Keto Chow has been added to the Cron-O-Meter Database, KC 2.0 update
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Keto Chow has been added to the Cron-O-Meter Database, KC 2.0 update

Keto Chow

Keto Chow has been added to the Cron-O-Meter Database, KC 2.0 update

This entry is part 80 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

I like Cron-O-Meter. I think it works better than MyFitnessPal and has some really cool features designed specifically for doing Keto. You can read how to use Cron-O-Meter to track your net carbs in this post from January 2017. That post used to have links to files you could import into Cron-o-Meter database so you wouldn’t need to enter all the info from the label into a custom food. Dunno what alerted them but a few days ago I received an email through my site’s contact form – it was one of the guys from Cron-O-Meter saying I should publish my custom entries to the database so people wouldn’t have to import the files anymore. Well, yeah but I did that months ago and didn’t see anything happen, but I decided to give it a go, expecting things might move this time! Indeed they did. You can now find in the Cron-O-Meter database all of the different flavors for Keto Chow 1.9 and 2.0, plus the fish pills and the Base Powder. If you have an account, try it out! You can search for Keto Chow by name, or if you have the mobile app, you can use the barcode scanner because I got those in there too!

I’m super excited about this. It’ll make tracking easier for me and for the general public (mostly I’m excited for myself because I’m lazy =)

Now the question comes up: “When is Keto Chow 2.0 going to be ready?!” Better be soon, I just finished my test bags of 2.0 yesterday and I want more! We farmed out 4 of the bags we got in the first test batch to some of our employees and all of them really liked it. Of the 63 meals worth I was sharing with my awesome wife, I probably consumed 40-45 of them – enough that I am completely confident in Keto Chow 2.0. Anyway, I just talked to the manufacturer, he says the protein supplier “confirmed they have the Purchase Order” which doesn’t mean much. He says he’s going to try to get better info from the supplier today if he can. He did say they’ll be starting on the Base Powder early next week though.

By Chris|2017-03-21T14:48:45-06:00March 21st, 2017|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: nutrition, ketochow2.0, cron-o-meter, Keto Chow|0 Comments

“Low Carb Show” Podcast Interview, Keto Chow 2.0 update
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“Low Carb Show” Podcast Interview, Keto Chow 2.0 update

Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

“Low Carb Show” Podcast Interview, Keto Chow 2.0 update

This entry is part 76 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

Mark from the Low-Carb Show, contacted me a few weeks ago to see if I would like to do an interview for his podcast and the recording has just been posted. His wife sent him down the rabbit hole of Ketogenic Meal Replacement drinks and he found Keto Chow, ordered some, and enjoyed it enough to get me on his podcast to talk about Keto Chow, the progress of Keto Chow 2.0, Domain Squatters, Mac&Cheese, and a bunch of other stuff! I reference a post about Arches National Park in the podcast, I’ll save you the hassle of finding it: “Vacationing for a week (mostly) on DIY soylent” (you can see more of my Dad’s stuff here) – this is from about a month before I started doing Keto and was still doing “People Chow” which was primarily corn masa.

I keep telling my teenagers I’m “Internet Famous” – they still just roll their eyes.

It’s about time for an update on Keto Chow 2.0, wouldn’t you agree? This week we finally tackled the funny aftertaste problem for realsies. The Whey Protein Isolate we started experimenting with significantly reduced the bad flavor (so it was essentially non-existent)… for a few hours. If you tasted the mix anywhere from 30 minutes to 3-4 hours after mixing it would taste fine. For many people, this would be sufficient, but I like to mix up 3-4 days worth at a time so I can just grab them out of the fridge. I’ve said it before: I’m not going to sell a product I wouldn’t use (and enjoy using!), I’m pretty much my worst customer =). The time delay aspect was particularly vexing and pointed to some sort of ingredient interaction causing the issue. I got samples of each ingredient, mixed them up in water, both alone and in certain combinations. Straight potassium citrate isn’t particularly nice tasting.

Anyhow, the Isolate all by itself did not have any weird flavor, nothing really did… until I tasted the Enzyme Blend + Whey Protein combination. I discovered the flavor anomaly! The enzyme blend alone was fine, the breakdown of the lactose in the whey by the enzymes was most decidedly the problem and it got worse over 2 days. On Thursday we had new samples made that omitted the enzyme blend. I’m super happy to report that all of the flavors now taste exactly the way they’re supposed to, and with the “200 mesh” xanthan gum you can mix it without a blender and get good results – everything is coming up Milhouse! At least in KC 2.0.0 there isn’t going to be an enzyme blend. For most this won’t be an issue, but if you’re lactose intolerant you will want to consider using Lactaid or another enzyme blend. There are 0.58g of lactose in each serving of Keto Chow 2.0 thanks to the Whey Protein Isolate being super low in carbs. Adding 1/2 cup of heavy cream brings the lactose up to 3.31g.

This coming week we’ll make some bigger sample batches so I can start doing more extensive short-to-medium term tests as we gear up for full-on production; which I now expect to be starting (maybe) March 6 or later, not sure which flavors we’ll be doing first. The plan is that they’ll be mixing up all of the ingredients except the color and flavor in their giant mixer to make a base powder, then they can do smaller batches for the individual flavors. Anyhow, I’m super excited about the prospects of getting this going!

On a final note, this week I added a “Recipes and Flavor Hacks” page, check it out.

By Chris|2017-02-25T10:49:43-07:00February 25th, 2017|Categories: Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: Keto Chow, flavors, nutrition, ketochow2.0, Whey Protein Isolate, experience, recipe|3 Comments

Soda Sugar Comparisons by XKCD
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Soda Sugar Comparisons by XKCD

Weight Loss, Ketogenic Diet

Soda Sugar Comparisons by XKCD

Saw this on XKCD, mouse-over says “The key is portion control, which is why I’ve switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.”

21 days progress with strict Keto: Awesome Sauce! (also 2 years since my last “cheat” meal)
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21 days progress with strict Keto: Awesome Sauce! (also 2 years since my last “cheat” meal)

Weight Loss, Weight Lifting, Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

21 days progress with strict Keto: Awesome Sauce! (also 2 years since my last “cheat” meal)

This entry is part 74 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

As mentioned earlier, starting January 1, 2017, I committed to writing down everything I eat in Cron-o-meter before I eat it. Turns out this works quite well, which I already knew but somehow was ignoring and doing “lazy keto” for the last few months by only eating Keto Friendly food but not really tracking food closely. Yes, Jalapeño poppers are, generally, keto friendly – but if you eat 20 of them you’re going to go over your net carbs for the day. Anyhow, I’m doing great and still writing everything down. I’m also still lifting – today I’ll be squatting 90lbs, it’s starting to get harder =) A couple days ago I failed to notice it was the 2 year anniversary of the last time I had a “cheat” meal on January 21, 2015. Since then, I’ve only deliberately eaten non-keto food once: a bite of breaded fish in September 2015, spat it out. I expect that I’ll be living HFLC for the rest of my life, sounds fun.

“Cheating” on Keto is self-sabotage. Imagine you’re trying to climb a giant sand dune. It’s really hard to get up to the top (and you get sand in your shoes, guaranteed) but once you’re there, staying on the top is easy. It’s especially easy compared to the amount of effort required to get back on top if you decide to roll down to the bottom. Being fat adapted is very similar to this: you’ve worked so hard to get your body burning fat instead of glucose, why would you ruin months of work? My advice: embrace living keto, focus on the awesome foods you can enjoy, not the foods you choose not to eat (not “can’t eat”).

Here’s an updated weight log of my progress:

Calories consumed per day (I had a tummy ache on Jan 15, ended up fasting a bit over 2h hours):

Net carbs per day:

By Chris|2017-03-20T12:19:23-06:00January 23rd, 2017|Categories: Weight Loss, Weight Lifting, Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: nutrition, weight lifting, experience, results, ketogenic, Keto Chow, Withings|0 Comments

Recommended reading for those starting Keto; Keto Chow at the construction site
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Recommended reading for those starting Keto; Keto Chow at the construction site

Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

On track with my New Year Resolutions

This entry is part 71 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

I have two health-related resolutions this year:

Strength training 3x a week (StrongLifts 5×5).
I’m not eating anything until it’s ALREADY logged into Cron-O-Meter.

So far, so good, on StrongLifts 5×5. I did it 3x last week (which is the recommendation for the program): Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday because Friday was a crazy evening. I did StrongLifts regularly last year but we remodeled some bedrooms in the basement and the workout area was turned into a bedroom with the power rack cage becoming a closet. That’s all done, as well as the Christmas mayhem so it’s time to get back into lifting! These first few weeks are relatively easy since the SL5x5 app had me “deload” all the way back down to starting weight. I see that as a good thing since even squatting an empty bar that first time made me sore for 4 days. There’s an excellent article over on Art of Manliness about various fitness programs – he didn’t like StrongLifts as much as he likes Starting Strength due to the number of reps. I might check that one out at a later date if I hit a wall. SS has an app but it’s $9 and I doubt it has the amazing Android Wear integration SL5x5 has. It’s seriously awesome to track my workout entirely on my watch.

As for tracking my food in Cron-O-Meter, I did this 100% all last week, I have a perfect record for 2017 =). Writing down what I eat before I eat it has an interesting effect on reducing what I’m eating. Either I decide not to eat something because I’m too lazy to write it down; or I write it down, check to see how the addition affects my macros and decide “yeah, not going to eat that after all.”

Due to the aforementioned laziness, all but one of my meals last week were Keto Chow. It’s pretty easy to enter 3x “Rich Chocolate with 50ml heavy cream and MCT” from the list of frequent foods. Saturday evening we needed to drop off some kids for a thing and then hang around for 2 hours until they finished, so we took the remaining children to dinner at Red Robin. I knew this was coming so I messed around with their nutrition calculator page (requires flash) and decided on the Guacamole Bacon Burger. I added the standard one in Cron-o-Meter, then edited a copy to change the values for carbs, fat, protein etc… I haven’t tried to do that on mobile, doing it in a web browser with multiple windows open was quite simple. Red Robin is pretty proud of the fact that they can make any burger “wedgie style” (lettuce wrap), and you can do bottomless steamed broccoli or side salads instead of the fries. I opted for the salads, ended up getting 3 of them by the time I was done =) You can see the spike in calories consumed:

Anyhow, looking at the averages for the last week, I’m quite happy with the 18.9g net carb average. I could probably go higher than 20g/day but I’m going to keep it low.

In the end, one of the big ones is: how is this affecting my weight? I’m happy to report that: Hey! I’m losing weight again! That big spike (banana for scale) in the graph below was the morning of Sunday, January 1 2017.

We had a New Year game party with our friends (who are also doing keto) and our kids (not doing keto). We made individual “fathead” (keto) pizzas for us and regular dough pizzas for the kids. I ended up eating a lot of salt and it clearly shows that following morning in water weight. I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t keto friendly that night but you eat too much keto food and you’ll be over your macros easily. I also noticed that my weight doesn’t fluctuate as much when I’m mostly eating Keto Chow and the mild heartburn I had in the morning since mid-December is gone.

So, here’s to a successful new year for everyone! May the odds ever be in your favor!

By Chris|2017-01-09T09:06:59-07:00January 9th, 2017|Categories: Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow, Weight Loss, Weight Lifting|Tags: Weight loss, Keto Chow, Withings, nutrition, User Experiences, weight lifting, experience, cron-o-meter|2 Comments

Tracking Net Carbs and more using Cron-O-Meter
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Tracking Net Carbs and more using Cron-O-Meter

Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

Tracking Net Carbs and more using Cron-O-Meter

This entry is part 69 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

One of my main New Year resolutions is not to eat anything until AFTER I have it entered into a tracking app. In the past I’ve used MyFitnessPal (hereafter referred to as MFP) – it works fine, has pretty good social sharing so friends can see what you want them to see; and they have a massive user-contributed database of foods. The website and app are free (though they hit you up pretty hard to buy the premium membership). It’s kinda like the wild west so far as their food database is concerned, though: anybody can add any food with any information. If you look in MFP for “Keto Chow” you’ll find several dozen entries, some that I made =) MFP does have some serious shortcomings though. First and largest is that user-contributed database, it has a lot of good stuff in there but it also has a lot of junk: entries with incorrect or incomplete information, duplicates, and more, including linking barcodes to incorrect products. Sure there’s an entry for food X, but you have to verify the information – it’s about the same as entering it yourself anyway, advantage lost. MFP also doesn’t know how to track net carbs, only total carbohydrates (including fiber). There is a Chrome browser script that you can use to add net carbs to MFP but it doesn’t work with mobile and is a bit of a hack.

By comparison, there’s Cron-O-Meter (hereafter referred to as CM) – free via browser, paid as an app with barcode scanning. The biggest difference with CM is the food database is curated – it only has validated, correct entries. It also has a lot more detailed information. You can add your own foods and recipes that combine foods together – if you buy the “gold” membership you can share foods and recipes with friends. CM also added a Ketogenic Diet mode back in March 2016 (I even posted to /r/keto about it =) – it’ll help you track net carbs and other nutrients. Set your macronutrient targets and go! I recommend CM over MFP for these two features alone. The problem becomes: How do you get custom foods into CM? ~~I have the process for getting Keto Chow officially added to the database going but that could take years! The solution is to add it yourself with some handy information I’ll give you.~~

To start off, you’re going to want to add an entry for just the 50g of Keto Chow powder. You can refer to the entry I created for Keto Chow 1.9 Rich Chocolate. If you add new food, there’s a gear icon on the far right that you can import a JSON file with the nutritional information so you don’t have to type it all.

UPDATE: The developer of Cron-O-Meter contacted me and said I should just submit all the flavors for publication in the general database. I had previously tried that but nothing ever happened. About 15 minutes after I submitted them they were approved and ready to use. So you can now simply search for “Keto Chow” in Cron-o-Meter! END UPDATE.

I was excited to find an entry already in CM for “Darigold, Whipping Cream, Heavy Classic 40%” which is the stuff I get from Costco in 2-quart packages. BUT the entry was missing a key element: the 0.48g of carbs per serving I know are in there. The solution was to find the USDA entry for “Cream, fluid, heavy whipping” and edit a copy with the specific values on the Darigold label (since the Darigold has more calories and fat at 40% fat instead of the standard 36%) see here for the complete entry I created.

OK, so you have an entry for the powder and the heavy cream. You can enter the powder and cream separately every day (tedious) or you can bundle the heavy cream into a “recipe” with the powder. I created a recipe that includes the powder, heavy cream and MCT oil (since I use MCT oil, I’ve been at this 2 years =) – you can check it out here. Now every time I want to add Rich Chocolate Keto Chow the way I like to mix it up, I just add 1 full recipe of “Keto Chow 1.9 Rich Chocolate plus 50ml heavy cream and MCT”. What about Chocolate Peanut Butter? Since it’s my #1 favorite flavor of all time you gotta know I have a recipe for that too! I made a custom food entry for “Peanut Flour Light Roast 28%“. I cloned the Rich Chocolate recipe and added 10g of the peanut flour to give me “Keto Chow 1.9 Peanut Butter plus 50ml heavy cream and MCT“. In case you’re curious, here are the entries for KC2.0 Chocolate+heavy cream and MCT and the corresponding KC2.0 Chocolate Peanut Butter. Finally, make sure you are getting your Ω-3 fatty acids – here’s an entry for the new Keto Chow Fish Oil pills .

One thing to note about CM: If you edit a food entry you created, the change will propagate back to previous days. This is handy for fixing an error you discovered but sucks for revisions. The solution is to edit a copy of the food, then “retire” the outdated one. The existing entries will remain unchanged and the old food will not show up as a suggested entry when you add food to your diary.

Here are my entries for yesterday (January 2, 2017):

The target values were derived from the Keto Macro Calculator coupled with some details I got from my DEXA scan last year.

By Chris|2020-05-21T13:50:10-06:00January 3rd, 2017|Categories: Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: ketogenic, myfitnesspal, Keto Chow, flavors, nutrition, ketochow2.0, cron-o-meter, experience|6 Comments

Finalized nutrition and ingredients for Keto Chow 2.0 (which might be here before the New Year)

This entry is part 68 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

Previously I reported finalizing the ingredients for Keto Chow 2.0… and then I decided to add potassium. Well, now it’s not only finalized for reals this time, I have the nutrition information available. Head on over to https://old.ketochow.xyz/nutrition/ and you can get a glimpse into the future!

The impetus for doing this now was needing the labels for the Keto Chow 2.0 packaging. I’m hoping I’ll have that over at the printer early next week.

By Chris|2016-11-10T11:55:59-07:00November 10th, 2016|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: recipe, Keto Chow, nutrition, ketochow2.0|0 Comments

Today I learned: A bunch of FDA labeling requirements stuff
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Today I learned: A bunch of FDA labeling requirements stuff

Keto Chow

Today I learned: A bunch of FDA labeling requirements stuff

Well, that was a fun rabbit hole! I have been working on the labeling for the individual meal (aka “Sample”) packages of Keto Chow and also started making up the label for the larger week packages. As part of that, I needed to come up with a nutrition information panel for both. I figure if I’m going to make packaging, I might as well make it the right way according to FDA guidelines from the outset. So I started kicking around the FDA site and discovered there’s a revision of the labeling rolling out. Technically, Keto Chow wouldn’t need to use the new standard until July 2018 but there’s no problem being early.

Anyhow, I got to learn about the values to use for calculating DRV and RDI, panel display and size requirements, and more! I also learned that the vitamin and mineral recommendations have changed as well, most are minor changes. Fortunately for me: when I spec’d my vitamin/mineral pre-mix, I was using data even more current that the FDA requirements (optimal values vs. minimum) and Keto Chow 2.0 is getting over 100% on all of them according to the new standard… except Potassium. The Recommended intake used to be 3500mg/day and now it’s 4700. It easily met the old requirement but not the new one. So I’m looking into adding some additional Potassium. I don’t want the change to affect the taste at all so I’m going to test out a couple different sources. The easiest is Potassium Chloride (“Low sodium salt”) or just more Potassium Citrate, I’m also going to give Potassium Gluconate a try. Looks like my earlier assertion was a bit pre-mature =)

By Chris|2016-11-02T10:43:29-06:00November 2nd, 2016|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: nutrition, ketochow2.0, Keto Chow, science|1 Comment

Heavy Cream Powder, still not really suitable for Ketosis
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Heavy Cream Powder, still not really suitable for Ketosis

Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

Heavy Cream Powder, still not really suitable for Ketosis

This entry is part 67 of 131 in the series Ketogenic Diet

UPDATE: I have more complete information available now, check it out!

So this is something that has been asked a lot: is there a powdered cream that can be used with Keto Chow? People would like it for the convenience factor of being able to just add water. I explored this earlier with a different product – and I’m drawing the same conclusion on this one: not suitable (in my opinion).

The product in question is “Anthony’s Heavy Cream Powder” – it’s available on Amazon for $12.99 a lb. The Nutrition label shows 0g of carbs per 4g serving because anything under 0.5 gets rounded down to 0. I contacted the manufacturer and was able to get a more accurate number: 0.48g per 4g serving. I put that into my recipe calculator and came up with this handy comparison showing the powdered form vs what it would cost to get heavy cream by the quart from Wal-Mart:

calories/day	form	amount	cost	carbs from cream	final net carbs
1300 calories	powder	109g	$3.12	13.1	19.4
1800 calories	powder	176g	$5.04	21.1	27.4
2000 calories	powder	203g	$5.81	24.4	30.7
1300 calories	liquid	238ml	$1.42	6.6	12.9
1800 calories	liquid	383ml	$2.28	10.7	17
2000 calories	liquid	441ml	$2.63	12.3	18.6

So, if you use the powder, you are going to have a really hard time staying in ketosis unless that’s all you’re eating all day since it has 2x the net carbs as the liquid version. You’re also going to be paying a lot for the convenience, about twice as much. Don’t get me wrong: it is possible to use this for the primary calorie and fat source of Keto Chow and thereby have a powder that just needs water (and refrigeration); it’s just not very practical.

By Chris|2020-04-15T16:49:37-06:00November 1st, 2016|Categories: Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: recipe, ketogenic, Keto Chow, nutrition|3 Comments