There’s always the do-over.

Boy, I’ve really been getting on my own nerves lately. I am supposed to be gradually easing back into carb-eating by adding WHOLE foods. What have I been doing instead? Taking up my carb count with junk and with non-junk that I’m not supposed to be eating right now. It’s rather difficult to see whether I’m OK at 35 grams or at 40 grams (the next step up the carb ladder) when I’m eating enough carbs to almost take me out of ketosis.

If you’re wondering whether I’m annoyed at myself, you would be correct.

And it’s not the all-too-common excuse of, “You must need those foods or else you wouldn’t eat them.” Nobody needs a candy bar or a bowl of ice cream. Nobody needs French fries. Y’know, that kind of thing. In my case it’s been too many low-carb tortillas (I have devised an excellent method of eating cheese sandwiches when feeling snacky), brown rice, and the occasional taste of something I’m not supposed to have. And too much coffee. If I’m going to do the coffee perhaps I should grab some Da Vinci sugar-free syrups, as they have no carb count while granular Splenda is one gram per teaspoon. And that’s without counting the heavy cream. Le sigh.

And yes, I’m still having issues with vegetables. That’s got to change.

I think I need to start over with Induction. I don’t think I will need it longer than a week (if I start it tomorrow I’ll be on it a little over a week, actually). But just to get the junk out of my system, make myself eat the veggies and so forth.

The weight loss is going fine and better than fine. That’s not the issue. The issue is I need to be better at this healthy eating thing than I am presently.

I think something else I need to do is make menus for myself. If I know what I’m supposed to eat in a given day then it won’t be so easy to go over my carb count and I won’t have to worry about being under it either.

Wish me luck.

Do what?

I was Googling for info about pomegranates and carb count. I wasn’t completely satisfied with what CalorieKing had to say about it because they didn’t take the seeds into account, and when I’ve eaten pomegranate, I eat the seeds. I would think that would factor into the fiber count and all.

While looking around I ran across a conversation on the message board of a low-carbing bodybuilder website. Lo and behold, an administrator on that board was preaching about how ketogenic diets are unnecessary except for people with any of a few specific health problems, one of them being epilepsy.

Wait a minute. He’s on a low-carb site… and he opposes ketogenic diets.

Let that sink in.

You know, I’ve been on this diet for almost two months and aside from some cramping–and I make sure to supplement with calcium, magnesium, and potassium now, which works pretty well–I’ve been fine. Better than fine. I’ve dropped about twenty pounds and gone from a 24 to an 18 in that time period. Yeah, ketogenic diets suck all right. You betcha, I sure didn’t need to be on one.

Where do they dig up these people, anyway? A serious paranoid would almost call them agents provocateurs.

Still in ketosis, and observations about metabolism and starvation

I’m not sure if I ever went completely out of ketosis the other night with the rice crackers, but if I did, I didn’t stay out of it for very long. I use ketone testing strips (Ketostix brand) to check, and they’ve been at least a very light pink every time I’ve tested. Today they are more back to normal, probably around 80mg/dl or slightly less.

I suddenly have this insight on why you don’t give candy bars to starving prisoners you’ve just released from Auschwitz. They’ve been in ketosis all that time, and the candy bar is sugar city. Not good.

In fact, given that benign dietary ketosis has a good bit in common with fasting, I suddenly have this insight on feeding people whove been fasting or starving. I’ve been Googling and trying to figure out what the refeeding process is with someone who’s been undernourished and it’s not very clear to me, but it seems the medical establishment obsesses over the patient’s insulin levels getting too high too fast.

Seems to me they ought to be doing a reverse of Atkins. The patient needs a kidney function test to see how much protein they can tolerate, among other things. But the first calories they ought to get should be fat calories. You’ve got catabolism going on, which involves using fat and protein as fuel sources. Give a body enough dietary fat and it won’t need as much protein. You’d change the proportions from mostly fat to fat-and-protein, gradually increasing the protein as tolerated, and then bring in glycemic carbohydrates–again, gradually. I don’t imagine it would take much time but if you get the patient stabilized with a caloric intake that agrees with what their body is presently doing, shouldn’t that make re-introducing glucose safer?

I’m really surprised nobody seems to have thought of this yet, especially with the low-carb craze of the early aughts and all the scientific literature available demonstrating that BDK is safe. Obviously starvation is not benign ketosis but you could make that ketosis benign by the choices of what you feed the patient.

It’d be really funny if, in finding a diet that helped his cardiac patients, Dr. Atkins also found a way to help victims of starvation. He did not pioneer the earliest work on benign dietary ketosis, but he popularized it. Odd how life works out sometimes.