My diary (keto + intermittent fasting)

[uzakuz2]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently 25, 187cm tall, living in Germany and new here on this site, but I already tried to loose weight a for a while now. But now I feel the need to share my experiences and interim successes. This all started with me buying a scale and then seeing 130kg on it. That was only a very rough check on a not so optimal (read: soft) ground for the scale and with full clothing, but it still me shocked quite a bit and got me started. My actual first logged measurement was more in the range of 124kg. You have to know, that the last time I was weighed was before donating blood and that was in full clothing and even with shoes on and even in that condition I only weighed 115kg. This was roughly 1.5 years ago, but I found that already too much back then. I was a bit overweight for basically ma whole life after being quite a skinny baby.
Another reason for trying to loose weight as, that I was tired very often and larger meals did and still do almost have the effect of strong sleeping pills on me. Also I had regular reflux, which also is now gone when being in keto. Although it did come back lately when I was a out of ketosis.

First, roughly 90 days ago in September 2017, I tried to do a full fast only taking [Link Removed]. But after roughly 7 days of going for a walk and looking at food videos on Youtube I suddenly couldn't muster any strength to go up a small hill. That's when I stopped doing that. I already was taking the vitamin pills before fasting, because it helps with my chapped lips not only containing vitamins, but also minerals like iron.

When searching for videos about fasting I think Youtube brought me to the keto diet. Since then I'm following the "Goody Beats" Youtube channel, who seems to be quite a nice guy. So some days later I went full in and bought a "FreeStyle Precision Neo" for measuring blood ketone levels and blood sugar. The idea was to log everything in order to get a nice plot in order to motivate myself just like I was always doing in my university classes while studying physics. This was the best idea I ever had! Seeing the plot evolve and even doing some fitting for the weight loss per day motivated me like hell! Here it is, all my pride:
View attachment 25001
So I did a combination of keto and intermittent fasting in order to loose almost 400g per day for roughly 20 days. After that I somehow hit a wall, which i still haven't overcome yet, and which is partly why I'm posting here to get motivated for another run down to reach 100kg. Seeing that wall, I resumed more normal, but not fully my old, eating habits. Now I'm just glad I could keep my weight, even over the Christmas days. But I'm not satisfied with this status quo and looking at stock charts a bit too long a fear that my weight chart has reached a double bottom and could bounce from this resistance at 114kg to higher weights again, lol.

If anyone might be interested, I attached my scripts for creating that plot.

All in all I found it quite interesting to read into everything about fasting, keto and so on. I surprised me how much there is out there about everyday things like eating which you don't get taught in school. Like, when talking to most people about ketosis and how that is a completely different energy supply aside from blood sugar, they didn't hear of it. Similarly, some days ago, I read into sugar alternatives. Natriumcyclamat is very common and most know of that and Stevia also has widespread coverage through media, just to name on example: Breaking Bad. But all the other ones like monk's fruit, Erythritol, Xylitol and others were unknown to me and others I talked with. The same can be said about Glucomannan products. I strongly feel, that these things should be taught a bit in biology classes in order to fight obesity.

Well, glad to meet you and let's see what the future holds for me

 

[Llama]

Hi Uzakuz and welcome to the diaries
Trusylver has been doing keto for ages and tends to have a lot of information about it in her diary if you´re interested in someone else´s experience with the whole thing. I´m not surprised you hit a bit of a wall after losing weight so quickly at first. Es kann nicht alle Tage Sonntag sein Well done maintaining over the holidays though, that´s a big achievement.
Best of luck with your plans,
LaMa (who lives in Vienna and would be interested to know which part of Germany you live in).

 

[uzakuz2]

Thank you or the suggestion of Trusylver's diary, I'll look into it. Und ich bin aus Sachsen, genauer: Dresden .

 

[Cate]

Hi, uzakuz & welcome to the forum. 400g a day for 20 days is a bit mind-boggling. Do you do IF having 2 fast days a week (5:2) or only have an 8-hour window for eating? Maintaining over the holidays will do your body good. How many calories are you having a day at the moment?
As LaMa said, Trusylver is very knowledgeable about ketosis, amongst many other things, including strength training. All the best for 2018 & welcome to our little part of the world. Cheers, Cate.

 

[Llama]

Never been to Dresden but I've had several clients who were born there. I'm afraid my first association will always be the fire storm.

 

[uzakuz2]

Never been to Dresden but I've had several clients who were born there. I'm afraid my first association will always be the fire storm.

That's by far not my first association anymore, well I'm only 25 years old, so that's only natural. I don't wanna say it's a good thing for a new generation to grow up and Germans basically forgetting about this event, but I think a tad of forgetting and thereby gaining a healthy distance is a good thing.

400g a day for 20 days is a bit mind-boggling.

Thanks for the warm welcome and the interest. I already wrote down quite a bit, but your inquiry made me remember that 90 days are a long time and I did have many experiences and thoughts in this time span.

As for the 400g/day, there are many attenuating factors for that one. First and foremost is the huge pullback from the low. On the 27th of November I weighed 113.8kg in the morning and almost exactly 48h later after refeeding / binge eating, I weighed 117.5kg in the morning. So I put on almost 4kg, 2kg of which were no doubt the depleted glycogen / water being filled up again. The other half being excrement / intestine contents and maybe a bit more water. So yeah, the real fat loss must have been more around the dimensions of 200g / day.

There was one paper which kept me pushing forward with this. I basically idolize that paper, always mentioning that if someone talks to me about jojo-effects, the dangers of fasting and the like: "Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration" by Stewart and Fleming in 1973. It is short, but a very good read, especially about how the low blood sugar levels after two months of fasting go towards an average of 30mg/dL. My lowest value in my plot was 48mg/dL (~3mmol/L).

In the first place, I was very motivated by jeans being to tight and no chair holding my weight for more than a few months. I still could laugh about it, when entering a store and saying "bring me your largest jeans" and it still would only be a tight fit. Nowadays the old tight jeans is now comfortably loose, which is quite a nice feeling, but it also saps my motivation a bit. Also, I was constantly sweating after walking only a few stairs or distances, in short I just felt fat.

Do you do IF having 2 fast days a week (5:2) or only have an 8-hour window for eating?

That's why I reached the 400g/day loss by targeting an input of 500 kcal per day(!) with only one meal per day and every day or the other I would even skip that meal! But after the debacle with the sudden full fast some time before, I swore to not fight against hunger, so I'd just eat a slice of cheese or one or up to five Macademia nuts. This is also what my meals consisted of in that time period: In the morning a black instant coffee (0kcal) with roughly 100ml of coconut milk (~200kcal) and a nice dose of natriumcyclamat sweetener, so basically a lightweight keto coffee. I skipped the butter and the heavy whipping cream, because it tasted bad, I didn't miss it. On occasions when this did not satiate enough, then a slice of cheese (~100kcal) would do the trick. Also one of my favorite and still fast meals is a kind of pizza replacement using salami, cheese, sriracha sauce and red peppers:
View attachment 25012

Furthermore in order to loose even more weight and being able to walk without breaking a sweat after the first 100m, I would go for long and relatively fast-paced walks, but neither running, nor jogging, nor at least to my knowledge nordic walking. Just a kind of fast walk or well maybe it even was hiking, because I would seek out the steepest hills I could find in my area. After these walks of 1-2h I would be completely drenched in sweat, my T-Shirt, my sweater and even my jacket, so I'm quite sure they were very effective when it comes to burning calories. I tried to write the loss of calories down in my chart, too. These walks are the negative calories bars you can see in my plot, e.g. for the large one I calculated -1200 kcal for 2.5h of "hiking". Here is the height profile for that long walk:

View attachment 25011

That's about it. I tried to do these walks every second or third day. At the start of each walk, I would become quite hungry, but after eating 3 or so Macademia nuts (~23 kcal per nut), I would be satiated first because of the nuts and I guess for the rest of the walk the sport induced blood sugar would keep my hunger down. I wasn't hungry and I didn't feel particularly bad. Well, that is until the last day, before I stopped. So I was fasting again for almost 48h, I believe and went for that really long trip. I had ketone levels of 5.8 mmol/L, so very very elevated. Many already seem to be glad about levels >0.5. Personally I would regard >1 as being in ketosis. But 5.8 was already starvation ketosis because of the intermittent fast. And with that I went for that walk. After the first 45min I put in a break, but while sitting down, again my vision blacked a bit and when my weakness wouldn't subside after 10min and I began trembling because of cold, I gave up and ate the whole 100g of Macademia nuts I had with me. Unfortunately my blood measuring device was too cold to take a measurement of my blood sugar levels. I really would have wanted to know how low they were for me to be so weak. But after those Macademia nuts, I felt so damn good and warm. It was amazing how fast they had an effect. I didn't even have to eat my emergency glucose pills I always have in my backpack. So yeah, that's just to illustrate how I went a bit too far just before taking a break which basically is still ongoing now for 40 days.

Btw, after having being in deeper ketosis and then eating some sweets, I can basically feel the warmth of the sugar rushing through my veins. I never did drugs, but I guess this is how heroine shots must feel like. On every such occasion I get reminded how much of a drug sugar is. Anyone have had a similar observation? Plus, I get really sleepy after all that sudden sugar and carbohydrate intake.

Maintaining over the holidays will do your body good. How many calories are you having a day at the moment?

Unfortunately, currently I'm not doing any real calorie counting and I'm not even in real ketosis, always hovering around the threshold as my motivation waxes and wanes. Hell, on Christmas, before and after I even ate quite a lot of sweets, that's why I'm on the one hand proud of having kept my weight, but on the other hand it might be reducing my motivation to go for a hardcore intermittent fasting / ketosis period again. I mean, I still watch what I eat and try to cut down eating for a day after a binge day, but it still feels like I can hold my weight without much effort now, which means I can't really convince myself to go on a full diet again, right now.

Well, currently I feel the motivation coming back again after writing here on this forum. Unfortunately, I bought and ate some sweets after a stressful meeting this afternoon and before I got around to see the replies here. So unfortunately, I will need three days to reach ketosis again.

Btw, I found it very freeing some time ago, to actually throw some sweets in the trash bin. I've never thrown away perfectly good food like this before thereby living up to prejudiced view of the penny-pinching unwasteful Eastern German . When doing the full fast, I would always watch "Freaky Eaters" on Youtube and would bemoan how they would throw away whole canisters and/or trucks full of perfectly good food. And while that still is wasteful imho, I can now understand the reasoning behind it a bit more. For me, throwing away only 200g of food sufficed to acknowledge unconsciously that it is not "perfectly good food" but instead "poison / trash leading to an early death".

 

[Cate]

Thanks for answering my questions
Have you considered just counting calories for a while & losing slowly? You seem like a person who could do that if you set your mind to it

 

[Llama]

I wouldn´t call what you were doing intermittent fasting. It´s just fasting, even if you did eat a little bit. Which of course gets you into ketosis but isn´t what keto is usually about as far as I can tell (I personally can´t eat that way healthily and so never read too much about it). I suggest that fasting will get your weight down pretty quickly (if you can stick with it) but it´ll take a lot of time afterwards to find healthy strategies to keep it off long-term. So I´m definitely a fan of doing things more slowly and developing those habits and strategies along the way.

 

[uzakuz2]

I wouldn´t call what you were doing intermittent fasting. It´s just fasting, even if you did eat a little bit. Which of course gets you into ketosis but isn´t what keto is usually about as far as I can tell (I personally can´t eat that way healthily and so never read too much about it). I suggest that fasting will get your weight down pretty quickly (if you can stick with it) but it´ll take a lot of time afterwards to find healthy strategies to keep it off long-term. So I´m definitely a fan of doing things more slowly and developing those habits and strategies along the way.

I see your points. I did indeed more or less just take the best points of everything I heard instead of choosing one strategy and then blindly following it. I want to be free in that regard. Personally, I can't call what I did "fasting" with a good mind, because I ate. And I still would call it ketosis, because I only tried to eat fat plus protein in order to not get cravings and manage my blood sugar levels.
But yes, you are right. You can't really eat healthy with keto and/or fasting and I do need my vitamin pills daily, or else I'll get chipped lips. But I'm a student , I didn't eat healthy before, so no real harm is done when not doing it right now. In the end, my motivations for changing my diet are reducing sleepiness and weight loss. You remember, how I yesterday wrote about buying sweets and carbohydrates like bread rolls? Well, today a slept 12 hours. Glad I'm a student, would have gotten me fired else. I just can feel how eating makes me perform worse. But I'm addicted! When I go shopping, I stand in front of the shelves with sweets and I just can't decide on anything, because by now I ate from everything until I got nauseous, but I still crave it?! I mean, that is just irrational and an addiction in my opinion. But even knowing that, I still have to buy at least one thing when I have a craving. Hell, I had times where I ate pure sugar because of those cravings. And that is not something new. My parents never had sweets at home, so I would mix myself flour, sugar and butter and put it in the microwave to get a fast half raw dough of crumbles ... Another thing was mixing sugar and cinnamon, but oh boy, I ate until I got headaches, I guess because the cinnamon became too much. Plus the sugar also kinda dehydrates me. At least I become very very thirsty after a high carb meal. I have had days were I drank 12 liter of water! Currently I'm at roughly 6 liter per day, though.

Have you considered just counting calories for a while & losing slowly? You seem like a person who could do that if you set your mind to it

I'm glad you think that well of me already, but I doubt that. I'm more of a do it all or nothing guy. I mean, when I already go through the trouble of counting calories, why not reduce my trouble and increase my potential gain by eating less ? I guess the reason why I can keep my weight currently is, because I don't actually like to eat and/or cook. When I'm honest with myself.. nothing tastes good. I'm just eating out of habit, procrastination and addiction. I couldn't honestly say that I enjoy what I eat, and I still am adipose according to my BMI.

 

[Cate]

I'm glad you think that well of me already, but I doubt that. I'm more of a do it all or nothing guy. I mean, when I already go through the trouble of counting calories, why not reduce my trouble and increase my potential gain by eating less ? I guess the reason why I can keep my weight currently is, because I don't actually like to eat and/or cook. When I'm honest with myself.. nothing tastes good. I'm just eating out of habit, procrastination and addiction. I couldn't honestly say that I enjoy what I eat, and I still am adipose according to my BMI.

This saddens me a little. Food should be nourishing & delicious. Have you considered getting some help to restore your relationship to food? I'm still sure that you could get this under control in a healthy way if you set your mind to it. Seeing a nutritionist might be a good start, but wanting to is the first step. I'll have faith in you until you have it yourself

 

[uzakuz2]

Anyone here had experience with vomiting after eating Xylitol? I kinda ate a bit much of the cocoa Xylitol powder, it tasted quite good, so I ate it pure.

 

[feelinggooder]

I saw vomiting listed as a side effect here:
https://www.livestrong.com/article/61582-effects-consuming-xylitol/

Your diet looks pretty extreme to me compared to what I've seen from others that follow keto and/or IF. Seems like a mash of both that might not have gotten the best parts of either.

 

[Trusylver]

It is very much possible to remain keto with a healthy diet, you do not need to eat a ton of fat, fat does not put you into ketosis. Also don't chase high ketone readings, higher readings do not equal greater fat loss.