadsheet of results and check them out. Grapeseed oil is on Column O.

Let’s see… my LDL-P came way down (1242 to 849) – into the “normal” range thanks to the PUFAs, my LDL-C also came down (116 to 72) – again into the “normal” range. My triglycerides did indeed go up, though nowhere even close to the result I got with avocado oil in November: that one went from 113 to 199, this new test with grape seed oil went from 104 to 117. I guess we’ll see what happens with the subsequent tests with Saturated and MUFA: will the triglycerides go down or not?! While you’re on the spreadsheet, you can pop over to the other tabs and see the ongoing results coming in from the n=3 experiment that’s also going on. Both females have had really stable triglyceride levels, regardless of heavy cream or avocado oil. Makes me wonder if the 199 was a freak aberration (yes I was fasting at least 12 hours before the test).

So what else does the blood test show? On PUFAs my cortisol increased dramatically (9.8 to 12.7) and my fasting insulin predictably went down to 2.4. That’s actually the lowest I’ve ever gotten, 2.7 was the level when I did Avocado Oil. Oddly, my CRP (which along with cortisol is a marker for inflammation) was slightly up but still far lower compared to what I was getting in November.

By Chris|2018-01-24T10:11:49-07:00January 24th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: cholesterol, User Experiences, experience, video, Oil, 42dayExperiment, blood test, results, science, saturated fat, nutrition|9 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 19

This entry is part 19 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Not much is going on, settling into my new job. My tooth still hurts so it’s good I’m on a liquid diet. Just like last time I did an experiment like this, there isn’t much left over of the food I’m eating after it’s gone through my system so no much comes out… if you get my meaning. It’s not like I’m constipated, there just isn’t much there.

By Chris|2018-01-23T15:06:06-07:00January 23rd, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 18

This entry is part 18 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Looks like I have a mustache =)

Day 18 of my experiment. Hey, let’s talk about weight loss! I started this experiment on January 5th and I’m currently (as of this morning) down 14.7 lbs. Some of that is due to me eating a bit more than normal right before the experiment to fit in a few more yummy foods before I stopped eating, and some is from Christmas/New Years; but I currently weigh less than I did when I finished my December experiment. I’ll call that definitive progress =). My ketones are most definitely lower doing heavy cream compared to just oil: around 1.3-1.5 compared to up in the 3’s. That’s not a problem but it is interesting.

I noticed something yesterday when I was getting out of the shower: My back wasn’t sore and neither were my arms. That’s odd because the day before (Saturday) I spent around 3 hours shoveling over a foot of snow and typically I’d expect to be exceptionally sore. Kinda weird.

This week I’m gearing up to go to San Francisco for an event we’re sponsoring on Wednesday. It’ll be rather interesting: I’ll fly there, set up a table and hand out samples, and then head back to the airport. I’ll have maybe 5 hours before my flight so I don’t want to go through the hassle of getting a room so I’ll just camp out in the airport and try to get some sleep on the chairs, maybe watch some “Flash”.

By Chris|2018-01-22T14:51:57-07:00January 22nd, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: Weight loss, video, blood test, User Experiences, 42dayExperiment, experience|1 Comment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 17

This entry is part 17 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Not much to report here, everything is going OK still. I do have far lower blood ketones doing heavy cream, 1.3 mmol/dL this evening when I tested. That’s still a good number and I’m clearly making sufficient ketones. Tomorrow is my first full day self-employed. I remembered to change the “business hours” for Keto Chow on Saturday to reflect that we’ll be open longer.

By Chris|2018-01-21T20:33:22-07:00January 21st, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 16, shoveling snow
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 16, shoveling snow

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 16, shoveling snow

This entry is part 16 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Second day back on heavy cream, I’m quite enjoying it. Tastes really yummy.

Today was a bit of a slow start, it snowed pretty hard last night and I wasn’t particularly anxious to get going on that but eventually, I did. Took the kids sledding this afternoon too.

Tonight we have our Salt Lake and Utah County Keto Meat-up, we host it at the Keto Chow warehouse, mostly because I have the location available. There are several other meetups about Keto here in Utah but almost all are vehicles for multi-level marketing Keto//OS exogenous ketones. That bugs me so I don’t push anything Keto Chow related. I’ll answer questions if people ask but I’m not going to do shameless self-promotion.

By Chris|2018-01-20T16:12:15-07:00January 20th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 15, back to heavy cream, self employed, history of Keto Chow shipping
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 15, back to heavy cream, self employed, history of Keto Chow shipping

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 15, back to heavy cream, self employed, history of Keto Chow shipping

This entry is part 15 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

In a fitting end to my week doing grapeseed oil for my fat source, last night my blood ketones were 3.9 mmol/dL (again: not chasing ketones but it’s nice to see those rise, especially since I got another person that emailed me yesterday claiming that you can’t do keto while consuming sucralose… whatever =) Why did I get higher ketones (5.5) when I did avocado oil before? It may have something to do with that I was also using MCT oil at the time and this round I’m not – in a few weeks when I do the week of liquid coconut oil (which has a LOT of MCTs) we’ll see what happens then. For now, I’m back on 400ml of 40% fat heavy whipping cream per day. Confession: the week I started this experiment I went through cron-o-meter and added EVERYTHING I would be eating for the following 6 weeks, it’s really easy to copy and paste. Each day all I have to do is enter my ketone level and mark the day as complete =) It’s kinda like cheating but not really.

I can feel my plantar fasciitis starting to act up again in my right foot. It could be psychosomatic but I’m guessing that it’s legitimately acting up due to the inflammatory properties of the poly-unsaturated grapeseed oil I’ve consumed all week (1323 ml over 21 meals). I’m really quite happy to be going back onto heavy cream again, it’s like an old (non-inflammatory) friend. In case you need a refresher, here is the breakdown for heavy cream (mine is a little different as it has a slightly higher fat content at 40%):

[visualizer id=”23814″]

I went in for my weekly blood test this morning and then did my exit interview at my ~~day job~~. Exciting and scary all at the same time, I’m now officially self-employed full-time. To top it all off, the post office just delivered a pair of shipping cages for Monday. They’re going to start picking up our mail every day instead of us needing to take it to the post office and unload it manually. I’m pretty stoked!

Hey, tomorrow we’re hosting a Keto Meat-up here!

By Chris|2018-01-19T14:33:19-07:00January 19th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment, blood test, Keto Chow, science|2 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14

This entry is part 14 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 14, last day of grape seed oil! The kids had a really good dinner last night (see above) – it was about everything I could do to not eat some of the pork, it smelled AMAZING. Speaking of not eating stuff, today was my last full day at my soon-to-be old job, we did a meeting where we got together and brainstormed solutions to problems. Our product manager brought in (at her own expense) a bunch of food including some diet soda for me. I actually forgot to eat breakfast until lunch and am just finishing lunch at 2.

Tomorrow I get to do the blood test for the grapeseed oil week… and then wait for the results until next week. Should be interesting to say the least.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:14:48-07:00January 18th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: Oil, User Experiences, 42dayExperiment|2 Comments

42 Day of Keto Chow – Day 13: week 1 blood tests

This entry is part 13 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

I got the first round of results back from the blood tests I did on January 12. For the most part, I’m not seeing anything particularly interesting but that’s mainly because these are the “baseline” ones to show what a week of eating only Keto Chow and heavy cream will look like. HDL is 52, LDL is 116, LDL-P (particle count) is 1242 (which is high). Glucose is normal and my fasting insulin is 4.4 which is quite good. You can see all the results of all my tests here.

My Hemoglobin A1c (which acts as a measure of the amount of glucose my red blood cells have been exposed to over their lifetime) has been steadily going down throughout my experiments. Glycated Hb A1c is the measurement typically used for the diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus (not to be confused with “diabetes insipidus”). In the US it’s expressed as a percentage with numbers higher than 6.5 signifying diabetes, elsewhere it’s in mmol/l with values > 48 signifying diabetes. Typically you want lower numbers with <6% or <42 mmol/l. My first test in October 2017, my A1c was 5.1; In November 2017 it was at 4.9, and now in January it’s at 4.8. I wasn’t diabetic before I started doing keto, though I had a “deranged metabolism” that didn’t handle carbohydrates properly (you can tell because I was fat) and likely would have gone that direction in a few more years.

The 2 Keto Dudes do a better job of explaining what’s going on with diabetes but the interesting thing is that most doctors will prescribe enough insulin to keep blood sugar “low” but not in an ideal range. If you use insulin to bring down blood sugar and you go too far, you’ll actually end up in a coma. The problem is that (I’m working on memory here and a search didn’t find where it’s discussed at length) for each percent of HbA1c there’s an associated increase in all-cause mortality. Meaning if you use insulin to come down to a 7.0 – you are likely to die more than a person with a 6. Dang, I’m going to have to find the reference – it may be this but I’m not sure.

People with Type 2 diabetes make too much insulin and still have high blood sugar, those with Type 1 don’t make enough. The cool thing is: insulin is just a part of the regulation of blood sugar in your body and if that’s broken, guess what? there’s a backup! Your liver is able to synthesize all the glucose needed by your body. Provided you don’t introduce extra glucose into the equation, it’ll do a very good job regulating blood sugar all by its self. This is why people can go for month long fasts and not die without eating glucose.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:12:06-07:00January 17th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment, blood test, Keto Chow, cholesterol|2 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 12, how I got started on nutritionally complete foods

This entry is part 12 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 12, ketones up slightly at 3.3 mmol/dL. The numbness from my molar crown wore off yesterday just in time for a dull ache to replace it. I doubt I could have chewed anything before this morning so I would have been doing 3 meals of Keto Chow yesterday anyway =) Late in the afternoon I noticed that the crown has a high spot in the middle so I’m going back to the dentist today to get that taken care of. Any weird “bathroom” issues I had at the beginning of the experiment are completely gone now, which is what I expected.

This morning I mixed up 80 meals of Keto Chow 2.1 to take me through a few weeks. Of note: I made 20 meals of the Savory Chicken Soup flavor, mostly so my wife could have some that wasn’t messed up. The coloring test ones we got kept coming with the sweetener in it, which makes for a really weird taste. Anyhow, that’s what I’m drinking for breakfast today. I put a bit of water into the bottle, added the fat, powder, then hot water and shook it up. Put in in my backpack for the 5 minute drive and it’s still nice and warm.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:12:24-07:00January 16th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment, ketochow2.1, video, flavors, User Experiences|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones

This entry is part 11 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 11. I still haven’t had “breakfast” yet today. At 07:30 I went in to get a crown, 3 hours later it’s done but I’m still numb and not particularly hungry yet. Fortunately for me, when I do eat I’m not going to need to chew. Got the crown today so I could squeeze it in this last week of my “day job” before I quit on Friday. It’s a little scary but mostly I’m looking forward to only having a single full-time job next week.

My blood ketones are predictably coming up with the insanely low net carb count I’m doing with the oil. Yesterday I got up to 3.2 mmol/dL:

Now, your level of blood ketones is NOT an indicator of how much weight you’ll lose, and unless you are doing a ketogenic diet for treatment of epilepsy or Alzheimers you really don’t need to stress about ketone levels. Still for my own tests, it’s cool to see the levels going up. It’ll be interesting to see if/how they go down when I start on heavy cream again this Friday. Speaking of Ketones, let’s talk a little about taking artificial, or “exogenous”, ketones.

To start off with: I’ve been doing a ketogenic diet for over 3 years and to date, the only exogenous ketones I have taken were in a competitor’s keto “meal replacement” (at 200 calories I wouldn’t consider it a meal but whatever) that had beta hydroxy-butyrate salts in it (ketones). It wasn’t very good and I didn’t even finish the one drink (and I still have 11 in a box somewhere). Aside from that, I’ve never bothered. I figure I want to use my own fat to make them, and doing it that way is cheaper anyhow. I’ve heard a lot about exogenous ketones and I think they do have their place with:

High-performance athletes that need a jolt of energy faster than MCT oil can provide
Treatment of epilepsy or Alzheimers
People new to Keto that aren’t making enough ketones themselves yet but they also don’t have enough glucose left.

For that last group using exogenous ketones could be a good way to get through that first week in conjunction with extra electrolytes. The problem with exogenous ketones is there are a lot of unknowns right now in what the long-term effects are, mostly due to the “handedness” of natural vs. artificial. Within organic chemistry, you’ll often have molecules that can be assembled in two different ways, one a mirror image of the other. When life on earth creates the molecule, generally it’s always done the same way due to RNA sequences and other proteins that are running things. When you create a molecule in a lab, all bets are off and you will often end up with both types. Our enzymes know what to do with the ketones made in our livers, they don’t really fit the mirror image ones. Another problem is that in our bodies you have all 3 of the ketones being produced in concert, with the ratios of each tightly controlled. When you take only one of the ketones artificially it can mess things up because ketones aren’t just a fuel, they also act as a powerful signaling pathway that tells our cells what to do. This is of even greater concern when you take artificial ketones while still eating a carb-heavy diet full of glucose. We are not designed to have high glucose at the same time as high ketones, it’s simply not how things work.

So, in case you’re wondering if I’m going to add ketones to Keto Chow: the answer is “No.” =)

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:13:16-07:00January 15th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: Oil, Keto Chow, 42dayExperiment, Exogenous Ketones|3 Comments