Day 5

I felt a lot better yesterday. My energy level is coming up and the queasiness I was feeling after eating is subsiding. I am actually feeling pretty confident about continuing to eat this way. Unfortunately, K is still not adapted. Hopefully it will happen soon.

I got the bikes out of storage last night and got them cleaned up. I went out and rode around a little and felt good doing it. I was surprised that it was as easy as it was. Maybe it was all the walking I did recently in Las Vegas but I didn't feel terribly out of shape.

Yesterday, I first got hungry about 8:30 AM, which is earlier than usual. The first thing I did was try a couple of bites of the pemmican we made over the weekend. Unfortunately it appears that we either scorched the tallow when we rendered it or burnt one of the cracklins because it had a burnt taste to it. It wasn't very good, especially at first. As I chewed it, the meat flavor came out and it was a lot better. I think I am going to order some tallow from US Wellness Meats and try again. I am counting on pemmican to be my travel meals.

After the pemmican, I had two cheeseburger patties. Apparently even two bites of pemmican is filling because I filled up really fast on the burgers and didn't get hungry again until about 5 PM. I drank a cup of tea with a splash of cream right after the burgers and could barely get it down because I was so full.

I was a bit worried about dinner. We had a lot of left over ham and K wanted to make ham skillet. You take the ham, dice it up and brown it in butter with some onion. You then add mushroms and cook on low until the mushrooms are cooked. You then make a sauce with sour cream and more butter. It is very low carb (unless you put it over rice, like we used to do) but not zero carb, since the sour cream, ham, mushrooms and onions all have carbs.

I had a healthy scoop but it tasted really sweet to me. I ended up having another cheeseburger patty to top myself off instead of more ham skillet.

I was worried that the carbs and salt from the ham would bloat me up this morning but I was down another pound, to 192.4. That is a total loss of 7.4 pounds this week. That puts me at a lower weight than I got to a month ago when I went meat only for a week.

The difference between now and then is striking. I was struggling pretty bad then. Part of the problem was impending birthdays and vacations, so I couldn't get into it from the mindset of being in it for the long haul. However, I also was eating a lot of pork and I just don't think I was getting enough fat. I have had the ham this time but I have also been doing a lot of beef. I know that most zero carbers don't do dairy but I think the cream in my tea and the slice of cheddar now and then have really helped keep my hunger in check and to help me get enough fat that I'm not craving stuff in between meals. I think that is a bit of K's problem this time. She hasn't wanted to eat and doesn't eat a lot of fat so it has set up cravings and has delayed getting adapted to this way of eating.

Day 4

I am starting to feel better and get more energy. I am also having no issues with cravings now and feel like I can do this for a long time. K is still dragging and craving carbs. I hope she gets through it soon or she'll probably give it up.

I was super hungry yesterday for some reason. I still only ate twice but I ate a lot each time.

The first time was about 11 AM. I actually got hungry earlier than that but was too busy at work to make anything. I had the rest of my chuck-eye steak, three hard boiled eggs smashed up and mixed with mustard and three sausage patties (made from just pork, salt and spices, so zero carb).

For dinner, I grilled up a bunch of burgers. I had three burgers with cheese and two hot dogs. The hot dogs each had two carbs so weren't ZC but my total for the day was only five or six grams, so I'm fine with that.

I was down 1.4 pounds this morning to 193.4 lbs. That's a total loss of 6.4 lbs this week.

Day 3

I was really dragging again yesterday. I just had no energy but thankfully none of the other problems with induction flu. I started to feel a little better last night but it is too early to know if I've busted through yet. One problem I had during the week where I ate this way a month ago was that I had trouble sleeping and it has cropped back up. I actually have no trouble falling asleep, which is unusual for me, but I also wake up several times a night and have trouble falling back asleep. I have always had a problem with the waking up during the night thing but usually drop right back to sleep. Hopefully this passes soon too.

K is feeling like death warmed over. We may have to bump her carbs up a bit or she probably won't stick with this. Since she isn't insulin resistant (that we can tell) or overweight, she should be okay with 50 grams or so a day. That is still pretty low, just not zero carb.

I took the leftover chuck-eye steak for lunch yesterday but didn't get hungry until about 11 AM, probably because I had several cups of tea with a little heavy cream earlier. I could only eat about half of the steak before getting a little queasy. I took that as being full.

I was hungry for dinner, which was scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. K wasn't very hungry, so I finished her eggs and probably had about five eggs total, with ham mixed in and a little shredded cheese sprinkled on top. I still wasn't full after that and had a slice of cheese because it was the only thing convenient.

One thing about this way of eating is that it is critical to have meat handy. You can't just throw back a handful of nuts or eat an orange or something if you are still hungry after a meal. This part of what we are doing is still a work in progress. I am hoping that the pemmican we have been making turns out as that would be a handy way to fill out a meal or to have something on hand while traveling.

I was down .6 pounds this morning, to 194.8, for a total loss of 4.8 pounds.

Day 2

I had felt yesterday that I might be heading into the induction flu period, but it never fully materialized. I had a low grade headache all day and was feeling rather beat all afternoon. I also had that dry mouth that always seems to come when first going into ketosis. It never went into feeling full blown terrible, though.

I got hungry fairly early and had a rib-eye. I next got hungry around 3:30 but I decided to "save" that one until dinner.

Since it was Easter, I decided to allow myself a little latitude and had ham, deviled eggs and half of a dill pickle. The pickle had no added sugar and was essentially zero carbs if you don't count fiber and 1 gram if you do. The ham had a little sugar from the curing process. K makes deviled eggs heavy on the mustard and very light on the mayo but there was a slight amount of sugar in the mayo plus the carbs in the eggs. I estimate that I had about 10 - 15 grams, which is more than I want but still very low. It was a very enjoyable dinner.

I expected a big bounce back up after the big water whoosh yesterday. Between the salt from the ham and the carbs, I thought that I would probably temporarily regain some of that water. However, I was only up .4 pounds, to 195.4. I also weighed at 4:30 AM. Yesterday, I weighed at around 9:30 AM, so it's possible that over a 24 hour period, it's actually a wash. We have a lot of ham left, so I will be working on that some this week which will probably slow things down due to the carbs and the salt.

I did want to make a comment about the purpose of this blog. I am writing this to primarily share my experiences. I am also posting things that I think are cool or strike me the right way. However, I am not trying to rigorously prove anything or debate lifestyle choices and am not going to hunt up studies to back up everything that I post. A really good blog for that can be found is the Zeroing In On Health blog. Charles, the author, does a nice job of thoroughly writing about various health issues and referencing the studies to back it up.

Day 1

First day was uneventful. I didn't get hungry until about 2 PM at which point I had a chuck-eye steak. The chuck-eye is an interesting cut. I wasn't even aware of it until recently. I had ignored "chuck steaks" because they are generally gristly and tough. However, the chuck-eye is a different cut and is kind of a poor man's ribeye. The fat is a little different but it is definitely a tasty cut and much cheaper than rib-eyes.

The store here is having a sale on rib-eye roasts for $3.98/pound. We bought two huge roasts and had the meat department slice them 1/2" thick. Dinner was supposed to be one of the ribeye's but I wasn't real hungry by then. However, my son J didn't want very much of his so I had the other half.

Something strange happened after that, though. Even though I hadn't been very hungry, the half of the steak wasn't enough to satisfy me. I felt a bit of gnawing in my stomach so ended up slicing off a bit of cheddar cheese. I hadn't intended on eating a lot of dairy but it did the trick.

Whatever I did worked though, because I was down 4.6 pounds this morning, from 199.6 to 195.0. I had mentioned yesterday that I was bloated from gluten and carbs, so it isn't surprising to see a big bunch of water gone but I wasn't expecting that much. If the weight holds up, it puts me in the middle of my week of meat only in mid-March and means I didn't gain anything but water over vacation.

I think induction flu is starting to kick in as I am starting to get a headache. Hopefully it only lasts a day like last time. Also, K is a bit dejected that she picked Easter as the day to start. She was looking rather longingly at the Easter candy as she filled the boys' Easter baskets this morning (bad of us, I know, but it is rationed and tends to last a long time).

I took her beginning stats and pictures this morning but she won't let me post them. For her, this is about health anyway, so they are really just for posterity. It is very possible to be thin and still insulin resistant. Her blood sugar tends to be a little high, which isn't a good thing and can eventually lead to heart disease and cancer (particularly breast cancer, which runs in her family), so it is important for her to get that under control.

Beginning....again

Here are my beginning stats and my pictures. I'll be updating them when needed.

Stats:

Weight	199.6 lbs
Bodyfat	21%
Neck	17"
Chest	42.3"
Waist	37.8"
Stomach In	37"
Stomach Out	40.75"
Hips	40.5"
Right Bicep	13.1"
Right Thigh	19.5"

I measure in cm and then use the spreadsheet that I track the numbers with to convert to inches.

My beginning pics are here:



"Flexed", to show the lack of proper muscle tone:



I am not sure how "real" those numbers are. I am still bloated from the gluten exposure I got a week ago and I think I am still holding a lot of water from the carbs I ate on vacation. It should help lead to some impressive initial weight loss (hopefully).

K is still going to do this with me but is starting tomorrow. She had some goodies that she wanted to finish but fell asleep last night before she could get to them.

Reboot

I haven't posted in a while because I have been floundering around. I successfully maintained through the holidays and then promptly fell off of the wagon January and February and pretty much regained all of the weight I had lost.

I began having more stomach problems during this time and decided that I needed to focus on health rather than just simply try to lose weight. It seemed that I was having problems with nuts and legumes. I started to study lectins, which are a specific kind of protein found in almost all foods. There are a handful that many people have autoimmune problems with, gluten being one. Since I had a problem with one of them for sure, it made sense that I might have sensitivities to others. I decided to try an elimination diet to try to pinpoint the problem.

The idea is to eat only meat for a period of time, since that is the safest food, lectin-wise. I would do that for a week and then add in one food group - dairy, for example. I would see if it caused any problems and then go back to meat only for another week and try something like eggs.

I tried it for a week in mid-March and felt great that week, after a day of induction flu. I ended up going off of it at the end of the week because of J's birthday, our anniversary and the fact we were going on vacation for a couple of weeks, which would have made it extremely difficult to keep it up.

During the time I was looking into this, I came across the concept of zero carb (ZC) eating. The idea is to keep carbs as close to zero as possible to correct the insulin levels in the body. High insulin traps the fat in your body and can cause a host of problems, including heart disease, Alzheimer's and possibly cancer.

I had always thought that fat on the body was just bags of unused fuel. It turns out that fat actually circulates through the body and is metabolically active. An analogy that I saw on a ZC forum was that fat in the body was like a series of interconnected pools. When you ate something, it was broken down and triglycerides are formed. These circulate through the blood stream and are used as immediate fuel for cells in the body. Any excess is moved into the circulating pools to be used as fuel during fasting periods (times between meals).

In someone with normal insulin levels, triglycerides are drawn back out at the end of the series of pools when the cells need more fuel. However, high insulin levels will put fat in but resist pulling it back out. In effect, it clogs the drain, causing the pools to back up (putting visible fat on the body). Since the drains are clogged, fuel can't get back out and the cells signal that they are starving. This triggers the metabolism to slow down and also triggers hunger to increase, driving the person to want to eat more. If that meal is again high carb, it maintains the vicious cycle of high insulin literally starving the cells while the body carries excess fat.

Since someone with chronically high insulin levels will quickly become insulin resistant, it is often necessary to bring carb intake to a minimum to fix the problem (it is unclear if it can actually ever be cured, but it is possible to bypass the problem with ZC). Going ZC starts unclogging those drains and allowing the fat to be drawn back out as it would be normally.

My dieting pattern has shown an increase in insulin resistance (IR). Weigh Down worked for over four years but because of the carby food I was eating, slowly stopped working and I found it increasingly difficult to stop eating when full. Next, a low carb version of Weigh Down worked really well but failed quicker because my carbs were apparently still too high. Then my attempt last year at low carb Weigh Down combined with intermittent fasting failed even quicker.

So now my attempt at fixing this and stopping the yo-yoing is to do near ZC. I am going to do this for at least 90 days and see how it goes. I plan on eating mainly meat with a small amount of eggs and dairy. I found that dairy was a good way to overeat so it will mostly be limited to butter and a small amount of heavy cream in my tea. Since even sweet tastes can trigger an insulin response, I will wean off of my Diet Pepsi habit and keep Splenda to a minimum.

Most ZC-ers don't take supplements but I am going to continue mine for now. They have been keeping me healthy for several years (no colds or flus in that time). I will also eat two or three Brazil nuts every day. One nut only contains one tenth of a gram of usable carbs, so a couple of them are still very low. Brazil nuts are an extremely good source of selenium, which is severely lacking in our food supply. I just feel like it is important to get it and it keeps my immune system humming.

This all starts tomorrow. My wife, K, is planning on doing it with me, though she will probably be closer to induction levels of 20 grams or less, with the addition of some low carb veggies. She is doing it more to improve her health than to lose weight (she doesn't need to lose anything).

We will eat meals only when physically hungry and eat as much as we want at that point. I won't try to restrict how much I am eating and will leave it up to what my body tells me.

I'll get starting weight and measurements tomorrow. After that, I plan on posting my menus and thoughts on the process.