Ilana's beef binge buster thread

(Susan) #58

Awesome, Ilana, I am happy for you that it is going down =).

(mole person) #59

Thanks @Momof5. I knew it would go down fast since I’m pulling on every single one of my “levers” except fasting. I’m doing this thread more for documentation purposes (and accountability).

I haven’t actually been tracking any macros in part because I want to ignore calories, but now I’m finding that I’m quite curious. I will make an attempt at tracking for the remainder of the experiment. My guess is that I’m under 1000 calories a day, but I might be way off.

(mole person) #60

Lol… I was totally wrong. I had about 1400 calories today. Wow. That’s actually surprising.

63 g protein
122 g fat
2 g carbs

Edit: Numbers corrected. I’d forgotten the bone broth.

(Susan) #61

That is excellent though, and is obviously working =).

(mole person) #62

@PrimalBrian Here are the pictures you asked for.

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That was three beef ribs. I ate one rib for lunch and one rib for dinner resulting in the macros in the post above (my husband had the third). I ate very little of that fat chunk. The rib had a lot of fat on it. Much more than it appears in the photos.

(mole person) #63

For anyone who’s interested in having a higher fat to protein ratio without getting a lot of fats from oils and rendered fats such as butter, lard and tallow, I wrote a post this morning about my more regular diet and how I prepare my meats in general.

#64

Wonderful! Thank you for doing this. This is what I was hoping to see (rare-ish). I know exactly what you mean about warming up in the microwave (not too much). Great stuff! :smiley:

(mole person) #65

Day 8:

I’ve already posted what I ate yesterday. It was over the top delicious. It’s a weird thing about this way of eating. The deliciousness of the meat pops more and more with time away from spices, much the same way that sweetness does after some time on a keto diet. I’m practically drooling right now thinking about my next meal even though it’s just another beef rib :joy:.

My ketones were still at 4 mmol exactly at 5 pm yesterday.

Weight this morning was 105.8 lbs. -5.4 lbs in 8 days.

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(mole person) #66

Wow, finally! It took eight days for my ketones to return to my normal reading.

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(Susan) #67

Congrats Ilana!

(mole person) #68

Thanks Susan! :slightly_smiling_face:

(mole person) #69

I see a lot of people in this forum, especially women, who are around my age (52) or older running into a similar issue that I did on my fat loss journey. They set a goal weight based on the weight that they were the last time they were the leanness that they’d like to see again, but when they get there find that they aren’t even close to that goal leanness.

For me I wanted to get back to how I looked in my 30’s. I remembered being around 115 lbs then. But when I got there I was not even close.

I immediately realized something I should have known based on my knowledge of aging. We all lose muscle and bone as we age. In post menopausal women it’s particularly extreme. In those who aren’t exercise fiends its actually quite precipitous. We hear about the dangers of allowing it all the time but most of us actually fail to address it because it’s hard work. I am one such. I go through phases of working out a lot but then I stop usually for many months at a time.

So by fifty, especially as a woman, my muscle and bone lean mass is quite a significant amount less than at thirty. Thus, when I hit my target weight I was still a full ten pounds fatter than I had been in my thirties.

This was shocking. To achieve the level of lean that I was happiest at I actually have to be lighter than I was at 14 yrs old. Nothing makes me want to push weights around more than this scary and very real fact.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #70

I am also near the weight I was at 15. I made a very similar statement on a thread about goal weight the other day. At 45 I weighted 168, I was cycling everywhere around town and also rode for recreation and enjoyment. On and off road. I slipped out of the habit while I was on dialysis, my energy slumped and went towards taking care of my autistic son 5 days a week. I gained significant weight on the foods I had to live on while I was on dialysis. I started keto a year ago at 205 lbs with a goal to get back to my cycling day’s weight. When I started to approach that weight I realized how much muscle and bone mass I had lost in 15 years. So I figured maybe 10 lbs more might be right. I lost that and still have significant abdominal fat and gynecomastia. I am now at 151.5 and still need to lose fat but I don’t really want to lose much more weight and need to up my muscle mass. I have hyperparathyroid issues that make me fatigued I believe and it’s hard to overcome armchair inertia. I’m seeing my nephrologist in a week to discuss the issue. I feel I may have been misdiagnosed and have been living with fatigue for years as a result. I hope I can get sorted out and feel more energy to help reach my goals. Things are so much harder to recover as we age, I admire your resolve, you are inspirational and very realistic about getting where you want to be physically. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Susan) #71

Both of you, @Ilana_Rose and @David_Stilley are an amazing inspiration to me and I admire and respect you both very much.

I wish you both health, happiness, longevity and all the best =).

(mole person) #72

Thank you both for your kind words :hugs:.

@David_Stilley I hope you figure out your fatigue issue soon. Has keto helped it at all?

(Full Metal KETO AF) #73

It helped when I started, lasted quite a while too. But I could tell something was still off. At first I thought, well you can’t expect to feel like you did 25 years ago, you’re almost 60 now. But I know other people my age and older who function better and don’t get burned out like I do. I realised I was 50% or so improved so I figured I just needed more time. Now it’s been a year on Keto next September 7, and I have started to reevaluate my health, why I still need blood pressure medicine, can’t get below a fasting glucose number of 112, still not getting as good of sleep as I should, have chronically elevated serum calcium levels as well as way high PTH levels and some other issues that I thought would be sorted out by now. The high calcium and elevated PTH are an sure sign of Primary Hyperparathyroidism, I was diagnosed with secondary years ago because of reduced renal function and being on dialysis which is common. But secondary is always accompanied by reduced serum calcium levels. It’s impossible to have elevated serum calcium with Secondary Hyperparathyroidism. Primary and secondary are polar opposites of each other and I believe that I was misdiagnosed because of my renal status. Elevated calcium above 10.0 in the blood is very dangerous and it will kill me in the next ten years if I can’t get it down through a stroke, heart or other organ failure. It’s in the statistics and elevated calcium is considered more of a vascular disease issue that cholesterol ever was even during the “cholesterol is evil years”. I am pretty worried about sorting this out right now especially with all the hard work I have put in changing my lifestyle. I did this to help extend my life. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Empress of the Unexpected) #74

True dat. I’m happy and feel great, lugged around 50 pound sacks of dirt yesterday, but my belly still hasn’t gotten the memo. I may weigh what I weighed at 18 but it’s all a different shape. I look decent for 61, but obviously weight loss is not the answer. Just strength training. No goal, the weight loss just happened.

(mole person) #75

This is interesting. I don’t measure fasting glucose (although I very much want to start soon now) but my blood pressure and heart rate were not improved on keto and my sleep is without question worse.

I AM significantly improving my blood pressure and heart rate on a keto carnivore diet. But sleep has not yet followed suit. I do recognize that I need far less sleep while keto. It’s not the shorter hours of sleep that bother me. It’s that most nights I wake up nearly once for every hour that I sleep.

Have you given any thought to trying a few months of only meat and fat? I know it’s extreme but you seem to care a lot about your health and it may be a stone worth turning over. No harm comes of a three month trial.

A lot if things are way better for me on keto carnivore than they were on keto. Trust me, I’d be back to eating vegetables in a heartbeat if this weren’t true.

(mole person) #76

That sucks. I have managed to get back a figure that’s better than any I’ve had since my 20’s but I’m 9 years younger than you and sarcopenia really kicks up as we age. The good news is that it’s somewhat reversible, the bad news is that it’s hard work and difficult to stick to. I know I’m not even close to dedicated enough right now to prevent year over year lean losses.

I think you are making the right choice. Work on muscles, you can lean out more later. Otherwise you’ll just look skinny, even if you still have fat.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #77

Okay one by one, BG… I don’t measure all the time but do regular fasting blood labs. I used to do labs twice a week after my transplant. They start to do it at longer intervals as time goes by. I was monthly for a long time and during my first 6 months of keto. I saw my 14+ hour fasting BG go fairly steadily down each month except last December (before the holiday) it jumped up and started declining again in January. I also have a quarterly HbA1c. I have gone from unhealthy to a healthy number but my three month average BG was 112. And my 14+ hour fasting BG was also 112! So when do I ever dip below 100? I know at some point I must be dropping below 112 but that is my number at 14 hours fasting so weird. Many experts claim you can’t be in ketosis with BG and likely insulin levels I have. I get urine testing at the same time and there are always some ketones there. I would be dead by now if I weren’t in ketosis so I must be. I know I must have significant insulin resistance still after one year. I also know my numbers are elevated and things are slow to progress because I am doing keto and taking steroids.

I have had to eat closer to carnivore the last 6 weeks because of ongoing dental implant and denture adaptation to work together so I cannot chew food now. Lots of ground beef, lamb and loose bulk sausage, eggs and cheese and only avocado occasionally and tomatoes everyday from my garden. Not much in the vegetable area, a little cauliflower mash or broccoli cheese bake occasionally. I know that isn’t carnivore but it’s 90% less vegetables than before. I have lost more weight without them the last 6 weeks. Problem that has just come up is that I have upped my cheese intake from about 45g. a day to more like 60-90g. or more sometimes because it’s easy to eat it. I started having an autoimmune response of dry flaky skin on the nape of my neck, side of my nose and around one eye socket and eyebrow plus where my sideburns are. This used to happen when I drank a lot of milk, my dad has the same problem and told me to cut out drinking milk. Cheese hasn’t ever been a problem but I have been eating a lot.

Sleep has been a problem long before keto. In fact it was quite a bit worse before than now. I almost never slept through a night. In recent years I would wake up every night between 1:30-2:30 with really bad muscle twitching in my biceps and thighs. I mean disturbing stress inducing bad. I had to get out of bed and move around. This became my dishwashing hour. I would always snack on crackers or buttered white toast (renal diet) and my muscles would calm down, I would get sleepy and go back to bed (lucky I lived alone or some woman would have hated me!). Going keto this magically stopped almost right away. I had been taking drugs for restless limb syndrome for years without relief. Dropped those quick. Interestingly salt being low now triggers the exact same effect for me? Now when it happens I wash down some pink rocks and get back in bed and fall asleep fast. But I still don’t sleep any more hours than I did pre keto, 5-6.5 hours most nights max. I kept reading about others getting better sleep and it never really happened except I don’t have to wake up to eat carbs anymore!

Leading to Carnivore: Yes, been thinking on a longer go at pure carnivore for a while. I would have a pretty tough time going into it on a Beef and salt only protocol but eating a variety of meats, eggs and maybe some dried herbs and spices might be a doable break in, maybe weening off the spices some as time goes on, and of course coffee would probably be involved too. I wonder how necessary it is to stick with animal fat only? Does coconut oil and olive oil really interfere with the efficacy of a Carnivore based keto diet? I think I really need to go dairy free mostly to see what that difference is, I obviously have some inflammatory responses happening lately from the Cheese I think. I don’t have any reason to believe there is an issue with eggs or the oils. Spices figure heavily in my cooking style (ex pro) and I know I talk big about not treating yourself with food, but spices are the joy and the artistic expression in my food. Maybe that’s just as bad of an addiction for me as sugar is to others. But when I get the teeth going again soon a good Carnivore trial is on the agenda. My main interest is to see how plant anti nutrients might be affecting me too so a period without the herbs and spices will be in order if I truly believe in nutrition over pleasure. :cowboy_hat_face: