How I broke my 3.5 year stall


(Edith) #21

We tried A2 milk for my husband. He normally drinks lactose free, so I had him try normal A2 milk. For him, it is definitely a lactose problem. He was a mess from the lactose-filled A2.


#22

Dairy isn’t a problem for me health wise… Just not good for fat-loss due to extra calories.
Surely they are just perfect for some people… But as many people have problems with them, no wonder it’s a common advice to try living without them for a while.


(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #23

Can you tell when lockdown started here?

So here’s how you return to a stall:

  • Eat anytime you like
  • Drink coffee and alcohol
  • Dairy, cheese, cream, etc
  • Go back to eating 90% dark chocolate with some allulose

At least for me, anyway. I should note that I’m still eating low carb. But one or all of these factors stopped the steady weight loss that I was experiencing under a strict ketogenic diet that removed all dairy and only had me cooking with animal fats (no butter) and eating just twice daily. That diet that worked was essentially meat, animal fat, garlic, cauliflower, bok choy, and berries. Maybe a couple of other things I’m forgetting.

I’m not saying you have to go that restrictive to lose weight, I could definitely eat a wider array of vegetables, but there’s no doubting the difference eating clean makes.


#25

Love that typo! :slight_smile:

Okay, seriously now:

Gabe, when you mention animal fats but specifically exclude butter, to what are you referring? Lard? And if so, used how in meal prep? Or are you simply meaning that you try to consume fatty meats?
Helpful post so thank you. I’ve settled into quite a stall (for a year or so?) and am guilty of pretty much everything you outline. So looks like I’d better plan on following your good example. If my results are similarly striking, I’ll let you know.


(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #26

Good to meat you, Annoula.

I can backchannel you a PDF of my current diet if you like. But to answer your question, when I say animal fats I use tallow and suet (beef and lamb fat, respectively) for cooking, not butter. I’m not saying that’s “the” answer, but it was part of the mix of things I did, as you can see above. I’ve been rendering my own suet by keeping some lamb fat on very low heat in a cast iron pot for a long period. Not sure if I’m doing it right, but it’s worked for me.

I was stalled for years. I do think that going back to basics is really the ultimate key. 2 meals/day max, strict ketogenic, only eating whole healthy foods, super clean eating, no alcohol or caffeine, no late night eating, no dairy (at least for the moment.)

Please do update me what happens for you either way, and I will keep this thread updated with my progress. I’ve definitely put on some lockdown weight and look forward to reporting back when I hit 75kg!


#27

That ‘meat you’ HAS to have been deliberate! Right up my corny alley :slight_smile:

Sure, I’d love to see your diet – thanks for the offer. As for tallow, I had to look it up since it just makes me think candles, but now I see: tallow is to beef as lard is to pork.
You’ve been rendering your own cooking fat from lamb suet, you mean? I’m truly envious if you can easily source suet (but you’re in New York where I’d imagine you can source just about anything if you try). I was raised with suet puddings and steak and kidney pie in suet crust, but since I live outside of the U.S. I struggle to try to source it.
As I said, my less-clean eating habits are quite similar to yours: one or two espressos a day, always with heavy cream (listen to the Italians fainting …) / other dairy in the form of cheese, including cream cheese / some chocolate, usually at the 70-80% range. And this summer, on vacation, one-too-many mini ice creams. I generally find keto easy and satiating, but living entirely without ice cream and onions (not together :-)) would add up to a life not worth living IMHO.


#28

Thanks for poiting it out (and the grated pun too), I totally missed both before.

Oh you punny folks :smiley:

I can’t buy suet (I don’t want it but I want to try brisket one day and it’s not something I easily can get either, oh well, I can wait) but when I had mutton, that produced a surprisingly high amount of tallow. Too bad I can’t eat tallow, it’s awful tasting to me, I give it to the animals. (The remaining fat in beef/mutton dishes is perfectly fine and even welcomed, it wouldn’t be proper meat without that.) But I am a lard fan (very convenient in Hungary) and avoid rendered fat as much as possible anyway.

I really hope my coffee isn’t a problem. I would be super proud if I just drank 2 coffees per day… But it’s not 10+ as in the past so I am mildly proud anyway. They are super weak so it’s probably fine. Still shouldn’t consume such useless things especially that they tend to bring cream… But when my eating is full with bigger problems, I don’t do that hard fight.

Hmm… Interesting idea though… I think I wondered about salty ice creams before…
I lost interest in ice cream somewhere on carnivore(-ish) but onions are basic. Keto allows me to eat them any time and amount I want but keto isn’t enough for me. But it’s part of my carnivore-ish too, I refuse not to eat stews. And I don’t know about other stews, Hungarian ones requires onions. Meat is optional, can be replaced with zillion other things but fat, onion and paprika is a must. It’s great higher-carb vegetables (and fruits) are way more flavorful than “keto friendly veggies” so way, way less is needed (for me, at least). (Nevermind that as a kid, I ate one big onion per egg in my scrambled eggs sometimes. More like eggy fried onions. It would be too sweet for me now.)

@gabe, good luck to reach 75kg! Well it’s just a saying, it’s not luck, rather your own effort but we always need a little luck too :wink:
I know what I should do to lose, I just can’t seem to stick to it for long for some reason. It’s a mental thing I am working on.


#29

I love lard, but have to go to a special Polish deli to find it here. Of course with both lard and suet, I’d use them in crusts which involve flour and that would be a keto no-no. They’d be way too tempting for me to have around!
I think if you look at the carb count, keto doesn’t allow ‘any amount’ of onions you might want. Or at least for me since I adore onions and any amount I might want could be very high. We have a classic stew here that is a bit of meat and the rest is browned, whole, small onions – a kilo or two of them for the entire recipe. It’s one of my favorite dishes but the only way I can eat a serving and not fall completely ‘off the wagon’ is to fast afterwards. And caramelized onions? I could just eat them plain – spoonful after spoonful after spoonful!


#30

@Gabe? By any chance can you (or another reader) point me to information spelling out why dairy, per se, is considered problematic for many? What I don’t quite understand is why it is separated out as a group rather than simply being evaluated according to its constituent macros.
I’m trying to be clear, but not succeeding I suspect ;-). What I’m trying to say is if I were to have heavy cream, for example, or avocado, and in both cases the macros involved in my servings were appropriate for my daily macro ratios, why would the avocado be a better choice?
Hopefully some bright soul here will figure out what I’m trying to say!
I’m happy with links or just a push in the right direction – don’t require spoon-feeding :slight_smile:


#31

Oh it totally does… I ate onions AND banana and zillion other carby things on keto. It wasn’t ideal for me and I stopped doing that in “bigger” amounts but I got into ketosis and reached fat-adaptation just fine with them as my total carb intake was low enough. If I want to avoid going high with carbs, I need to avoid lower-carb vegetables, they bring the zillion carbs. I use onions as important “spice”, they are very flavorful as I wrote and I need only a bit so they fit with all the other remaining plant matter I regularly use. I may even eat 6 different kinds of fruit and I stay way below 20g net carbs and I am in ketosis below 40g too… So onions are fine, just not carnivore so I only use them when I desire them, not just any time when it may make my food a tad more interesting but I don’t really need that.

You are right about those recipes, I saw the same on Hungarian sites… Almost as much onions as meat… But recipes are weird, fried liver recipes tend to use as much fat as liver too. I just ignore such things, omit this, reduce the amount of that…
I use as much onions as I enjoy and that’s way less than the amount of meat. If I wanted to go over my personal ketosis limit using a stew, well that would require the whole huge pot with more than 2kg meat. And I don’t eat that much. To stay below 20g, it’s half of it but I don’t eat only stew on any day.

I am creative enough if it’s about my food :slight_smile: I can make quite low-carb onion soups (a proper version includes onion, garlic, carrot and green pea, no other vegetables are used)…

I never had the misfortune to eat caramelized onions. Onions are very sweet to begin with and I have problems to have sweet stuff with my meat. Onions must come in the proper amounts and I prefer them with liver as they tend to be a tad bitter (but beef liver is quite sweet to me so not for that). It’s so good I live in a country where meat dishes rarely are sweet. Many people love meat with sour cherries, apparently (sour cherries are quite sweet, usually) but that’s a side dish and anyway, I rather don’t eat then, they typically pair it up with boiled beef, eww. That reminds me of bad old school lunches. I like my meat fried or roasted and fatty.

So nope, onions shouldn’t be the bulk of my stew. They are there to add a tiny extra flavor. It’s not a very small amount of onion per big pot but okay for a portion or two.
I had to be careful or creative with egg stew as it has onions AND tomato puree (eggs are a bit carby too but that’s fine). I usually use sour cream instead, the portion is way too tiny and it makes it pointless.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #32

There are three issues: (1) the fact that some milk products do have sugars (lactose and galactose, primarily) that count towards one’s carb allowance; (2) lactose-intolerance, which is the inability to digest milk sugars in adulthood (this is normal for human beings, unless they happen to have northern European or Maasai ancestry); (3) a sensitivity to one or more of the proteins found in milk.

Given that there are quite a few dairy products that contain little or no milk sugars, it is often point (3) that prevents certain people from enjoying dairy.

This makes sense in evolutionary terms. Most mammals, human beings included, stop producing lactase at some point after weaning and therefore do not consume dairy in adulthood. So a sensitivity to milk proteins would not have been weeded out by natural selection. It is only because of the two mutations that allow certain people to continue to produce lactase that dairy even came to be considered a food suitable for adult human beings.


(Jane) #33

I cook with onions all the time. 1/4 cup chopped is 4.6 g carbs and I doubt if I add 1/2 cup to dish for 2 people, so probably around 4 extra per serving. That may seem high for someone trying to keep under 20 but I am in maintenance and can eat more like 40-50 g and still be in ketosis - which is the very definition of a ketogenic diet. Some days I am nearly 0 carb - just depends.


#34

Hey @Janie – I cook with onions all the time, too, but, unlike you, I do aim for 20ish with carbs. When I was tracking really closely in order to get a better feel for how the carbs mount up, I was often surprised by how quickly I reached that target, or in other words, how tricky it was to stay under. And while 4 or 5 carbs doesn’t seem like much for a serving of onions, using up a quarter of my daily allowance for just a wee bit in an omelette meant pulling back elsewhere, often significantly. And of course for the onion-y stew I’d mentioned in the reply to @Shinita (don’t knock it until you try it!) a single serving would probably alone exceed my daily carb allowance. So, I’m jes’ sayin’ – for somebody like me, who really loves onions, they’re NOT something I can eat as much as I want of!


#35

@Paul, thanks for chiming in to answer :slight_smile:
I think I’d slightly misunderstood, then, when people suggested dairy, per se, could be a problem. I got it that certain dairy items were a problem because of the carbs in the sugars, but I made the incorrect assumption that those had already been weeded out! In my mind, then, we were talking about the less-carby dairy – like the heavy cream I personally am so fond of :-).
As for other stuff, like cheese, because I haven’t understood the problem enough to avoid dairy as a rule, I’ve just treated dairy like any other food category – weighed out what I wanted, calculated the carbs according to standard nutritional information, and eaten as much of them as my day could afford. Since I’m not lactose intolerant, nor sensitive to anything else in milk that I’m aware of, I’m concluding this has been an okay way to go about things. No?


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #36

I would say so, because that’s what I do! Heavy cream and butter are almost entirely fat, with very little, if any, protein, so they should be fine for almost everybody. The hard cheeses are those with the least amount of milk sugar, apparently, because it was all consumed in the fermentation process.

A few years ago, it was popular on these forums to talk about one’s “Phinney weight”—based on a comment Dr. Phinney made, in which he suggested that our “ideal” weight was the one we could get to and maintain easily, and “still have a life.”

My Phinney weight is considerably higher than the weight at which I would look thin and lovely. But I embarked on a keto diet primarily to reverse pre-diabetes, which goal has been achieved. Given that, and the fact that I did lose a fair amount of fat, I decided that I wasn’t going to struggle to convince my body to become even thinner. So it’s always a trade-off, and it’s just as valid to keep something enjoyable in your life as it is to decide to ditch it in the service of another goal.


#37

@PaulL, you and I are very much on the same page :-).

And while I’d never heard of it (but do know of Phinney) I LOVE the “Phinney weight” concept and it pretty much explains why I haven’t done an awful lot about my plateau. I lost enough weight to feel much better, and I definitely love my new life of no cravings, no headaches I’m fairly sure were low-blood-sugar related, and in general a steady, reliable level of energy. So while, no, I certainly can’t OFTEN eat as many onions as I might like :slight_smile: or that ice cream I also mentioned, I buy Jason Fung’s advice and sometimes, if the occasion merits it, I ‘let rip’ and have something just for the soul! I’m not thin and lovely either, but I’m cozy and grandmotherly and my health markers are pretty good and I still love food and life. That’s good enough for me – “you can never be too rich or too thin” never quite hit me right anyways :wink:


(Michael) #38

You are my favorite poster Paul, for everything you explain and share. However, kind of like showing your teacher up, I cannot help but note that Lactose is made up of galactose and glucose, which is confused with your statement :slight_smile:

Now carry on being an excellent poster


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #39

Thank you for the compliments.

You are right; lactose is indeed a disaccharide, composed of a molecule of galactose and a molecule of glucose—just as table sugar, sucrose, is composed of a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose. However, lactose is not digestible until it is cleaved by lactase into its component monosaccharides—there is an equivalent enzyme, sucrase, for sucrose. That is why the phenomenon of lactose-intolerance exists. (If I have it right, the symptoms of lactose-intolerance are the result of bacterial action in the intestine operating on lactose in the absence of lactase.)

A similar situation obtains with carbohydrates, by the way. All carbohydrates (with the exception of the sugars, at least) are made out of glucose molecules combined in various ways. Some of those combinations are inedible, and we call them fibres. For example, the human body lacks the enzyme cellulase, so cellulose is (to us, anyway) a fibre.

You can see why it doesn’t always pay to try to include all the small details, lol!


#40

HAH! This is that part where I should lie and say… see what I did there? LOL!


#41

Yeah, this is problem for people who eats significant amount of carbs in every dish :smiley: Since I tried carnivore and added meat, it’s not so hard to stay below 5g carbs if I wish (for the day, I mean) without any sacrifice on a meaty day (I can’t have a meaty day all the time though)… I am used to eating eggs and meat and not much else when I get hungry. (I am often not nearly as perfect but my main dishes are very low-carb, it’s habit and taste.)
So I can eat onions or fruits or whatever I fancy if I am fine with <20g net carbs… On my old keto, I had to be super careful and track all the time just to stay below 40g net carbs and vegetables made it very hard as they are quite carby (I always disliked most green leaves) and I wished to eat them in big quantities (on keto, I couldn’t, 40g net carbs just wasn’t enough for that).

I really love onions, that’s why I don’t do carnivore just carnivore-ish. I need my onions and tomatoes and others…
But they are usually very tasty (today’s onion wasn’t, I hope I didn’t change and lost the ability to enjoy it… though it helps with carnivore…) and more importantly, I went low-carb a decade ago… I trained myself, I changed… Now I am fine with ridiculous amounts regarding most carby items.
And if I really want to eat much onion, I just eat it, keto be damned :smiley: But I never want that. I want other stuff in bigger quantities, eggs and meat. I even learned to want only a tiny sour cream and only when there is a really good reason for it.

Our stew is enough onion-y for me, I don’t want a tastier dish than that! :wink: (And I would need a tastier meat for that, not more onions. I prefer my meaty dishes being very meaty, not full with plants.)
Even if I had to change a lot for this. It was needed. My inner hedonist (my core inner self, I can’t think and function without it, it’s almost me) hates compromises. It learns to enjoy the right food the best. Vaguely. It can handle the tiny plant matter so that’s fine. It would be bad for me if the food I want and the food that makes me feel best and healthiest would be quite different. I am lucky enough and I can adapt too, fortunately. But it takes time. Oh well, anything to be able to eat whatever I desire. Even being patient and train myself.