How to not lose too much weight while keeping Dr. Boz ratio low?

conversationstarters
(Elizabeth Blane) #1

Hello, all,

73 YO lady here with a potential suspicious lung nodule (cancer?) for which I want to keep my Dr. Boz Ratio very low, for any of you who are familiar with her work, for metabolic reasons of having ketones help with cancer cell death (along with my other treatments). I’ve been ketoing on and off since 2017, so fairly familiar with the diet. I do have pre-diabetes BUT can control it with the keto diet. I don’t need to lose weight; I need to keep my Dr. Boz ratio low (low blood sugar and high ketones) to do this. I can do it BUT I start getting too thin. I feel great, but it’s painful to be too bony. I’m 5’7" and currently 132 lbs., but have gotten down to 122 lbs, which to too thin for me. Whenever I eat less meat and fat to keep my Boz ratio low, I lose too much weight. When I eat more meat and fat to prevent weight loss, my Boz ratio goes up. Does anyone have any experience with this?

(Bob M) #2

That’s a tough one, because it can be hard to control ketones, and supposedly ketones are somewhat individual. That is, if you and I eat exactly the same diets, we could have two different ketone values.

One thing you could try is to eat more meat (which is good, as it has protein), but combine it with something that helps ketones, like MCT oils. You can get these relatively inexpensively, even in the store (look for coconut cooking oil, which should be a liquid at room temp). The detriment for those is that they don’t increase ketones for that long, only a few hours or so. You could also try exogenous ketones, but those are expensive (note: some of these will raise your ketones, but the meter won’t see those because the molecule is “reversed” and meter can’t read it).

The other thing to do is add more fat, particularly animal fat, if you can. I find this tough because fat and I tend not to get along, and it’s hard to find just fat. But you could figure out which meats are fattier (like beef chuck, dark meat chicken with the skin, bacon, etc.) and eat those, so when you do eat meat, you get the fattiest cuts.

You might try eating nuts, which have a lot of fat too.

How much will this help ketones? I’m not sure. Except rare occasions, my morning ketones are 0.2-0.5 mmol/l every morning (and my morning blood sugar is its highest for when I’m not eating), and they only go up over the day. I’ve tried both MCT oils and exogenous ketones, but I can’t test enough to tell you what actually happens when I use those. I need one of those continuous ketone monitors, which they don’t sell in the US yet.

(KM) #3

Have you tried increasing just fat? Adding butter or heavy cream or as Bob suggested, MCT oil?

#4

Why do you eat less meat AND fat? If you undereat, no wonder you lose weight. If you want high ketones, higher fat shouldn’t be the problem - as long as you are fine with that. It’s so very easy to eat tons of fat if one likes fat if you ask me, there are zillion options to do it, even without added fat (like butter, lard, coconut oil etc.)! If I want more fat (I have fat fast days sometimes, that’s 90% fat), I mostly just eat various kinds of fattier pork though I add a little butter and cream too as I love them.

(Bob M) #5

If you’re looking for higher ketones, it’s a hard calculation. Here’s a graph of someone from their continuous ketone monitor:

image
image.jpg699×756 104 KB

See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ketoscience/comments/1c6oow9/playing_with_continuous_ketone_monitor/

Now, I never come anywhere close to those high levels. But even with that, this person’s low is 0.4 and their high is 6.1. With pin prick monitors, I’m lucky to take two values per day. I’d love to know what my actual ketone values are over 24 hours.

And they are supposed to come out with a dual blood sugar/ketone monitor in one package, which I think would help. It seems to me that these travel in opposite directions: my morning blood sugar is higher and my ketones are lower; my evening blood sugar is lower and my ketones are higher. But that’s taking 2, maybe 3 data points per day. A blood glucose/ketone monitoring system might teach me something else.