Keto-this, Keto-that

Ketogenic Diet
This is something I am on at the moment. A ketogenic diet is a “fat burning” diet. The Atkins Diet happens to be a ketogenic diet, but I am not following any direct Atkins guidelines.

Ketosis
One primary result of a ketogenic diet is an effect called ketosis, where the bloodstream has elevated levels of ketone bodies. Ketone bodies are formed from stored fatty acids after you have depleted your ready supply of glucose and your liver has also exhausted its glycogen stores.

Glycogen
Glycogen is the stored form of excess glucose. When you eat a meal rich in carbohydrates, your body converts the carbs into pure glucose and some other things. If you consume excess glucose, more than your body needs immediately, it is converted and stored away as future potential energy in the form of fatty acids and glycogen. This is why it is understood that a high-carb diet can actually make you fatter, even if you are restricting overall calories.

Fuel Priorities
As you go about your daily business, or sleep at night, your body must have energy to keep running, so it first turns to any free-floating glucose from any recent meal as its first fuel. Once that fuel has been depleted, it then turns to any glycogen stored in the liver. When that fuel has been depleted, your body’s last resort is to unpack the energy stored as fatty acids in your fat cells. However, it can only do this if your insulin levels are not elevated. Eating a meal rich in carbs is what elevates insulin levels. This is one of the main reasons to cut out a lot of carbs: they keep insulin elevated and inhibit the release of fatty acid fuel from the fat cells. You can have massive amounts of stored fatty acid fuel ready to be used, but find yourself completely unable to utilize it and feeling quite hungry as a result if you eat too many carbs and raise your insulin levels.

Ketone Bodies
Let’s assume you are not binging on carbs and your resulting insulin levels are low. When stored energy is released from fat cells in the form of fatty acids, it is converted to ketone bodies and ferried around the blood stream to hungry cells, just as glucose and glycogen would have been. Your body does quite well on ketone bodies. Your brain will go through an adaptation over a period of roughly six weeks where it is weaned off of the rich supply of glucose and glycogen and learns how to survive, quite well, on mostly ketone bodies. Speaking personally, the transition feels quite odd. It is known as the “ketosis flu” because you sometimes feel ill. It hits you pretty hard at first, then lessens as your body acclimates to the presence of so many ketone bodies.

Ketostix and Ketonuria

Linked via the web

One of the side-effects of a ketogenic diet is that you have an abundance of these ketone bodies floating around the blood stream. You have so many, in fact, that you end up relieving the excess when you urinate, a medical condition called ketonuria. A product has been developed which allows you to measure this condition, basically confirming that you are indeed hitting that sweet spot of a ketogenic diet: being in a state of ketosis. You pee on the little reactive square at the end of the plastic stick. If it changes color and becomes darker, you are eliminating excess ketone bodies. The darker the result, the more you have ketonuria.

My Results
A few days ago, I was curious how I would fare when put to the ketonuria test, so I purchased a vial of Ketostix. The bottle and “stix” look exactly like the ones pictured here. I have tested a few times a day since purchasing and my results are usually the third or fourth darkest, with my highest result matching the second darkest. You can see the range of colors on the bottle in the picture for comparison. Suffice it to say, I am definitely in ketosis, as evidence by my measured ketonuria.

Weight
On a related aside, I weighed myself this morning and was happy to find myself hitting an exact 203.0 pounds wearing only my briefs. This means I have lost roughly two to three pounds in the last couple of weeks. I was expecting more, but I theorize that walking every day is building muscle while I am losing fat. If I had just been a big lazy butt and not exercised, I would have probably seen more of a drop. I expect to see between 1.5 and two pounds dropping per week beginning now.

Weekly Log: April 18–24

Warning: Ultra-boring post

The first week’s worth of data is ready to churn out. Calorie Counter attaches a nice weekly summary to the beginning of the PDF as shown in the screen capture below. According to my calculations, about 69% of my calories come from fat, about 10% from carbohydrates and about 21% from proteins. My weight has fluctuated between 204.4 pounds and 207.4 pounds.

Sharon Woods

Lisa and I live in Westerville, Ohio. I read somewhere that it has the highest number of public parks per capita of any town in the U.S.A. Our favorite is Sharon Woods. There is a four mile bike trail that runs in a loop and I took an 80 minute walk around it this afternoon in the pouring rain. After the rain subsided, I snapped some pictures, including one of a pair of deer. There’s also a shot of a bridge and a movie of the water gushing down what is normally a nearly bone-dry streambed as seen from the bridge.

©2011 Nathan Dickson

©2011 Nathan Dickson

©2011 Nathan Dickson

©2011 Nathan Dickson

SELF Nutrition Data

I stumbled upon a fairly comprehensive database of nutrition information at the SELF Nutrition Data website. You do not have to be a member in order to perform nutrition searches.

You can search by food name or by nutrient to obtain nutrition facts, various charts showing where this food fits into the nutrition spectrum and a detailed breakdown of all nutrients in several categories. I’ve never seen any other resource go into as much detail as this site.

For example, here is a link for an a voluminous collection of data on the nutrients in raw bananas. The screen capture below only shows about one third of the available page. You can already see that the data is well organized and quite detailed.

The only negative thing I have to say about the site is that it presents recommendations based upon the flawed notion that saturated fats and cholesterol are inherently unhealthy for you. This is the conventional wisdom that is now being challenged on many fronts.

Counting Calories

/Facepalm

I am mentally scolding myself for falling into the calorie counting trap. Thanks to Lisa for pointing this out. The inclination to do so is hard to shake, given how much we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that changes to our weight will result from calories consumed minus calories burned. The Calorie Counter app (see links to the app on a previous blog posting) that I am using doesn’t help matters much.

Screen capture taken midday on Thursday, April 21st

Calorie Counter, by definition, helps you count calories. It does other useful things as well, for which I am grateful. However, the notion of calorie counting is fundamental to its purpose, hence the name. As you can see above, the Diet Calendar displays the number of calories I consumed in the Food column, the number of calories expended in the Exer. column and the net difference of the two in the Net column.

According to long-taught (and mistaken) nutritional theory, I should be losing about 631 calories worth of fat on Wednesday. Of course, no consideration has been given as to what constituted the calories I consumed, whether they were fat, protein or carbohydrates. It's all just generic calories.

Therein lies the problem with calorie counting. There are different metabolic pathways for the different types of calories. Fats are handled differently than proteins which are handled differently than carbohydrates. Also, no consideration is given to fiber, specifically high density carbohydrates coming in fibrous foods like fresh fruits. All of these factors change the way the body processes food (both pathway and timing) and, hence, render calorie counting as a somewhat misleading barometer of eating goodness.

So, if calorie counting is not the best thing to be doing, why use this app? I am now trying to use it for three functions:

1.  I want a comprehensive log of what I ate so that I can either confirm or disconfirm the newer very-low-carb dietary hypotheses when I get my physical in June. I am hoping to see the similar results to those realized by Gary Taubes. I have read that it may take a several months for things to settle in, so my results may still be a little off.

2.  I want to monitor the number of grams of carbohydrates I am consuming each day, so I know that I am maintaining them low enough to keep my body in a state of ketosis for as long as possible each day.

3.  I want to monitor my fat intake, so that I am aware of what percentage of my daily calories come from fat. From what I am now learning, it’s okay to go as high as 75%, which is very easy to do.

Latest Picture

Lisa took this picture yesterday. I look positively emaciated. I suspect the angle is making me look thinner than I actually am, since I still weigh about 204 pounds.

Fatsecret.com

iPhone Screen  ©fatsecret.com

Want to know the nutrition metrics in some type of food? Don’t have a mobile device which can run the Calorie Counter app? (Here are iPad and iPhone links.) Simply go to the Foods tab at fatsecret.com to search for just about anything. For example, here is a link for a can of Kroger Black Beans.

Tip: If you have the iPhone version of the app, the icon in the top right corner is a button which should allow you to take a picture of a barcode on a package using the built-in camera. The app will then look up the item automatically from the Fatsecret database. I haven’t tried it myself since I run on the iPad.

Food Log: April 19

Enough with the daily food logs already. After this, I’ll begin linking them at the end of each week.

Daily Report

I am not eating enough

You don’t hear someone trying a newfangled diet express this very often.
I should be getting at least 2000 calories a day, but yesterday I only managed to eat less than 1600. When the body gets too few calories, it thinks it is being starved. There’s the likelihood that you will be placed into a lowered metabolic state, sort of like a hibernating bear. It’s your body’s way of fighting undernourishment and can paradoxically result in you getting fatter. You will have no energy and feel like sitting around doing nothing. If you force yourself to exercise, you only exacerbate the problem.

Apples
I need to start eating three or four apples each day in order to boost my calorie count and to reduce the overall percentage of calories from fat down towards 50% from where it stood last night at 61%. Even though apples are a carbohydrate storehouse and are high in fructose (the great evil), they are also fibrous, which moderates your body’s intake of the sugars. Apples are healthy if eaten raw. If you eat fat and protein along with a naturally-occurring fibrous carbohydrate like a raw apple, the uptake of sugar is further moderated. Contrarily, apples are not healthy as apple sauce, apple juice or after being cooked since most of the sugars will have been released from their fibrous enclosures via excess crushing or heating, or both.

©Fir0002/Flagstaffotos*

Red Delicious
I find red delicious apples most to my liking. They are crispy (when not overly ripened) and have the right balance of tartness and sweetness. After some experimentation, I stumbled upon a very efficient way to cut them, which includes keeping the peel. After washing the outside and drying it off, turn the apple sideways on a cutting board, then slice it evenly to get a top half and a bottom half. You are cutting across the core rather along it as displayed in the linked picture. Then place each half, flat side down, on the board and cut five to seven slices away from the core as you rotate it. Start the knife near the core and slice downward and outward slightly, as the core becomes thicker toward the bottom.

*Image linked to Wikipedia and made available via GNU Free Documentation License

Is Sugar Toxic?

I have to confess to being a bit enamored with Gary Taubes this past week. I love discovering someone with a clear vision who is able to communicate that vision clearly, especially if that vision is intended to do great good. Gary had an essay published in The New York Times last week on the topic of sugar. He asks the question “Is Sugar Toxic?”

Weighings

Fluctuations
It’s probably been said before, but I will add my own take here. My weight seems to fluctuate by a few pounds, most likely due to the cycle of intake and outtake. Friday I was 209 pounds, Sunday I was down to 205 pounds, yesterday I was back up to 208.2 pounds and this morning I was sitting at 206.2 pounds. I am not going to sweat it.

240 lbs. in early July

Obese
I keep reminding myself that I weighed a peak of 240 pounds back in June and July, when my wife Lisa and I took our trip to Chicago. That’s a Body Mass Index of about 32, which placed me well into the obese classification, which starts at 30. My wife, bless her soul, claimed that to her I still looked like the man she married. What a great fibber. I got serious and stopped eating all sugars, starches and any other refined carbohydrates like breads, potatoes and white rice. I ate like a pig at first, but none of my diet included those items. I still sometimes miss pizza, but less and less so over time. Even though I barely exercised that whole time, I still managed to lose about 30 pounds from early July of 2010 to early April of 2011.

Shame
I felt a great deal of shame about how I looked. I went so far as to doctor photos of myself before I allowed Lisa to post them on Facebook. To the left is a comparison showing off how easily I was able to lie using Photoshop. Notice my jowls and gut in reality. Not only that, but my resting heart rate was between 90 to 110 beats per minute, which is not good. I struggled with Gastroinestinal Reflux Disease, minor chest pains and sometimes cold sweats at night. All very bad signs.

Phase 2
This new phase will be even more interesting, as my goal is to lose about two or more pounds per week until my physical in June. I would love to eventually weigh 170–175 pounds and be somewhat stronger that I am now. The plan includes eating at least 50% of calories from fats, which seems scandalous to many who still believe the long taught low fat/high carb mantra.

R.I.P. Steve Larsen

Steve Larsen [©Tim Carlson, linked via slowtwitch.com]

I remember reading about triathlete Steve Larsen, who had a massive heart attack and passed away on May 19, 2009. I remember being shocked that someone in his perfect physical shape would experience something like this at 39. At the time, I figured he ate really well and was in superb physical condition, which greatly lowered the chances of something like this happening, but there is always a chance, however slim, right? The conflicting data points surrounding his death has bothered me ever since.

Now that I am learning more about the great damage that refined carbohydrates do to the human body, I am wondering if there was a causal link between his diet and his death. It’s pretty common for intense athletes to follow conventional nutrition theories and to focus greatly on refined carbohydrates to “carbo load” or inject a great quantity of high energy fuel into their systems before a competition. According to what I have been reading, the human body was never designed for this. The resulting sudden and severe destabilization of blood sugar, insulin, triglycerides and lipoproteins could be enough to cause long-term damage of the type that caused Steve’s heart attack, even though he was by all accounts in perfect physical condition.

If you think about it, although we can run long distances at great speed, we are probably not well adapted to it. The age-old process of hunting most likely required walking with brief moments of running at the point of killing or capture. When food was scarce, undoubtedly a good deal of the time, would hunters and gatherers burn their fuel reserves by running at full speed to their next waypoint? I find that hard to believe. They never needed to “carbo load” in the process of daily life and they probably couldn’t even if they wanted to.

Food Log: Monday, April 18th

First Official Day
From now on, rather than list everything in detail, I will include a daily link to a FatSecret report and summarize the interesting points.

Daily Report

Summary
Omelet for breakfast; omelet and apple for lunch; beef salad, apple and a glass of apple cider for dinner:  1644 calories. I am having trouble getting the nutrients to add up to 100%, so I am temporarily scaling them uniformly so they are forced to add up properly: 62% from fat, 19% from saturated fat, 21% from carbs and 17% from protein. Moderate walk (3 mph) for 35 minutes to the nearby park and back.

Bizarro
As you look at the percentage of calories coming from fat (especially saturated fat), you have to wonder how I could possibly be healthy or lose weight. Welcome to Bizarro Diet Science, where black is white and up is down according to conventional wisdom.

Calorie Counter

©Fatsecret.com

I used Lose It! for a day, then hunted around for the best free diet and exercise tracking app I could find for my iPad. I prefer using the iPad over the iPhone because of its size. I also use it for a lot of reading in iBooks and the Kindle app. Sadly, Lose It! is an iPhone-only app, and I prefer an iPad-optimized app.

I did find an app called Calorie Counter from a company called FatSecret. It has an intuitive interface, access to nutrition information for just about anything I could throw at it, including fast food, popular grocery and even store brands.

You can create an account at fatsecret.com, via the iPad or your computer, and keep your iPad data synced with your account on their servers. What’s slick about this is that you can then export and email reports in PDF or CSV format. For example, here is a PDF of today’s food information so far, although I don’t know how long the link will remain active.

Confirmation Bias

Definition

Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.

Nutrition Science

As I read through the book Good Calories, Bad Calories, I am struck by how forceful confirmation bias has been for the past century. Excellent, and contradictory, research was pushed aside because it did not support prevailing beliefs. Instead, the message “High Carb/Low Fat” was shouted from the rooftops so loudly, and for so long, that we have collectively forgotten other points of view. Now we are suffering the effects of this perspective as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and many other metabolic syndrome-related ailments skyrocket like never before, especially in the last 30 years.

Bizarro Health

Is it possible that fat, including saturated fat, was and is unfairly demonized? Is it possible that refined carbohydrates—sugars, flours and starches—are what’s killing us? Imagine eating a meal that is emotionally fulfilling, keeps you sated for several hours and yet is also healthy. We have all struggled with our eating habits, but it doesn’t have to be so difficult if we embrace the scientific data that’s been there all along, just ignored because it did not fit the party line.

Study Hall

If you are not intimidated by college-level reading, I highly recommend that you immediately run out and purchase Good Calories, Bad Calories and begin reading it. You can read an excerpt here.

Starting Picture

©2011 Nathan Dickson

Oh the Humanity!

This is me today. Yes, I am wearing underwear. Just pretend that it’s grey Speedos™. Lisa was embarrassed enough for me while taking the pictures.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that smile is creepy... an “I'm coming to get you!” a la Jack Torrence Shining smile. Now I know why before and after pictures always have the person sport a blank look on their face.

Time Lapse

I am going to try to do a photographic experiment as part of this venture, which is to take a picture of myself each morning and animate the result over time.

Before the Before

I will post unmodified pictures that Lisa took from our vacation in Chicago back in July of 2010, strictly for scientific purposes. She posted a bunch on Facebook, but I demanded the right to “edit” myself to not look so morbidly obese. I looked and felt so unhealthy. Thank God for Photoshop.

Food Log: Sunday, April 17th

Food Log

This is the first of what will be many, daily food logs. They are mostly here for my own amusement, so feel free to skip reading them if they make you so bored that you'd prefer to be dead.

The past few days

It's Sunday evening and the eating regime of the past few days has been fairly straightforward: omelets, some fruit and a couple of burger patties. I weighed myself around 7 p.m. and was surprised to find out that I went from 209 pounds on Friday to 205 pounds today. That's a decrease of four pounds and is probably attributable mostly to losing water since I cut off almost all carbs over the weekend.

Omelets

I cooked home-made omelets for Lisa and myself this morning. Using a very nice and free app for my iPhone called Lose It! (which I will discuss at some future point if I keep using it), I calculated the meal to be 575 calories, about 45% of which came from some type of fat. I think about half of the fat was saturated. I will try to find ways to obtain more accurate information as the days and weeks progress.

Breakfast, 575 calories

1/2 of the omelet

2 eggs

3.5 strips of bacon

1/2 slice cheese

1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil (I would have used butter in the pan had we had it)

1 apple

1 banana

Lunch, 459 calories

The remaining 1/2 of the omelet

1 banana

Dinner, 471 calories

I had some leftover beans and rice from before Friday, so I finished them.

Nutrition

According to this app, today I ate 83g fat (1/4 saturated), 275 mg cholesterol, 1500mg sodium, 168g carbs (which is very high from the beans and rice, the goal is 100g or less), and 55g protein for a grand total of 1600 calories. I burned 200 off exercising, which leaves me with a net intake of 1400 calories. I have not felt hunger pangs at any point today.

Preamble

This is the obligatory inaugural blog entry. The purpose of this blog is to document a dietary experiment, where I will attempt to follow something called a Primal Diet, also known as a paleolithic diet. This endeavor was inspired by the viewing of the documentary Fat Head.

It will take me a few days to organize my thoughts and should begin posting daily (or nearly daily) progress reports beginning Monday, April 18th, which also happens to be tax day.

I have a physical scheduled for June 13th, where I will have a full blood panel run to see what effect this diet has had. If what I am reading is true, I anticipate that my cholesterol and triglyceride levels will be nearly ideal.

Here's hoping.