What is the reason for the night sweats? I notice on zero carb I get them sometimes and will pay attention to how much protein I’m eating (I’ve been trying to show a little more moderation with my protein lately). I am curious why it occurs.
A really extended fast: going for 46-days!
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#431
I believe that @richard has mentioned numerous times that protein takes more internal energy to burn which is good and bad. Using more energy also means generating more heat so, especially eating too much protein before bed, could lead to all of that protein causing too much warmth at night!
I have seen a direct correlation, now that I am tracking EVERYTHING I am eating, that when I exceed my protein amounts, especially when eating late, I get the ‘meat sweats.’
BillJay
#432
It’s called the thermic effect of food, which is separate from generalized thermogenesis.
The thermic effect of food has to do with the digestion, whereas thermogenesis is caused by an uncoupling protein in the mitochodria of mostly brown fat (Brown Adipose Tissue, aka BAT) and to a much lesser extent in white fat (White Adipose Tissue, aka WAT).
Protein is often quoted as 4 calories per gram, but in fact protein contains 8 calories per gram - it’s just that 4 calories is being burned to digest the protein, so the net is 4 calories.
In other words, 50% of the true calories from protein as being burned off just to digest it and at some point (YMMV), that is noticeable as heat.
I’m another one of those who doesn’t do well eating protein in the evening and it even disrupts my sleep as well as keeping my heart rate higher until later in the night as shown by my Oura ring’s data logs.
roxanna
(roxanna)
#433
Thanks all! I don’t find it disruptive because it isn’t heavy sweat, but good to know the reasoning.
JohnD
#434
@BillJay you say > but in fact protein contains 8 calories per gram
Do you have some links with more details?
I poked around a bit but it appears that the 4 cal / gram is swamping out this bit.
BillJay
#435
Richard just addressed this in a recent post. It’s not quite 8 as I had read in the past, but it is a lot more than 4.
The energy of combustion of protein is not quite 8, but it is a lot more than 4.
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#436
Day 59 of my experiment, completed 46 days fasting and am now 12 days feasting and now onto feast/fast cycling as I begin a 2 to 3-day fast today. My attempt to control my protein blew up so I have to rethink my plans! Here are my numbers for today:
I mentioned earlier that I was having ‘meat sweats’ from having too much protein too late in the day as protein tends to generate extra heat when being metabolized especially when it is excess protein not needed to rebuild tissues. My weight also shot up from that faux pas and that did not make me very happy.
So now I’m back to a very comfortable area of fasting for a few days just to let my system get back to normal. I was planning to fast next week but our plans for dinner with our granddaughter have been moved to Tuesday because of her finals schedule. That means I can actually fast 3 to 4 days if I really want! We will be having a late lunch with her before she drives across the state to go home for the summer.
A nice thing about using MyFitnessPal for tracking what I eat is that I can now go back and review all of the foods I’ve been eating and see which ones I can get more fat and less protein from. For instance: eggs have a fat/protein ratio of about 1:1.1, bacon was 1.1:1, whereas the breakfast sausage was 2:1. My ribeye steak had a ratio of 1:2 which was a lot of protein.
The hard cheese I like to snack on is protein heavy at 1:1.4 but Carl’s Chocolate mouse is extremely fat heavy at 12:1. Another favorite is macadamia nuts that measure at 12:1 as well but they have a bit more carbs so that is something else I will need to watch.
All in all, I think that if I plan to have beef for 1 meal a day and do eggs and bacon or sausage of another meal I may be able to keep my fat high while keeping protein in check.
One of the other mistakes I made yesterday was thinking I could add some cheese snacks (Grok’si) which I love but it turns out that a serving is half a bag, (Gee, where have we seen this before?) and being a hard cheese it is protein heavy. That and a 5 oz burger patty had my supper almost at my protein limit for the entire day! I need to plan ahead!!!
Barbara_Greenwood
(Barbara Greenwood)
#438
All the best to you, Ron, as you get back into fasting. Did you find the first few days of your long fast difficult? It will be interesting to see if this feels harder or easier. I think most people would assume it will be easier because you know it’s only a few days, but I just wonder if knowing you had committed to the 46 days helped your resolve in the first few days when you were experiencing hunger.
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#439
Barbara, the first few days of the long fast were a bit easier as I was committed to the long fast. I did have ideas about options for how to do the fast circulating through my head like, technically, Lent does not include the Sundays or it can be seen as Lent ending on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter.
I decided to just go with the flow and see where it took me and it ended up being easier than I originally feared once I got going!
The very beginning of the fast, the first few days in March, there wasn’t any physical hunger but just the breaking of the habit of eating. As I said in one of the early posts, I had a bad habit of snacking during the day even on mostly keto things like macadamia nuts and I had put on about 20 pounds.
In my 12 days of feasting after the long fast I am amazed to see the changes in my eating patterns up to and including snacking once again. Yesterday, the first day of a 3-day fast was again, very easy with no physical hunger.
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#441
Day 60 of my experiment, on my second day of a 3-day fast. I previously completed a 46-day fast and then 12 days of feasting; now onto feast/fast cycling. I was really surprised by my blood numbers this morning as my glucose was the highest I’ve seen since the first of the year! Here are my numbers for today:
My first blood glucose and ketone reading this morning was 127 mg/dl (7.1 mmol/l) and 0.4 respectively. Knowing that the home meters do have an error range, and more importantly, the test strips can sometimes vary quite a bit, I decided to do another test with a different finger and different strips. The new numbers were not as extreme but the glucose was still the highest I’ve recorded this year. Glucose: 118 mg/dl (6.6 mmol/l) and ketones: 0.6 mmol/l.
I fasted yesterday, technically a fat fast as I did have 2 coffees with ¼ cup of heavy cream in each resulting in about 400 calories from fat for the day. I had the second cup about 8 PM and am not sure if that may have had an adverse impact on my numbers. Today, I am going just water and black coffee with no cream to allow my body to relax and settle into fasting a bit better. We will see what happens tomorrow morning.
I am not very active as I work from home and don’t have a gym membership. I do get out maybe 2 to 3 times a week for a 20-30 minute walk but not much exercise on a normal basis. This morning was different. We had about 11.1 cubic yards of mulch delivered last weekend and have been working on it a bit at a time. This morning we tackled about 89 bags or 6.6 cubic yards of the total: with our son’s help to distribute the bags, my wife and I dumped and spread mulch for about 3 hours! We finally stopped when the full Florida sun warmed things up enough to make it miserable!
I do feel a bit sore and stretching is helping but I felt this way last weekend when I spread 31 bags by myself and was amazed at how fast I healed. I really felt much better the next day! I have to work at bingo tonight and will keep stretching so my muscles don’t stay too sore.
Someone on the forums asked me if the first couple of days of my long fast were any more difficult than the first days of other fasts? I replied that the commitment I had made to complete the fast made the start a bit easier and I even had plans on how to modify the long fast if I needed to. Technically since it was a Lenten fast there are numerous ways of observing Lent. It is typically 40 days long but there are 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday so there are 6 days to play with. Many people look at the Sundays in Lent as feast days so I could have eaten on Sundays. Others claim that Lent ends on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, so Holy Week would not be included in the Lenten observance. Yet others say the Holy Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday the 3 days before Easter are not part of Lent.
I decided to make it easy and just fast for all 46 days! My only rule was “If I didn’t feel good, I would end the fast!” It worked for me.
My current 3-day fast began yesterday and I didn’t have any problem going without eating. I had no hunger and it felt a bit comforting as my body obviously remembered how I felt on the long fast when I had no hunger as well.
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#442
Day 62 of my experiment, on my first feast day after a 3-day fast. I did miss my update post yesterday and I ended my fast at about the 71 hour point with a nice bone-in ribeye from Longhorn! Here are my numbers for today:
Working with my wife’s scheduled we had a coupon for Longhorn that expired today but we didn’t have time to go there today so decided to use the coupon yesterday. Tomorrow we are doing a 6-hour round trip to see our oldest granddaughter before she leaves college to go home for the summer. I am working this fast/feast cycling around my personal schedule so I will get to ‘switch it up’ on a regular basis and still fit most personal plans into my eating.
My glucose numbers were still high for me today so I will feast for about 48 hours, ending Tuesday after a late lunch with our granddaughter, and then fast about 72 hours until Friday evening or so when we are on our anniversary trip together. As I said, I am using the cycling thing to include all of the fasts I want around all of the personal events that happen! This will make life a lot easier.
My wife’s only request is that I let her know when I am fasting so she can make her plans as well. I am trying to do most of my fasting during the week but with the busy weekends we often have it doesn’t really matter which days I choose, it will work out. Being that the intention is to cycle, I will not always do 48 or 72 hours like I am beginning but I will look into anywhere from 1 to possibly 4-days for each cycle and change them up often.
I read a couple of interesting articles over the weekend that I may incorporate into my plans as well. First, a May 2008 blog from Dr. Michael Eades, the co-author of “Protein Power,” whom is one of the experts I really enjoy reading. I will post the links as comments on my Facebook posts.
Dr. Eades talks about the LCHF diet ant the tendency for people to think that as long as the foods they are eating are high in fat and very low in carbohydrates then they must all be good—but this is far from the truth. We do need to be reasonable with what we eat and I really like the term he used for ‘hedonistic’ snacking! Yes, I can identify with that: snacking for the pure self-gratification and pleasure of snacking!
He mentioned that the worse snack items are cheese and nuts—again, I can identify with those 2 right away. I remember many times hearing Dr. Stephen Phinney casually mention that we need to limit cheese to no more than 4 ounces a day and about 2-3 ounces of nuts as well.
Why do we need to limit these? Because they are a slippery slope, like Lay’s potato chips “You can’t eat just one!” Oh yes, let me tell you, I can easily sit down and eat ounce after ounce of nuts or cheese. Cheese actually fills me up faster but put me at a manager’s evening event in a hotel and I can go for a good plate of those cheese cubes. Knowing that 3 cubes is about an ounce I should limit myself to no more than 9 cubes: well, that is good for the first plate! And what about the cheese I had on my omelet that morning, or the cheeseburger, with extra cheese since I’m on the ketogenic diet, I had for lunch? Did I just ‘forget’ about all that cheese as well?
Nuts are a whole other thing, they don’t fill me as well as cheese does so I could probably go through a whole 11 ounce bag of macadamias in one sitting or even spread out over a day. And who says that I couldn’t do both excessive nuts and cheese in the same day? So, what to do about this hedonistic snacking? What is the best answer?
I have set out to be very honest with tracking what I eat in MyFitnessPal. I am also determined to STOP SNACKING and include these, purely pleasurable, trouble foods in my normal meals only. This way I am maintaining accountability to myself just like these daily updates do for me as well.
I have been successful for the last week or so and I am hoping that the fast/feast cycling will help me stay in line as well.
Oh yes, I am not the only one that has this misconception, in a June 2008 follow-up to the original blog, Dr. Eades begins with a letter from an exasperated dieter:
A lady from New England wrote to us complaining that she had diligently followed our low-carb diet to the letter yet, had lost only four pounds over the first few weeks of the program. She included her food diary to show that she was indeed doing a low-carb diet. Here it is:
BREAKFAST: a four-egg omelet with cream cheese, five or six pieces of bacon or sausage, and coffee.
MID-MORNING SNACK: 4 ounces of nuts and 2 to 4 ounces of cheese.
LUNCH: a large bowl of tune or ham or chicken salad make with real mayonnaise, a bag of pork rinds, and a diet drink.
MID-AFTERNOON SNACK: nuts and cheese again.
DINNER: a 16 ounce piece of prime rib, a green vegetable, and a small salad.
DESSERT: sugar-free gelatin and whipped cream and coffee.
When we received this letter MD [Ron - Mary Dan his wife and co-author] and I wanted to shake this woman and say: Does it not surprise you that you’re not gaining weight on your diet? I’m sure the only reason she lost the 4 pounds was that she dumped a bunch of excess fluid as a result of her insulin falling. If you run the calculations you will find that this woman was eating somewhere around 5,000 calories per day. She was definitely not creating a deficit. And she wasn’t losing…but she wasn’t gaining either.
Jacquie
(Jacquie)
#443
@ron-coleman Especially enjoyed your post today as I started lc in the mid-90’s with Eades Protein Power and read Mike Eades’ blog from time to time. Found myself agreeing with him and you regarding nuts and cheese. A slippery slope indeed! I think you’re a great example of someone who makes fasting work despite your busy work and personal life. 
Chris_W
(Crow T. Robot)
#445
I had to switch to raw nuts (almonds, walnuts) because I can eat the roasted and salted kind until I burst. Cheese is much more satiating, thank goodness, but I still have to watch it.
MKChitown
(Michelle)
#446
Great reminder. Slippery slopes. I can totally manage my nut intake, it’s the cheese and dairy that is a weakness. I have it with most meals.
May will be a “lower dairy” month for me. I’m consciously making choices to have less. I cannot go to “none” right now, so working on less.
Debby
#447
What a great thread, Ron! I haven’t been on here in ages and it took a long time to catch up reading. Thanks so much for sharing your experiences and for the great podcast interview!
ron-coleman
(I am a Dog (Dog's eat until they burst!))
#448
Day 63 of my experiment, on my second feast day after a 3-day fast. Took a 6-hour road trip to see our granddaughter today and actually ate 3 good meals! Did I also mention that I fasted for all of Lent, March 1 to April 16, 2017? 46 days! Here are my numbers for today:
I have been including my journal from MyFitnessPal showing what I’ve been eating each day and have changed it up a bit so that the journal I post is from the day before and you can then see what happened to my weight and blood glucose and ketones the next morning. Just seems to make more sense to me. Plus, depending on what time I do the update I may actually eat something after that so posting the previous day’s journal.
Yesterday I talked about a couple of blog posts my Dr. Michael Eades and there is another current study that just came out last month, April 2017, that was studying the hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin in people with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and since I feel that I am still very insulin resistant, one of the major factors in T2D I was interested in how my body decides if I am hungry or not.
Leptin is our satiety hormone, it tells the hypothalamus in our brain that we have eaten and are full. Leptin is actually made by our adipose, fat, tissues and I like to look at it that if we are adding more fat then we are storing energy so we must not be hungry! The problem comes when the brain becomes leptin resistant and doesn’t get the signals to stop eating. This is very common with obese individuals like me especially ones with insulin resistance and/or T2D.
Ghrelin is our hunger hormone, it tells the hypothalamus that we are hungry and need more food. Ghrelin is created in our GI tract so if there isn’t much in the way of digestion to do, or the process is slowing due to lack of energy then more ghrelin is secreted.
The study titled “The effect of meal frequency in a reduced-energy regimen on the gastrointestinal and appetite hormones in patients with type 2 diabetes: A randomised crossover study.” Looks at persons with T2D and their eating patterns. Two different diets, both hypocaloric, lower in calories, are given either as 2 large meals: breakfast and lunch or as 6 smaller meals throughout the day. In both cases, the same number of calories are consumed during a day.
The conclusions are interesting and show that the group eating the 2 meals a day had a higher fasting ghrelin. That means that the subjects woke up more hungry and were able to eat the large breakfast and then the lunch later in the day and were still able to lose weight!
The group who ate the 6 smaller meals had lower fasting ghrelin and had troubles eating first thing in the morning and had a bit of difficulty losing weight!
So how does this impact me? It tells me that eating fewer times a day allows my hormones to work better and helps me lose weight. Eating 6 times a day never allows your body to get hungry whereas eating only 2 times, but larger meals, allows for a longer period of fasting between lunch and breakfast the next day which allows the body to work its magic and lose more weight. Hmm, sounds like intermittent fasting (IF) to me!
So, back to the ‘hedonistic snacking’ that Dr. Eades mentioned in his blogs; snacking for any reason, especially pure pleasure, defeats what it is that I am trying to do which is to lose weight! Snacking undermines my attempts to become healthier.
As I write this I am feeling guilty because on the way home from our road trip I had a nice dinner of 6 ounces of almost fatty brisket and some hot sauce (they were really nice and gave me a 45% discount because I didn’t have any sides) but I still went into the pantry upon getting home and grabbed some macadamia nuts to snack on. I didn’t need them, I wasn’t hungry, I wanted them and I know it was a mistake!
As I said yesterday, I need to include the foods I snack on with my meals so I can enjoy them, not feel like I can’t have them, but include them at the right time. I could have some nuts as an appetizer or a dessert. I also love 90% cocoa chocolate and I may have that sometimes as a dessert.
One of the big goals I had when I started my 46-day fast was to get better control over my impulsive and hedonistic eating habits and thankfully writing these updates really help me to see where I am making my mistakes!
I didn’t start my fast this afternoon as I planned, but I will this evening. I will fast until sometime on Friday when we leave for our anniversary celebration up the coast! 2+ days fasting, then 3 days feasting – with control hopefully, and then back home for a few more days of fasting to keep the fast/feast cycling going!
Onto better eating!
Bill_Cube
(Bill Cube)
#449
Any news on this (or did I miss it ?), was there any significant deficiency ?