Kitteh Fasts

So much to update, so little time.

Kitteh is not yet skinneh. (This cannot be a surprise, Dear Reader). Kitteh’s research has taken her to ketogenic diets and from there a short leap to intermittent fasting and the fine work of Dr. Jason Fung and Megan Ramos at the Intensive Dietary Management in Toronto.

More on all of that eventually. For now, let’s just say that this week, I started my first six week round of 2 fasts of 42+ hours each – I fasted from Sunday night to Tuesday dinner and then started again last night (Wednesday night) and will fast until tomorrow (Friday) dinner. On the other days, I am keeping to two 90-min eating windows and a ketogenic diet. So my week looks like this:

Sunday – fast until lunch, eat lunch and dinner. Begin fast.
Monday – fast
Tuesday – fast until dinner. Eat dinner.
Wednesday – fast until lunch, eat lunch and dinner. Begin fast.
Thursday – fast
Friday – fast until dinner. Eat dinner.
Saturday – fast until lunch, eat lunch and dinner.

For my first cycle of this, at the end of the first day (in the morning of the second) I lost 2 lbs. The second day, I lost another another 2 lbs and I FINALLY had blood ketones in the nutritional ketosis range, if barely, at .6/mmol. (I’m not testing as often as I would like, because those strips are pricey!).

After eating “normally” (as per above) on Wednesday, my ketones were still at .6 after dinner and (fascinating to me) I had gained back only .2 on the scale, which I am sure was the actual food.

I’ll check in after the full cycle with more results! I am excited to finally see ketones up above .5 for the first time – ketogenic diet alone  just was not getting me there. Too much metabolic damage, I guess.

Kitteh’s Plan, Draft the First

Here’s my daily plan that I want to try out for the “normal days” between now and the end of the year. That’ll give it over 30 days and see how things go. Caveats: I am traveling the week of Thanksgiving and will just go plain old “maintain” keto diet then and probably at some point during Christmas, although not sure yet when that will be.

6:30 – rise and shine. Do morning pages.

7:00 – Wake boy. Shower/get ready.

7:30 – wake girl, drive boy to school

7:45 – 8:45 – T-Tapp, get girl off to school (she walks)

Note that by 8:00 (and maybe sooner) I will reach 12 hours fasted)

8:45 – head to work. (It’s a five minute drive .) Have Bullet Proof Coffee (BPC) with kerrygold butter and coconut oil.

Approximately noon (after fast hits at least 16 hours) Lunch – green smoothie (greens, flax, walnuts, splash of apple cider vinegar (ACV) and water), protein, and fat.

Between noon and dinner, Bullet Proof Tea or broth if desired.Lots of decaf green tea and water with ACV.

Between 6:00 and 8:00 – dinner with family (low carb, high fat), close eating period

Looking back, looking ahead

 

Howdy, kitteh friends. I’m back to talk to myself, because I need a place to plan and think. To do that, Imma sum up what has happened since, say, 2000.

Here’s my long, long story as short as I can make it: I have known I SHOULD be low carb since 2000 and the days of Protein Power. However, back then, it was all about high protein and after a couple years, I developed a bad egg allergy from eating them too often (as in, bleeding-colon-bad) and a problem with what I now know was glucogenesis, and I pretty much stalled.

Between the egg allergy and the stall, I wandered a bit from 2002-2004 and then in 2004, started seeing a nutritionist, who put me on low carb, low cal, and exercise and I lost about 40 lbs and gained lots of muscles.

In 2004, I was very close to goal when I found out I was pregnant with our first, who was born in 2005. After she was born, I had a year of restricted activity and high bp meds because of post-partum preeclampsia, fun times, and so what I was doing before did not work at all.

I hovered around the same weight for a couple years (always obsessed with it but not making any headway) and had three bouts of pneumonia in 2007. Just as I started feeling better from that, I found out about our second (also surprise) baby in March 2008.

Then in June, at 15 weeks, I had a severe placental abruption and was put on total bedrest until 38 weeks, when I had our son by c-section. He was a big baby, weighed 16 lbs at his six week appointment. I, by  contrast, was like a coma patient – had lost over a hundred pounds of lean mass, and my hypermobile joints had turned into Hypermobility Syndrome. Before I got THAT diagnosed and treated, exercise was just a disaster. And I STILL didn’t know about glucogenesis, so my LC efforts never really worked consistently.

Between then and 2014, I started this blog. I got a CPAP machine to address sleep problems, and that doctor directed me to Medifast, On Medifast (“packets”), I lost about 50 lbs and then developed an allergy to the soy and whey in the packets. Medifast is ketogenic, but I was still not sure it was OK to be in ketosis that long and wondered if I would “destroy my metabolism.” (This is pretty hilarious, since I am pretty sure I don’t have much of one to destroy with losing all that muscle!)

Since Medifast, I have tried various forms of intermittent fasting, low carb, Paleo, Primal, and was even vegan for about six months.  But I never really found the right combination to do well consistently. I have always struggled with food allergies and sensitivies, which change about every three years and so are a moving target for avoiding inflammation. This year, I started leaving off gluten/gliaden (not just from high carb things), whey and casein (from dairy and protein powders), and avoided eggs, and that started to heal the inflammation somewhat but weight loss was sporadic.

In 2015 (March) I got on Weight Not, which is a commercial program that uses really restricted real food lists and supplements but boils down to a ketogenic diet with restricted calories. I lost about 50 lbs between mid-March and July this year, and started studying ketosis and IF in earnest (because I am not enthused about paying what amounts to $11/day for the supplements). Discovered the issue with high protein (glucogenesis) and that whey causes high insulin levels even when the blood glucose doesn’t rise.

So now I understand that my real issue is too much insulin, and that the best way to heal that is a combination of ketosis/HFLC when I need to eat, and fasting (to reduce basal insulin over time and heal the system, as well as to let my body burn off this stored energy!)

And ironically? after all the research and reading, agonizing and pondering, the best explanation of ALL of this has been “Butter Bob” Briggs, who uses his “fifty cent vocabulary” to explain some thousand dollar words in YouTube videos like “Butter Makes Your Pants Fall Off”! Ha!

So I am starting my own “thing” on Monday (meaning Sunday night, by making sure I don’t have anything after dinner). Plan will be set out in next post.

Guess who?

Howdy, folks! It’s been a minute!

I’m very happy to tell you (OK, me – this blog is for me!) that I am picking myself up, dusting myself off, and beginning again.

Why kitteh, you say. What prompts this? you say. Well, I’ll tell ya.

Kitteh haz a tired.

Srsly.

I can’t even tell you the story of why I reached this point – at least not yet. But I am here, and I took a vow of NO MORE. No more waiting, no more half-way trying. It is time to get serious and by this time next year, I will be BRAND NEW KITTEH. I have vowed it. So mote it be.

So by Divine Providence (no kidding) I found a program (or rather, the program found me, at exactly the right time). It’s called Weight Not, that is overtly ketogenic (remember how that works?) and works a lot like the Packet program that I became allergic to – but uses only real live food. I’ve signed up and I am in the waiting window to receive the supplements and full instructions, but in my head I have started.

Enough is enough.

E is for Efficiency

And efficiency refers to how efficiently the calories can be converted to body fat.

 

The easiest thing to convert to fat is… fat. No conversion necessary.

Second easiest? Sugar. Goes straight to blood glucose and thence to body fat.

Third easiest? Complex carbs. They turn to simple carbs and pick up the chain.

Hardest is protein. So that gets the best “efficiency” score.

 

And there you have it. SANE eating.

N is for Nutrition

Here’s where Bacon falls down. (Sob).

You want to eat foods that give you the MOST nutritional value for your calorie buck.

Yeah, old news. It’s vegetables.

Followed by protein.

Followed by good fats. (And bacon. Nom.)

Then starchy vegetables.

Last comes processed carbs and sugars.

 

A is for Aggressive

“Aggressive” basically means consider the glycemic index.

The Glycemic Index is an attempt to measure how fast food will break down into sugar and hit the blood stream, thus necessitating an insulin response.

Aggressive foods, like simple sugars and simple carbohydrates, quickly turn to blood glucose, hit the blood sugar, and provoke an immediate insulin response.

So what slows down a food’s digestion and makes it less AGGRESSIVE?

You guessed it. Fat and fiber.

And what are the least aggressive foods for your calorie buck?

• Nonstarchy vegetables.
• Protein
• Good fats

And worst would be starchy carbs and sugars.

Sensing a theme?

 

S is for Satiety

And satiety basically means feeling full.

It’s the first principle of SANE eating. You should eat calories that make you feel full.

My past reading/experience tells me that two things fill you up: FAT and FIBER. One of those is very calorie dense. Can you guess which one? Yup. Fat.

So you want to eat high fiber foods to fill you up without adding tons o’ calories.

Let’s rate the macronutrients – starchy carbs, veggie/fibery carbs, protein, fat – in terms of SATIETY. Remember, we do this on a PER CALORIE basis.

A gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, a gram of protein has 4 calories, and a gram of fat has 9 calories. But grams of fiber and water (which are most of what you get in NSV) are basically zero calories, they pass straight through.

So surprising no one, nonstarchy vegetables, composed of 4 calorie carb + bulky zero calorie fiber + water, come out way ahead. They are hugely bulky and fill you up for nearly no calories. Consider the sheer volume of spinach you have to eat to get to 300 calories and you see what I mean.

After that, you get high SATIETY from, say, BEEF or CHICKEN or A SWEET POTATO, all for about the same level of calorie really.

And of course, BACON or AVOCADO — which are basically pure fats — are VERY high in the satiety department. VERY satisfying for the calories. But as you will see, it will not score so well on the other measures, which is why we have to look at ALLLLL the letters of SANE before we evaluate a given food.

Happy New Year

New Lunar Year, that is.  The lunar new year, in case you didn’t know, is the first new moon in Aries after the sun goes into Aries – Aries being the first sign of the Zodiac – which actually mirrors the seasons a good bit better than our official random middle of winter new year. 🙂  And that new moon was this past Sunday, about 2:45 pm. So… happy new year!

Don’t know about you, but my energy is DEFINITELY feeling very new year-ish.  I have a dozen things closing out and opening up. I feel very energized and hopeful – for the first time in a LONNNNG time in some areas – and I am making Big Plans!  Want to hear about it? (PSsst: if not, move along. After all, this is my blog! What did you THINK you were going to find? Nuclear physics?) 🙂

First: New In Shrinkin

1. Still doing the SANE approach to eating, and I just realized I still owe you a description of what that even means. I will get to it this week and next, I hope, but my March was Madness (and nothing to do with any sports).  As with Paleo, I have come to find equilibrium and realized that amongst the SANE choices available, some move me to losing weight and some keep me right at where I am. Am working on moving into more shrinky SANE choices. Right now, just doing that on a meal by meal basis. Coming next week, an actual plan.

2. During March, I had a serious working trip from Wed/Thurs through weekend. During the first, my right hip came out of socket, leading to literal bawling misery. Favoring hip made knees worse and hurt shoulder.  Toting luggage made it all terrible. Bad wet cold weather made it all worse and the month was so miserable that I broke down and went to the doctor. I was ready to get a handicapped sticker and a scooter, y’all. I was seriously feeling broken. Had all the bloodwork in the world and confirmed that while I DO have hypermobility syndrome and osteoarthritis, I do NOT have rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, or anything else super nasty. Best of all, was prescribed a six week course of physical therapy (that may become a 12 week course) twice a week at a PILATES BASED PT studio. So I just finished my fourth session today (out of 12) and I am ALREADY seeing a HUGE difference in my issues. SOOOO HAPPY!!!

Second: New at Work

1. Remember the CRAZY work stuff I have been doing the last two summers? Well, it paid off. Got a GREAT order from the judge (finally) and the case SHOULD be mediating and hopefully settling this spring/summer. That would be FANTASTIC.

2. Got invited to be trial counsel on a case with one of the people I spoke on a panel with in October. This is huge, because said person is quite famous in our field and I am so stinking flattered I can’t get over my bad self, and because it is right here in my home district, so I might get a chance to do a trial right in my own back yard for a change. Also comes with substantial financial upside, assuming we win.

Third: New in Miscellaneous

Deep in my kitteh heart of hearts, I want to write stories. I have made a LOT of headway on that this month. Not really a topic for this blog, but things feeling fresh and new and … possible. 🙂

In Which Kitteh Finds SANE-ity

Right after I wrote that last post, I was surfing for Paleo recipes for dinner and found Carrie Brown’s blog, which has some wonderful recipes that are gluten free, dairy free, egg free, etc.  I noticed her subtitle, life in the SANE lane, and read a bit about Jonathan Bailor and The Calorie Myth.  Not expecting much, but looking to find more inspiration, I googled around to see what Bailor’s “SANE” approach to eating was all about. In no particular order, here’s what I found out:

1. JB is a program manager or something for Microsoft – works on Word. Kitteh DH has actually heard of him.  That’s probably why his presentation style is super Microsoft-y. Not complaining, just different. I like.
2. JB’s big push is, all calories are not created equal, and calories in v. calories out just won’t work the way people think it will. I take THAT as such a given that frankly I was surprised to realize how many people find it shocking. But there you have it. But in the course of telling you the summary of research on various calorie quality issues, he actually synthesizes what I have been struggling to articulate.
3. To expand on that, for months (years?) I have been struggling to eat according to several principles that all seem correct and have been borne out in my own experience as “true” but I feel like as soon as I focus on one, I lose my grip on the others. For example, most recently Paleo taught me about natural, unprocessed, gluten free, dairy free…. and I forgot to think about carbs. Get the leptin under control! Wait, forgot about fats…  Paleo did a great job of pulling together the WHAT to eat for HEALTH for me, but I was still foundering on how to capture it all in one systemic way and be able to reliably lose weight. Turns out, JB already did that!
4. SANE stands for Satiety, Aggression, Nutrition, and Efficiency. More to follow on each of these and why they are, In Kitteh’s Humble Opinion (IKHO), the four corners of how I should be eating.
5. As will be covered in depth in upcoming posts, the most SANE food you can imagine is a non-starchy vegetable – NSV for short – and as JB points out, NO ONE from ANY food philosophy, from Weight Watchers to Vegan to Atkins, will tell you that an NSV is bad for you.  It’s just utterly noncontroversial.
6. So the SANE suggestion from JB? Eat five servings of NSV with every meal.
7. That bears repeating: five servings, EVERY meal. Even breakfast. Even lunch.
8. I was SHOCKED how little NSV I really eat.
9. I am SHOCKED how FULL I feel all the time eating so much more vegetable.
10. I am SHOCKED how GOOD I feel with this simple tweak!

For the past four weeks (which have included one week of being home bound due to ClusterFlake 2014 and one week of home bound due to Snowmaggedon and strep throat) I have added five veggie servings to my meals.  I am down about 5-7 lbs. I am feeling freaking awesome.

I also started a T-Tapp schedule this week. Going easy to start with, to build the habit. It’s “no excuses” exercise – I’m doing one third of the Instructional work out on each day, MWF (about 7-10 min) and the MORE Chair work on T/Th/Sat, for the first six weeks. I’m pleasantly sore, but not terribly so. And it is waaaaaay too easy and fast to justify EVER skipping. And I am building habits.

Stay tuned for more on each of the letters in SANE!