Keto & then back to old habits

(Alan Williamson) #21

Sugar and carbs send a signal to the brain that blocks a signal to the body telling it that it is full. For example, I can eat a whole 1/2 gallon of ice cream that has HFCS, and not get “full”. I will feel sick afterwards. That is what stops me from eating more. A sirloin steak, I eat 8-10oz, I feel full. I can’t eat more. For myself, I don’t have the ice cream and what not in my house. I just stay away from it. If I eat some, I feel hungry then eat more. It just ruins the day. Further, if I eat 3 meals a day for weeks, I will gain weight. I have to fast a couple times a week for 36 hours to stay lean.

(VLC.MD) #22

2 months of under 10 carbs to get into ketosis ?
That’s the longest I’ve ever heard of ! But I’m new, so maybe that’s it.
An alternative to what you are describing is you could have been eating hidden carbs and that delayed your ketosis.
Kudos to you for sticking it out. I would have quit.

I wonder if Ketosis has been shown to be harder to get to for Women.
I think it is harder for women to lose fat. But that is often cancelled by women being more motivated to improve than men. :sunflower:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #23

There is a great deal of similarity between sugar addiction and alcohol addiction, as Dr. Lustig points out in “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” This makes sense, for fructose and ethanol are metabolized by the same metabolic pathway in the liver, and they have similar effects on the dopamine receptors of the nucleus accumbens. To say that your response to that sugar-rich dessert resembles the response of a newly-sober alcoholic to being presented with his favorite tipple is, therefore, merely to state the obvious.

Recovering alcoholics have a number of strategies to avoid being blindsided by this kind of situation. They range from having people you can call to check in with, through making sure to have a safe alternative at hand, to psychological strategies for postponing the next drink. All of these, I find, can easily be adapted to staying away from sugar and from carbs in general.

If you are the cook in the family, then it should be easy for you to prepare a keto alternative for yourself. If your wife is the cook, I would expect her love for you to lead her to do the same. Unfortunately, however, it frequently happens that family members who are bound up in the same dysfunctional system with us resist our efforts to get better, and we have to work to overcome their resistance as well as our own internal resistance. It’s not fair, but it’s what is. I find it helpful to remember that I am entitled to do what I have to do to take care of myself, regardless of how that affects the people around me.

(Doug) #24

Paul, not sure what you mean by the metabolic pathway - I thought fructose and ethanol were treated differently in the liver, i.e. ethanol ends up being more like a fat, going through acetaldehyde and ending up as water, carbon dioxide and fatty acids, while fructose goes to glucose, glycogen and lactic acid…?

(Dawn) #25

@Mark_Heard My sugar addiction is so strong. And much like @PaulL says, it is not much different from alcohol addiction however it isn’t treated as seriously by the general public. I actually follow all of the advice that the members mention here. I decide what hill I want to die on. If a very special ocassion is coming up, then I will indulge and allow some sweets to come into my life. Now that I understand 1) There is no way I am going to eat 3500 calories worth of it, so I probably wont’ gain any fat. And the weight increase on the scale is likely just water and 2) The damage is reversible as long as i jump right back into keto and maybe do a little extra exercise to quickly get back into ketosis.

If I decide that the occassion is not worth the cheat, then I will simply skip it or bring my own keto treat. The most important thing to me is to not let the binge continue for more than 2-3 days at the most. As @240lbfatloss says, you will be fine. It may even help push up your metabolism a bit because of all of the calories. Just be careful of triggers and don’t let it pull you into a spiral. If you find that even small amounts of sugar cause you to spiral, then you need a plan B.

You’re ok. You will still reach your goals and you are still going to be healthy.

#26

During these 1-2 years, did you see a shift in your craving ? I was craving for sugar and now I can binge on macadamia nuts and mascarpone… Is it normal ? Or am I simply reporting my craving on keto food ? Do I have to restrict from macadamia nuts and cheese ?

(Karen Parrott) #27

I was eating too much fat and started to to
regain my weight. Once I brought my protein grams closer to my fat grams, I could still be in Keto but yet lose weight.

As far as what you may or may not need to abstain from that is highly individual. For example I can have a little bit of 85% chocolate here and there and it doesn’t trigger binges urges.

When I reintroduced 1/8 of a serving of macadamia nuts I had massive binge urges for 2 to 3 weeks. It was really awful and I won’t be eating nuts ever again.

Eliminating something for 30 or 60 days and then re-introducing it one by one will give you a great idea. I’m not a bad person for not being able to eat nuts. I have a lot of FTO genes those are obesity and type two diabetes genes they are also associated with addiction. In my case food addiction. Add in a copy of a ghrelin gene ( hunger hormone) and grains, nuts, emulsifiers are a living nightmare for me.

When I Abstain I get maybe 25 to 30% of the time normal satiety feelings. Many times I don’t get satiety so I always track my food and then I know what I’m taking in and my fit bit tells me my activity level.

Take care and take the time to identify any binge triggers. You can decide for yourself if you want to abstain or not. It’s a very personal decision and not one anyone else can make for you. The number of times I’ve been told I’m a hurting my health for not eating nuts because they’re healthy is astounding. People truly have no idea what they’re asking me to do. For myself and my family I cannot go back into the circle of addiction,it’s too awful.

Food sober now for 6 years and 7 months, 19 hours. Life is better. Keto helps a lot.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #28

Dr. Lustig’s lecture (“Sugar: The Bitter Truth”) is all over YouTube, if you want to catch it yourself. He goes into quite a bit of detail, discussing the metabolism of fructose, and then as I recall, when discussing the similarities between the two chemicals he says fructose and ethanol are metabolized by the same pathway. Fructose and ethanol both cause fatty liver disease, too; I remember him saying that doctors refused to believe that patients with the disease were not also alcoholics, until children started coming down with it. So in kids, it’s called NAFLD—non-alcoholic fatty liver disease—and in others they assume it’s just plain old AFLD, lol!

I will try to re-watch it soon myself, but I don’t have much time right now, since our Lessons & Carols service is on Sunday, and then Christmas follows, two weeks later. Once that’s out of the way, I won’t be so preoccupied with getting music ready and preparing for rehearsals.

(VLC.MD) #29

Is it the food ? Or more your genes ? Can a certain food be a trigger and then not a trigger 6 months from now.

(Karen Parrott) #30

I think once a trigger always a trigger. Millions of folks abstain. I’m just not in the anonymous groups. I understand why people don’t talk about it. Brain, biochemistry? I may never know. All I know is I escaped.

(jim schafer) #31

just know that it’s not every day this kind of thing happens…just start again… and maybe add in some fasting: if you’re able to…it’s more damaging to dwell on one’s “mistakes”…it can and does happen.

#32

“Food sober” : I love this expression ! I’ll try to be a food sober too. Thanks for sharing.

(Mary Kubasak) #33

One thing I have found helpful in putting a light rein on a potential binge (which for me works better than beating myself up about even thinking of eating the problem foods) is the “flat tire” analogy - If you are on the road and get a flat tire, there is no way you would consider that the best course of action is to get out with a knife and stick in all the other tires before getting help, so why would you take a completely manageable situation (one flat tire, for which you have a spare, or one indulgence, which is just an example of the feast in “feast and famine”) and instead of getting on with life reasonably, go ahead and make it many times worse for no real reason…

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #34

With drugs and alcohol, it is a known fact that people with decades of sobriety still cannot drink or drug safely—everyone I know who’s tried to do so has returned to full alcoholic drinking or full drug addiction fairly quickly, sometimes immediately. It’s folk wisdom in A.A. that the disease progresses even while we are abstaining. There is the very sad case of the researcher who tried to prove that alcoholics could learn to drink in moderation. She is now serving a long-term prison sentence for vehicular homicide while intoxicated. (Though it is possible she is out by now.)

As far as environmental triggers are concerned, I don’t get quite as bothered by being around booze or people drinking as I used to, 25 years ago, but then I don’t make a regular practice of subjecting myself to them, either. We have a saying to the effect that “If you keep hanging around the barbershop, sooner or later you’re going to get a haircut!”

Anyway, the point is that while I don’t have any proof, my strong guess is that food triggers don’t ever become safe, either.

#35

I thought fat and/or fiber slowed the digestion of sugar.

(Naomi Brewster) #36

My understanding is that where high sugar is present (say you eat cheesecake or donut etc) the body has to deal with the sugar first via the insulin response as sugar in large doses is toxic to the body - so the sugar gets burned as energy first. Insulin pushes fat into adipose sites to be dealt with later. Therefore if you eat fatty sugar it increases weight gain as fat in cells etc. Eating fat without the presence of sugar means that insulin isn’t triggered to the same degree and it can be used as fuel preferentially.

Obviously all the scientists and doctors would shudder at such a simplistic understanding. Feel free to correct or adjust my explanation.

#37

I originally read about this in the Glycemic Load Diet book, but also found this information on Dr. Fung’s site. I learned something new as far as vinegar also slowing absorption of carbs, which is great because I love vinegar.

(VLC.MD) #38

Me too !

(Naomi Brewster) #39

Yes v interesting esp vinegar - thanks for the link. Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to cheesecake I would think.