Keto Priorities

(Michele) #1

First of all I want to thank The Keto Dudes for starting and maintaining this forum. It’s a hugely valuable resource and safe gathering place for those of us who are embarking on a keto WOE/WOL and those who are further on the journey. Also thanks to those of you with the admin hats you help to keep the wheels well oiled and the train on the track.

I’ve been reading lots of threads on the forum over the last couple of weeks. Here are my reflections.

If you come to keto with weight loss in mind and you don’t suffer any ‘metabolic derangement’ you are some of the fortunate and will likely benefit enormously. You will most likely lose weight and keep it off as long as you maintain this WOE and don’t return to the SAD. You will also reap the long term benefits when you stay keto.

If we come to keto and have a degree of metabolic derangement (IR / diabetes / prediabetes to name the first but not least) we may need to ask ourselves about our priorities. Many (myself included) come to keto to lose weight as a first priority. This is an excellent priority as there will be many benefits to losing weight. However the scales can become an obsession. Those of us who come to keto from this path may need to move to a different priority; that of metabolic healing - reducing/reversing and preventing the worsening of our metabolic derangement would be a beneficial primary focus. Letting go of weight loss as the primary focus is hard. Without metabolic healing (starting to sound like the words to a song) we cannot progress as far along the road of weight loss as we would like. We will be constantly frustrated by one plateau after another. Why oh why am I not losing weight? (wringing hands) I’m doing everything right, I’m a perfect 20g of carbs every day! What am I doing wrong? How can I fix this? (Please don’t read a tone of condesension here - these are heart felt pleas and desires.) All of this has gone through my head and I’m sure it’s gone through many other people’s thoughts too. Being impatient is part of modern life, we want everything now. However, like saving a deposit for a house it takes time, sometimes a long time.

I am now in a place where I have to look at these priorities and ask how I support myself in shifting priorities. Put away the scales maybe and use other ways of measuring progress (waist measurements, fitness, BP? Actually not so easy thinking about putting the scales away - it almost feels harder than sticking to keto when standing in a bakery sorrounded by bread and cake! (Which by the way is an awesome benefit of keto - no carb cravings and a meh/I don’t care about those carb smells perspective.) I think a first step for me might be move to weighing once a week. If I get brave enough I might move to once a month! It seems crazy the scales are the new addiction, while I don’t weight myself multiple times a day, it feels like to spin it out between weighings I will be somehow missing out!

I was struck by something @Richard said about healing adipose and it taking 10 years in total hypothetically - we cannot put the cart before the horse. Unless we heal and reverse as much of our IR as we can we are not going to see the weight loss goals of our dreams. For some there may never be a return to pre IR weight. I may one day have to face that one and for now it is keto on so as to stay calm.

#2

All the metabolic problems I have are related to insulin resistance. That’s why I’m here, more than weight loss. My doctor was surprised I wasn’t excited about reaching a recent weight loss milestone, but I told her I will be excited when my A1C is optimal and she got on board with that. I do record my weight daily as I fast as a rough proxy for calorie burn. But the numbers I’m ultimately watching every three months are my A1C and my fasting insulin. Besides being key measures of metabolic health, the advantage to them is they can’t be obsessively checked.

(Michele) #3

One of the questions I’m holding for myself is ‘What can I track other than weight that shows me my health progress’? I wasn’t ever diagnosed as T2D or pre-diabetic so don’t have those markers to track. The one that is most present for me is my aerobic fitness. I am slowly seeing gains in the time it takes to climb the hills in our local park (which I am grateful is walking distance from home), how quickly I recover and how much stronger my legs feel, how less exhausted my legs feel each time. Eventually I will add some other body weight exercises like push-ups (currently cannot do even one :frowning:).
One of the reasons I want to see my weight drop is to ease the stress on my joints. My mother had both hips replaced and also died of pancreatic cancer, so I have enough incentive to repair my system across the board.

#4

Timing a hill climb is excellent, I’d say. That’s a measure of functional fitness, and unless you’re a compulsive exerciser, healthy.

If you’re having trouble doing push ups, start with push ups against a wall or counter. You can adjust the difficulty by how far away you stand. Once arms-length away is easy, you should have the strength to do knee push ups. When those are easy, move to your feet. :slightly_smiling_face:

(mary6aros) #5

I agree. I started the Keto WOE August of 2016. I became obsessed with losing weight and lost sight of being healthy. I only realised that after my hair began to fall out in clumps and people started asking me if I was sick. I decided to change my eating habits and add more healthy carbs, added supplements, and things turned around.
About eight months ago we hit hard times financially, and eating this way became too difficult.( I have seven in my household, and it was cheapest to eat the SAD way.)
Long story short, I ballooned, got several other problems in my body, and finally decided to hop aboard the ketogenic train, but this time, to be healthy. Plain and simple.

(Michele) #6

Thankfully no compulsion, I am at the stage where I want to do the climb, I want to add on another path, I look forward to it. Also very fortunate that the paths up the hill are in bush and very tranquil. Been doing the daily hill climb (should add the daily path/track is less that 15 minutes now) for 3 weeks and the improvement is very gratifying. Once a week I’ve added a much longer track about 20-30 minutes all uphill. I really enjoy doing that by myself (normally go with DH). It allows a lot of time for reflection.
Will experiment with the push ups shortly. Thanks for the recommendations.

#7

I tried avoiding the scale for 1 full week before. It was insanely hard and I was seriously freaking out. By the end of the week I was getting pretty cranky. Guess I have a problem :unamused:

(Michele) #8

My first week will be forced upon me. I’m going to a workshop away from home for a week. No scales and will leave me BG/Ketone meter at home as well. Hopefully I will be too busy to think too much about it.

(Richard Morris) #9

I can think of 3 metabolic markers of health that will precede weight loss - potentially by years.

If you have become pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic then HbA1c is the first. Get it under 5.6% and your pancreatic function will likely be trending healthier, and of your HbA1c is above that then likely trending unhealthier - no matter how slow the trend.

Once your HbA1c is healthy … the next step is how much insulin do you have to make to control your glucose.

The most popular marker of insulin resistance is the HOMA:IR which is simply (fasted glucose * fasted insulin)/22.5 and gives you a number that measure your insulin sensitivity against a reference human - which is a 35 year old man with no insulin resistance.

One you are making less insulin when you eat nothing, the next step is to make sure that when you normally feed, your insulin swings through a healthy cycle between fed state and fasted state.

One biomarker that can give you a window into that is triglycerides over HDL. This looks at how deranged your lipids need to become to deal with consistently high insulin. Trigs measure the fat that your adipose releases above the amount your cells use for energy. High insulin inhibits using fats for energy. Once your insulin adequately swings low your trigs drop because they are being adequately used. HDL is the lipoprotein used up to take out the trash in arterial walls. That trash apparently collects when insulin is high and is taken out when it’s low. So you need swings between both high and low insulin to appropriately use HDL in this role (and I’m sure HDL has multiple roles - but this one directly relates to atherosclerosis).

When you are efficiently collecting trash you have a lot of trash collectors on the road. When there is just no trash being collected by householders, or the neighbourhood has turned into an episode of hoarders and they are collecting it but not putting out their trash - you don’t need trash collectors.

And then finally there is weight. Once you have dissociated obesity from the diseases that usually travel with it - like type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardio vascular disease - then being overweight becomes a cosmetic state and not a disease state.