42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 31
Will all the hubub on Sunday I forgot to post anything, so this is a placeholder that I’m back-dating so the series numbering doesn’t get messed up =)
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 32, Superb Owl done
Days 32, 10 days left! I fasted yesterday until about 4 pm, which turned out to be a bit of a bad idea. The Carrington Farms liquid coconut oil is WAY better for my GI compared to the Piping Rock as it has a lower percentage of MCTs, still, it’s not close to the same as consuming avocado oil or heavy cream. To keep the experiment isocaloric (same calories every day, no matter what) I needed to consume 3 blender bottles over the next 4 hours. In the past this has been really easy, wasn’t yesterday and by the end of it I needed to go lie down and wallow in freakish misery forever (sorry, just quoting the Dread Pirate Roberts). I’m looking forward to 10 days from now when I can go back to Heavy Whipping Cream + Avocado Oil like normal (and I’m going to eat a steak).
Last night we continued our family tradition of getting together and watching the Superb Owl ads… with some football in between them. Honestly, I’d have to say Tide won – wasn’t even close. I think they would have even beat Oreos a few years ago with the quiet library fight ad. Aside from that, I didn’t really care which football team won, I just like a close game and I was quite pleased, highly entertaining until the very end. Because I wasn’t going to be eating any of the food, it was a little hard for me to summon the drive to make much. Still, everyone pitched in and we had a rather respectable spread of keto food, including veggies, pork rinds and dip, keto peanut butter bars, keto egg nog, cheese and more cheese, and some jalapeno poppers I found at Walmart.
I’m probably going to mix up a test meal of the dextrose today to see if it mixes well and has the right sweetness without sucralose.
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 33 – finalized plans for “carb week”
Based on the way I’ve been feeling the last few days I think I was “lucky” enough to have a run-in with the stomach flu at the same time I started the liquid coconut oil. Anyhow, I am feeling better today, likely in no small part from me doing the Savory Chicken Soup flavor of Keto Chow for breakfast and lunch.
I mixed up the 191g of dextrose I was planning on using for each meal next week… yeah, it was a LOT, so much that it wouldn’t even dissolve in the water and it was WAY too sweet. So I’m going to take a page out of Dave Feldman’s book and use some candy. I spent a bunch of time at the 7-11 across the street and ultimately decided that I’m going to use skittles, sprite, unsweetened almond milk, and a daily bag of M&Ms. It’s funny to me that using dextrose straight is unpalatable but put it in soda and candy and it’s just fine.
- Why candy and Sprite? Same reason I’m using dextrose: pure carbs with no other nutrients. My other nutrition is covered by Keto Chow, I’m just looking for calories (in this case from carbs).
- Why the Almond Milk? to make the Keto Chow taste better in the absence of heavy cream.
- Why the M&Ms? to break things up a bit but mostly to add some fat, otherwise my fat intake is excessively low and I might start to get weird effects. I’ll be hitting 16% fat which is about right per the AHA and ADA recommendations.
Here’s what each day should look like:
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 34: on the ByteSized Podcast
Woke up with a dehydration headache today, some water and ibuprofen took care of that. My gut is feeling much better, just in time for me to royally mess things up! =) Today is my second-to-last day of doing the liquid coconut oil. That means I have fewer than 48 hours before I eat carbs for science (and will likely feel like crap). In case you missed yesterday’s post, I’m going to be using skittles, sprite, and some M&Ms in addition to the dextrose to hit my 2000 calories for that week. And in case you’re wondering why the crap I’m doing all this, the original plan is laid out on this page.
Yesterday I was a guest on an episode of the ByteSized podcast and today it went up. I tried to keep it really short and didn’t ramble as much as I could =) Anyhow, please check it out!
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 35, last day of coconut oil, macadamia nut oil results back
OK, I can do this… it’s the last day. I thought I was doing better with the Liquid Coconut Oil – until this morning. I was woken up at 2 and didn’t get back to sleep until 3:30 or so. I’m really happy that I installed a bidet in that bathroom. Why is this happening? I have a couple theories:
- Still might be a stomach flu, I’m not ruling that out.
- The sheer amount of MCTs in the carrington farms liquid coconut oil (about 33-34ml per shake) is about as much as I used to have in an entire day back before I started the experiment, multiply that by 3 and it’s rather serious. At least it’s fewer than the 190+ ml I started with last Friday.
- The aforementioned MCT builds up or something? dunno but it was pretty bad.
Anyhow, tomorrow starts carb week. I’m actually having a bit of trouble finding a store that sells the bags of skittles I want. Costco only has giant bags, Sams-Club has vending machine packages of 50 (I need 20) and Walmart only has larger “share size” ones. I’ll try a local grocery store later today. This is nearly as bad as when I had to go to 4 stores to find a Runts banana to use in the product pictures. I’m planning on testing my glucose a bunch of times before and after I eat the sugar tomorrow, and I’ll likely do a live feed on a few of the social platforms. Wish me luck!
Last thing: I got back the blood work from my week of Macadamia Nut oil (high in monounsaturated fats) – it was a good enough result I called Dave Feldman and got to take up 22 minutes of his valuable time talking about it. You can view the results here for yourself (column Q). The short version is: it looks like my triglycerides respond to monounsaturated fats. Be sure to check out the “Chris Charts” tab at the bottom for easier to understand charts. It has all my tests plotted out nicely. Of note is the “Lipids 1” graph:
Avocado oil is quite high in MUFAs, Macadamia is higher. It’s also interesting to see Triglycerides and LDL-C running on an inversion pattern: one goes up, the other goes down in lock-step. The interesting thing about all this is it’s only happening to me in my n=4 experiment:
I’m the yellow line.
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 36: Carb Week Begins (with a live stream)
https://youtu.be/w_MnfN8KWp4
OK, here we go!
You can view my glucose tests as I take them on the “Sugar” tab of the spreadsheet here.
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 37 – full day on carbs done
I’m nearly done with my experiment – too bad the worst part has just begun =( You know that feeling you would get on Halloween when you would eat all your candy and you were all “sugared out”? That’s what I feel like right now. I had 3 cans of Sprite, 3 bags of Skittles and a bag of M&Ms yesterday during my meals of Keto Chow laced with Dextrose. For comparison, here’s what my Cron-O-Meter looked like Thursday compared to Yesterday:
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I’m at 1707% of my net carbs, fantastic! =) It’ll be interesting to see what happens with my weight this week on carbs. The whole reason I’m doing this week of carbs is to put another nail in the coffin of CICO (the theory that all that matters for weight loss is the number of calories) since I’m getting 2000 calories a day (+/- 10) every day of the 6-week experiment. As of yesterday morning, I was officially down 20.7lbs over the course of the 5 week experiment. My guess is that I’m going to gain a significant amount of that 20lbs back over the next few days. I also got a chance to work on the presentation about the experiment:
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 38, my mouth hurts
One thing I forgot to mention in the video: The previous 5 weeks were a little hard to not eat the amazing keto food around me. These last 2 days I’ve started getting a nearly overwhelming compulsion to snack and eat all the things! This is new and quite unwelcome. Previously I was quite satisfied drinking my chow and done. Now I’m starting to get legitimately hungry and it’s happening all the time. It could be a function of “I’m eating sugar I could eat that handful of goldfish crackers” but I think it’s more of the sugar and my insulin sabotaging me.
My mouth is really starting to hurt. Dunno if it’s the sugar, the citric acid in the skittles, or the chewing – but inside my cheeks are pretty raw. I might need to start swallowing the skittles whole. I’m happy that I haven’t had any crazy headaches or digestive issues yet – sure it would make for a more interesting result but since I’m talking about my own comfort, I’m good with boring and just not feeling as peppy as normal with some minor bloating and flatulence thus far (oh, and my mouth hurts =).
My weight did go up a little this morning. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t gone up far more already. I know from personal experience that my body will pretty quickly replenish glycogen (the opposite of the “whoosh” people get when starting Keto) which adds water weight rather quickly. The awesome thing about keeping this experiment isocaloric and regimented is that I’m eating the exact same amount of calories as in the previous phase of the experiment so even if I wanted to “spike” my results by eating more I couldn’t, so the results will be undeniable.
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 39, new flavors
I’m down to my final few days of sugar and REALLY looking forward to getting back into keto. I decided that I’m going to make brisket and ribs for the Salt Lake and Utah Counties Keto meetup this Saturday, should be epic. My mouth isn’t hurting nearly as bad as it was and my gut is feeling better. I wonder if I messed it up so bad doing coconut oil that the carbs were a relief =)
I have the finished artwork done for Keto Chow 2.1. The packaging for the sample packages is being proofed right now and I should have the proofs for the week bags sometime tomorrow. I actually had requests in with 3 different printing places and ended up going with the one that’s a bit more expensive because they’re wicked fast compared to the other places. I announced the new flavors of Keto Chow 2.1 in the live stream I did on Friday but in case you missed it…
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 40!
So close… only 9 meals left! It’s getting harder and harder to only eat the food in my experiment. I thought I had some kind of superhuman ability to stay on track, turns out it was likely just the result of solid keto eating. Making dinner for everyone else and not eating any of it hasn’t been a problem and now it’s REALLY hard to not take a bite.
For kicks, I made a crono-o-meter “recipe” of what I’m eating this week – mostly so it would generate a nutrition label so I’d have something to show people that question what I’m eating this week. Here’s a comparison of that and when I’m doing heavy cream:
| Carb Week | Heavy Cream Week |
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Those that say “nay” will likely take issue with the amount of sugar and sodium in the carb week, but if you click on the image and pull up the full nutrition info and check out the vitamins and everything else you’ll see it’s nutritionally complete still.
