I sit here with a full belly following a 48 hour fast yet I’m staring at uneaten morsels and a big salad I couldn’t possibly choke down. I made too much. I’m still learning how to land this plane.
This was my third EF since I started Keto in early November, and I just wanted to share some thoughts and observations, if that’s alright with you.
This fast wasn’t planned. I’ve been doing OMAD lately and yesterday I simply didn’t feel like eating dinner so I figured what the heck, go for another 24 hours. It was easier than the first two (a 38 and a 50 hour), which themselves were surprisingly easy, considering the pre-Keto me couldn’t have imagined going more than 10 or 12 hours without eating. The only reason I broke the fast was because I had 14 ounces of steak threatening to spoil in the fridge.
So I lifted weights at hour 46 and cooked a mighty meal, a meal I wasn’t mighty enough to finish.
I prepared roughly 1700 calories but I probably only ate 1200 and I could have tapped out at 1000. The steak, dripping in grassfed butter and sunlightfed garlic, was roughly 800 calories alone. My satiety hormones kicked in as I rounded the corner towards the salad. Before that, however, I’d mixed an avocado up with onion, sardines, olives and mayo and used pork rinds as scoops. I finished it but the last few bites were laborious. It’s incredible how powerful proper fullness feels. I couldn’t possibly eat another bite. Ugh, get it away from me! What a welcome change from what used to be normal, wherein I’d gorge on rice or pasta or fruit or fries or pizza and would feel hungry a scant few hours later.
I guess it’s the difference between being hormonally full and literally full. Could my body physically accommodate more food? Of course. I’ve filled up my stomach to the point of bursting more times than I can say ‘are you gonna eat that?’ but I don’t feel bloated. Well, maybe a little. Those last few bites were unnecessary, but it feels healthy to know I ate until my body said stop. It’s such a better way to live.
Part of me knew I was overshooting, that there was no way i could finish all the food I was amassing for my post-fast meal, but I haven’t yet discovered the “right” amount to eat after a fast. Satiety, or a little past, seems okay after 48 hours of only ketoade and coffee. Next time I’ll dial it in a little more. Fourteen ounces of steak might not be the gentlest cushion on which to land. Still, it was worth every groan and eye roll to the back of my head. Does anyone else do that after fasting? Find food tastes like the wind in heaven?
I’ve been on a nice scale streak lately after struggling to get past 230 (6’3" SW 239 CW 225) for about four weeks. Had I not been working out a lot and given my body’s ability to grow muscle (the mesomorph body type seems to describe me well), I would have been more discouraged but I’ve been keeping calm and ketoing on. In the last ten days or so, I’ve watched the scale drop to 225. 25 more lbs to go and I’ll be bikini ready, just gotta shave my chest, belly and back.
I’m about 3 days past a two week holiday break including cross-country travel and lots of family time and restaurants. I didn’t track calories but I ate OMAD most of the time and never once succumbed to temptation.
In fact, one of Keto’s surprises that has now become grateful bemusement is how there is no temptation. It just isn’t a factor, not like on EVERY other diet I’ve tried. Even though I was around toast and jam, bread and butter, cookies and milk, cake and ice cream, plus a perplexed but patient family, I didn’t have a single moment of temptation beyond a passing pondering of how bad it would be for me, for my hard-fought weight loss, for my skin, my insulin levels and gut biome and on and on. I didn’t spend the last 9 weeks stoking my fat furnace into the buttered bacon burner that it is just so I could dump a bunch of carbs on the coals. Eating those foods is simply not an option.
If you knew the old me, it might appear that I suddenly have tremendous willpower. It’s a wonder how a man can sit surrounded by crunchy, slathery carbage and not partake but it’s not willpower, it’s just a new reality. It’s the same willpower required to not go to space. Sure, I’d like to but it ain’t happening. So there’s no struggle about whether or not it will happen. Not unless Elon Musk answers my letters.
My folks are carbohydrate vacuums, hoovering glucose and sugar into their mouths from breakfast to bedtime snack. After intensive research over the last two months, devouring articles, forums and podcasts like my life depended on it because, well, it kinda does, I found myself watching in horror as they, day after day, reached for the chips, the crackers, the pretzels, the grapes, the orange juice, the candy, the carbs, THE CARBS! Indulgence tends to go up around Christmas but it’s an eating pattern I would have joined in three months ago. Though I wanted to slap every nugget of insulin accelerant out of their hands, I was cautious not to judge. They are following old habits, outdated advice and familiar comforts. They are people. They are us. They are you. They are me. It’s not their fault their hormones are calling the shots, demanding constant input. In a way, it’s reminiscent of those parasites who completely alter the host’s behavior, hijacking the body and removing its agency in pursuit of some parasitic plot. But sadly, no, we can’t blame the tapeworms.
Rather, it’s an instinct incompatible with our “modern” food system. The drive to eat carbs to excess and our bodies’ corresponding ability to store said carbs for later in the form of fat is a beautiful thing. It made sense in a world of scarcity, in the world in which we evolved, one of uncertain food supply, but civilization has upended that balance, turning such an elegant, smart, life-saving thing – the ability to save energy for later – into a modern menace that plagues so many of our lives.
Not that I didn’t test their patience with my enthusiasm for this ‘Kedo thing or whatever.’ They listened but I think they, my dad at least, finally heard me when I told him I lost 4lbs over the two weeks. Over Christmas and New Years. While traveling. Put that in your party kazoo and smoke it.
He says he might give it a shot. I hope he does. His remaining twenty or thirty years appear a lot more dismal without it.
Hitting that wall tonight was yet another lesson in the power of natural systems of regulation. A lesson in learning to trust my body. Calling Keto a diet isn’t accurate. It’s a hormone management approach to health. At least that’s how I’ve taken to describing it.
I’m so grateful I’ve discovered and embraced a method of allowing myself to be governed by hormones in a way that supports and sustains health, that helps me lose weight, clears up skin issues, prevents afternoon comas, supplies a steady flow of productive energy, deflates my depression, keeps the anxiety that haunts me at bay, is giving me my confidence and hope back. Maybe I don’t have to be sad, fat and alone after all.
I’m new at this, I’m learning every day, but I’ve already accepted that it’s a way of life, one I doubt I could ever give up. I’m going to keep Keto and calm on.
Thanks for reading. Sorry for writing so much. I tend to do that.