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.”
See also https://xkcd.com/1035/
Check Out “Carb Loaded” – available free on YouTube
Excellent documentary about a super skinny guy that was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. Does a great job at simply explaining many of the key points of a high fat, low carb diet. Here’s their “press release” description from their website:
It’s a classic image. An athlete bingeing on massive amounts of carbs before a race. It is believed that by consuming carbohydrates beforehand, an athlete is more likely to complete endurance events. Many people dress and talk like their sports heroes. They also EAT like them. While dressing and talking like your favorite athlete might not hurt you, many experts say carb-loading without the intent of strenuous physical activity can be destructive. This is just one aspect of our food culture to be addressed by Lathe Poland in his upcoming documentary, Carb-Loaded: A Culture Dying To Eat. Lathe, a slim build man in his mid 30’s, was diagnosed with Type2 diabetes in late 2010. “I wasn’t overweight. In fact I weigh the same now as I did back then. To be honest, I was completely blown away when my doctor gave me the diagnosis. Why would a seemingly healthy 30 something man like myself get a disease like this? My misconception like most people was that there were two scenarios where you get diabetes…Either it’s hereditary and it’s not your fault, or you eat junk food like it’s going out of style and end up diabetic.”
Lathe’s general practitioner wanted to start him on three different prescription medications, IMMEDIATELY. He recalls, “I guess what alarmed me was the ‘matter of fact’ rubber stamp approach. Is this the way it was for everyone? Feeling very discouraged, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be taking medication the rest of my life.” Not long after that, Lathe heard an NPR news segment about cases of diabetes and pre-diabetes skyrocketing. “I remember that was the tipping point for me,” he continues “for my own sanity, I needed to piece this puzzle together.” That journey began when Lathe spoke with his business partner, Eric Carlsen. Since 2004 the long time friends have run their own video production company. Lathe was interested in making a documentary, uncovering the reasons behind the shocking rise in diabetes over the last two decades. Eric though was a bit skeptical at first. “We have been producing video together for over eight years, so I have a lot of confidence in Lathe’s individual talent and our ability as a team. But the scope of what he was talking about was a bit overwhelming to say the least.” Buoyed by his friend’s enthusiasm, Eric finally agreed they could do it. The next obstacle that needed to be addressed was how to finance the film. “I had heard about filmmakers using crowd funding sites as an alternative to seeking financing from studios or private investors,” Lathe relates, “and I wondered if we could do the same.” Lathe and Eric decided they would use KickStarter.com to host their crowd funding project. However, as they continued their research they realized yet another challenge had to be met. Eric continues, “Crowd funding sites are a phenomenal tool, but they’re only effective if you attract a crowd. We knew we would have to build awareness and create an audience prior to launching our KickStarter campaign.”
As it turns out that audience would come from a multi-pronged approach. The two friends designed a website and set out to get experts to contribute content to the site. They also decided to make use of social media, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As content on the site grew, so did their fan base on Twitter and Facebook. At least once a month Eric and Lathe create an update video and post it to YouTube and their website, informing interested people how the pre-production work is progressing. The pair decided they would include their outtakes for each update at the end of the segment. Lathe explains, “We wanted people to be able to relate to us right away. By letting them have a behind the scenes peek at what we were doing, it seems to attract a lot of interest in the project. We get great feedback when we post our video updates.” The duo plans to launch their KickStarter campaign in March of 2013, with the goal of beginning full scale production by late this spring. If all goes well they hope to complete filming toward the end of 2013. “It’s a way to take a negative (having diabetes), and turn it into a positive,” Lathe observes. “The idea is not to just scare people, but to help them realize that they have a measure of control over their health and the health of their kids. It requires education, and we get to play a small role in that process…what’s not to like about that?”
Recommended reading for those starting Keto; Keto Chow at the construction site
To start off, I was listening to Episode 49 of the “2 Keto Dudes” podcast and they shared the content of a really good post on their Ketogenic Forums: “It’s Easy… Until It’s Not… And then it’s Easy Again.” If you’re starting out with Keto and the initial drive is flagging a bit, there’s some really good advice in there:
Going Keto, particularly if you’re not coming from a similar discipline like low-carb, or paleo, can have its challenges.
Those of us who’ve been doing it for a while can be pretty enthusiastic in our promotion of keto, which may at times make it seem easier than it really is.
Here’s the thing. Keto is easy, until it isn’t, and then it is again.
What do I mean by that?
Any time we start something new, particularly something that we perceive to be good for us, we’ve got a deeper reserve of willpower and enthusiasm that will carry us through the first phase of trying to build that habit. And, as it happens, keto has some seriously yummy and satisfying foods to sample, so between those two things, the first week or so of keto can feel like a breeze. Most people drop several pounds almost immediately as they burn off glycogen (and dump water), so there’s a short-term “win” feeling, too.
Then, things can get hard. Many people hit the dreaded “keto flu” when their bodies aren’t yet fully-adapted to making and burning ketones instead of glucose, yet they’ve drastically cut back their supply of glucose. This can include tiredness, dizziness, and generally feeling crappy. Most of these symptoms can be eased with some bone broth, or supplementing salt (salt water), etc., but it still stinks.
On top of that, if you don’t have a ready store of keto-friendly recipes, the meal plan can get a little boring. While it sounds wonderful to have bacon and eggs every morning, most of us enjoy some variety, too.
And at the same time that the keto flu hits, for many folks the weight loss stops, or slows significantly.
This is the point where many people get frustrated, and some quit, thinking that Keto doesn’t work.
DON’T DO THIS!!!
Once you get past this point, things start to get easier. When you have become fat-adapted, you will have more energy, and feel better, and probably far better than you did eating carbs.
And when you have been eating keto long enough for it to become a habit, something that is simply how you live, you won’t struggle with cravings (not as much, anyway), and you will be healing your body.
As has been observed in many threads already, each of us is slightly different. Younger folks, in general, will probably find it easier to lose weight more quickly on keto, while those of us who are a little more…seasoned…sometimes need to throw in intermittent fasting, or extended fasting, to get the fat mobilized.
At the end of the day…if you’re just getting started, be prepared for there to be challenges along the way. You may have some slip-ups where you indulge in carbs and end up regretting it. Or you may just be wishing that you didn’t have to eat defensively at restaurants, or read the labels on everything carefully to avoid hidden sugars. That stuff is a pain. But it’s worth it. Keep Calm, and Keto On, and you will be building a habit that promises good health, and a hopefully longer, healthier life.
It’s worth it.
He has some additional followup comments there in the post too. And if you’re getting started with Keto, I recommend listening to Episode 48 of the podcast “Starting Keto” – it’s good enough I have it linked in the “tips” section of the Keto Chow preparation Instructions.
My friend Steve has been doing Keto on and off, mostly to be supportive of his wife (he needs to lose weight like I need a hole in my leg – that was at his house BTW) but I think it’s also helping with his Gout. Gout is funny on Keto, it seems to either make it WAY worse (Steve’s initial experience) or it helps to alleviate the problem A LOT. Anyhow, he works construction and sent me a couple photos of Keto Chow on the construction job site
3 years of powdered food – from People Chow to Keto Chow
On January 13, 2014 I did the first post on my blog about trying nutritionally complete “future foods”. It corresponds to my first submission on Reddit (my reddit “cake day” is January 9, 2014 BTW). The Image up top is of my very first batch of powdered food, People Chow 2.3.0 at the time (I still have all 3 of those blender bottles, used the yellow one yesterday). It’s been an interesting journey. You can read some of my earlier “in review” posts if you want the full story:
- January 22nd, 2014: DIY soylent – Week 1
- February 18th, 2014: 1 month on DIY nutritionally complete “future foods”
- June 18th, 2014: My thoughts on (s)oylent – this one is interesting because it’s the first mention of a ketogenic diet
- June 19th, 2014: First order in the shopping cart: Rob P. ordered a week of People Chow.
- November 4th, 2014: The Nuclear Option: Ketogenic nutritionally complete “future foods”
- November 18th, 2014: 1 month in doing Ketosis – Time for an update
- December 23rd, 2014: 3 months of Keto – update
- January 1st, 2015: New ketogenic recipe in development, it’s moar betterer – first mention of Keto Chow recipe
- January 6th, 2015: A year in review – 365 days doing (mostly) nutritionally complete “future foods”
- January 29th, 2015: Changing stuff around here – added credit card payments and announced I was stopping selling People Chow
- April 21st, 2015: 6 months of Keto, I’m 81% the man I used to be
- October 20th, 2015: 1 Year of Keto, 77% the man I used to be
- September 21st, 2016: NMR Cholesterol Blood Test Results: I’m still alive (what a relief!) – 2.5 years of blood tests compared
3 years ago I weighed 260lbs (I’m 5′ 13″), my low point was at 200 in October 2015. I slacked off and did “lazy keto” without tracking my intake, just sticking to low-carb foods, and you can see that on my graph:
Recently I re-committed to getting back on track for realsies. It’s a bit pathetic: I know exactly what I need to do to lose weight – it’s rather simple so I should just do it, which I am. Since January 1, 2017, I haven’t eaten anything until after I logged it in Cron-O-Meter. Unsurprisingly, it’s working quite well. Guess I should have read my own stuff =) I was at a post-new year’s high of 223.7 and now I’m at 215 after a week and a half.
You can expect to see my weight graph more frequently now as it goes down further (and I’m less ashamed of the trend =). So there you have it: 3 years of blogging about “Engineered Staple Food” aka “soylent” – this post is number 371.
On track with my New Year Resolutions
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!
Keto, gamers, cheat codes, Keto Chow.
Gamers are a perfect fit for keto, and in particular: Keto Chow. They’re often playing for hours on end, eating junk, no time for cooking and need to get healthy. Well, keto is (in my view) the cheat code for losing weight. You’re cutting out sugar from your diet and completely switching around what your body uses for fuel (“burn fat, not sugar!”). If you’re familiar with Soylent, well Keto Chow is like that but specifically designed for losing weight via “nutritional ketosis”.
I consider myself a gamer… or at least I used to be back when I had more time and less kids. I still think Unreal Tournament 2004 is my favorite of all time, though Overwatch is pretty awesome. Keto has worked wonders for me (and others), brought me back from the brink of metabolic syndrome and eventual T2 diabetes. Rosa Labs (makers of Soylent) have been targeting gamers lately, I think Keto Chow is a better product, tastes better, and will lead to lasting health (and weight loss) that is hugely beneficial for anyone needing a change.
So here’s my invitation to gamers: head over to reddit.com/r/keto and check it out (start with the sidebar =) and if you decide you want to give keto a shot, grab some Keto Chow; it removes a lot of the guess-work that makes doing keto challenging – especially in the beginning. You’re getting all the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients you need: quick and easy.
Excellent, short, BBC documentary on low carb diets
Over the weekend, a link to an excellent documentary showed up on /r/keto. It’s really a good overview of a high fat, low carb diet with a decent amount of time spent showing how to do it effectively. They do an excellent job exploring the controversies too. I would absolutely recommend it for anyone wanting to know some of the quick details of keto (and it’ll be a good intro to the junk you’re going to hear from doctors and family when you start!). For those in the US: a “stone” is 14 lbs; for those elsewhere, it’s 6.35kg – they really like their archaic weight measurements!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F8qXxjdh-4
I read through some of the comments, one thing that jumped out was his GP (primary care physician) told him she can’t say how this affected his liver and kidneys. Yeah, they have blood tests for that. I’ve gotten them. She’s hard to take serious saying things like that. She also recommended he do it for only 3 weeks. Today is my 3rd Halloween where I will not be eating any candy since I started keto 3 years ago just before Halloween. Doing it indefinitely is awesome!
Others noted that it’s ironic that all of the doctors they interviewed who advocate the government dietary guidelines are overweight and some are obese. Especially the guy in charge of the obesity clinic, if he can’t lose weight on the accepted low fat diet, how can they expect people to take their stance seriously?
I also loved this comment:
“What we are concerned about is the lack of substantial long-term evidence for it’s ease of use…”
The “ease of use” argument always gets me. The only reason you could consider a LCHF diet harder to follow is because of how everyone else eats. If we never had to go to work events, family events, or parties where there’s nothing but carbs and everyone questions our diet, it wouldn’t be hard at all! But some of these doctors/dietitians in here are saying that’s a reason to question the inherent effectiveness of the diet. Makes no sense.
If the youtube link stops working, you can also get it from here.
“We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment”
So what occasioned this rant? A new article published over on Vice.com: “We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment“. The thought of a class action lawsuit against some company is tantalizing but are we also going to posthumously sue “Doctor”Ansel Keys and Senator George McGovern for their roles in all this? I’m going to move on and help as many people as I can. That’s why I make Keto Chow.
As a kid, one of the things I loved to eat more than anything was a bowl of melted cheese. Cut off a slab, microwave it and eat it with a fork. I didn’t do it very often.
Part of that was cheese was (and still is) rather expensive. The main reason was that I knew that it was full of fat and fat is bad for you. I would even microwave it a bit longer and drain off the oil that over-cooking the cheese would render out. Why did I know that fat was bad for you? The 1980 US Dietary Guidelines said so, my parents, my teachers, EVERYBODY said that it was bad. So it was. End of discussion, or so we though.
For almost 2 years now I have been living with new knowledge: that refined carbohydrates are the true cause of the obesity I’ve battled almost all of my life. Some people seem to handle sugar OK; I don’t. For these past two years, I’ve lived with a High Fat, Moderate Protein, Low Carbohydrate lifestyle. I’ve only “cheated” twice (January 2015 when I ate carbs before a weight loss competition, and I ate some breaded fish at a party in September 2015 and immediately regretted it). Knowing what I know about diet and nutrition now, and looking back at my life; I sometimes get angry. It passes when I think that at least my kids won’t have to deal with what I did, but I still get upset.
Along with the aforementioned cheese I also really, REALLY like bacon and sausage. Emphasis on the sausage. Before October 2014, eating sausage was an extremely guilty pleasure. Like when I hear Backstreet Boys and it reminds me of living in Chile back in 1997. When I cook sausage now it’s typically because we’re camping and I cook 2 pounds of it, plus another 3lbs or so of bacon and a couple dozen eggs. Granted: there are 8 of us, but the kids usually don’t have to ask “how many pieces can I have?” – they just get what they want. I didn’t put butter on anything before November 2014 because it was “bad”. When I think about sausage, sour cream, cream cheese, butter, guacamole and the other downright awesome fatty foods I didn’t use to eat: I get angry too.
When I think about Type 2 diabetes, which I thankfully did not develop before I started Keto, I’m filled with grief and a bit of rage.
I suspect everyone has someone they know, love, or respect DIE because of the effects of refined carbohydrates ravaging their bodies. Some people I’ve successfully helped transition to getting rid of sugar, flour, rice and other carbs and turning their lives around. Other people, I’ve tried to help but they didn’t want to make the change. They like bread too much, or candy, or pasta, or potatoes. I’ve never had bread that’s worth dying for (which is saying a lot, we grew up on homemade sourdough bread). Again, while I acknowledge that there are some people who can healthily have some refined carbohydrates, the level of sugar consumption we have attained in our diet is astounding. If Peter Attia can develop T2 diabetes doing Iron Man races, then do the rest of us have any hope?
Probably not unless we ignore the official dietary recommendations and do something else.
When I get an hour block I’m going to watch “Fixing Dad” about two UK film-makers who intervened in their father’s life when he was facing likely amputations due to his diabetes. There seems to be an over-emphasis on extreme exercise but the message about changing his diet looks promising.
Awesome user success post from Reddit today
Just saw this posted over on /r/keto, thought you’d all enjoy seeing it (make sure you check out the photo gallery). 350 to 225lbs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/4vz0ew/svpic_update_down_125lbs_today/
Found an awesome Keto blog – especially relevant for “the ladies”
OK, so I was kicking around /r/keto and found this post which linked over to this recipe over on ketokarma.com
Seriously good stuff and inspiring! She has a wealth of great information, recipes, and video updates. If you’re looking into starting Keto, wanting some more info, motivation to keep going, or whatever – check it out!
