Metabolic Flexibility - Get Real

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #222

This line to make the submission different from the last post I entered.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #223

That is actually a pretty good, open-minded review. I note that at one point they quote the Volek team’s latest study.

(Ken) #224

Just curious. Why have/did you decide to use Complex Carbs for a TKD? Why are/were you consuming high fat and carbs at the same meal? Both violate traditional TKD doctrine. This is not a critique, I suspect we both have come to similar conclusions.

(PJ) #225

Did you know that if you take a big dose of vitamin C while intoxicated (pref before) it will basically remove the ‘physical symptoms’? It won’t make you any less drunk. But slurring, lack of coordination, will generally be much less or resolve. Of course then you’re still mentally drunk and behaving like it in that way but people may not know you are since you aren’t showing the physical symptoms so much, which could probably lose friends. :slight_smile:

(Mick) #226

When I started, 20g was too high to stay in keto. A year later, metabolically adapted, I can switch from months of carb eating to keto in a day, and stay in keto with 60g. Keep at it, don’t overdo it, and eventually it gets easier access less externe

(PJ) #227

This exactly is true for me. I do find if I stay in hard-keto a long time or high-carb a long time, it takes slightly longer to re-adapt to the other, but once I do it’s fine. When I first began keto it was brutal, the tiniest over-carb was like being thrown off the bus into traffic :smile: but now I can shift between them with no issue and stay ketogenic at a higher carb level.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #228

I’m reading Gary Taubes’s book, The Case for Keto, and he reprints a very interesting graph from a study by De Fronzo et al. Apparently, the threshold for insulin is 25 μU/mL. So what you are saying is that your insulin resistance has decreased (or your insulin sensitivity has increase) to the point where you can eat more carbohydrate and still keep your insulin below the threshold.

#229

When I was an absolute newbie, back in October 2022, I was of the opinion I ought to keep some plants in my keto diet just simply to preserve the ability to digest them. I later realised this was nonsense. So, in the beginning on my WOE I was really concerned about the variety, including this and that (naturally still keto friendly) whilst keeping my carb count below 20 grams. Then my carb count dropped to below 10 grams, and before I knew it I had lost all interest in consuming carbs. But still, like a fool, I kept fighting against what my body really wanted, adding back in this or that, in meagre amounts, just to be able to digest them, as it was my understanding omitting them entirely for a long time meant inability to later eat them. Fast forward to now, I eat carnivore with the addition of eggs, cream and cheese, I suppose you could refer to that as ketovore, and it is all my body wants. Meat, eggs, cream and cheese. And it is so simple. I don’t weigh my food, I don’t measure anything. I mostly eat two to three meals a day, the third being a bowl of whipped cream, more like a dessert. I am 5.2, 110 pounds, and am doing keto not for weight loss, but for health reasons. Of course whenever you pursue better health whilst also following research and science, it is easy to get in a muddle about what is truly beneficial or potentially unhealthy in the end. These days, I just enjoy my very simple WOE without overanalyzing, worrying, exhausting myself trying to wrap my head around science that is probably biased, one way or another, anyway.

#230

No, that’s purely carnivore, just not the strict “only meat” carnivore. You eat animal products. Ketovore has plants beyond coffee, tea and spices…

#231

Well, I do drink coffee and enjoy green tea still, forgot to mention. I don’t bother with spices though, just salt my eggs and meat to taste. Mine is a WOE some keto folk might find dull, but I love the simplicity of it, and never seem to tire of this way of eating. And it may be that my body has changed a lot, but the taste of fatty meat … sinfully good! It even trumps the divine taste of whipping cream.

#232

It doesn’t matter, it’s not them who eat it! If you are fine with it, it works for you nicely, no one has any right to find any problem with it :wink:
Simplicity is great, I wish I could be more simple! It’s loads better on carnivore but I still complicate it. It’s fine when I fancy making something more interesting, not necessarily because I want to eat something like that but the cooking side… I would miss making/modifying recipes… I just keep to simpler ones now. Still not as simple as roasting 2kg meat with salt on it… :wink:

Cream is great but to me, nothing beats well-fried or well roasted fatty pork. Maybe occasionally, there are some very good item I rarely eat (smoked mackerel! :yum:) but they immediately lose this extra charm is they are eaten more frequently, like, twice a year :smiley: Pork every day is pretty okay and still lovely.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #233

That is such an intriguing idea, and I wonder how it got established in nutritional thinking. Because it’s completely untrue. Yes, we do inhibit our ability to metabolise fatty acids on a prolonged high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. But that is mostly because excessive glucose (a/k/a carbohydrate) damages our mitochondria, which then need time to recover when we stop eating carbohydrate and start eating fat again. Cells can metabolise glucose without mitichondria (in fact, red blood corpuscles do just fine without any mitochondria at all), but mitochondria are essential to fatty-acid metabolism.

But the ability to metabolise glucose goes right back to the earliest uni-cellular organisms, and we never lose it. And glucose is so important to the body that it makes its own, if it needs to, so we are never without a certain minimum amount circulating in our blood. How anyone can claim, in the face of that knowledge (which is basic biochemistry), that we would ever lose our ability to metabolise glucose is beyond me.

#234

Pork is my favourite meat too, and the fattier the better. I regularly eat pork chops, but really only enjoy the fatty bits, the rest is too meagre, and bacon. I must have bacon everyday or it’s not a good day. But what I really would like to consume on a more regular basis is pork belly, far too expensive, so my SO and I get gammon joints instead. He has, to my great joy, decided, inspired by my WOE and the benefits I’ve been enjoying, decided to cut out all processed food. He’s not desiring to go keto, but is more interested in paleo at the moment, but any WOE devoid of processed food, is a major step towards better health. His health is pretty good despite being overweight, and he’s doing it to lose said weight. But I am already starting to notice he looks better, his complexion more youthful, and I bet he will reap a ton more benefits.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #235

:bacon::bacon::bacon::bacon::bacon::bacon: !!!

Do you get pork shoulders where you are? Here they are called picinics, and are dead cheap. They come with a lovely cap of fat, so you roast them fat-side up and they are self-basting, and not only is the meat very tasty, but the fat is also delicious.

#236

We do get pork shoulder here as well but I wouldn’t say it is cheap, rather the opposite. We had it for christmas, and I thought it was OK value because it would last through the entire christmas period and provide many meals, but alas … gone in just a few days, it was … sinfully good. Pork belly is cheaper, but much less in volume so less value for money. My weekly food shop reads something like: 2 packs of bacon, 2 packs of burgers, 1 pack of pork chops, 1 pack of chicken legs, 1 gammon joint, 1 packet of beef mince, and I just feel I get more money for value with all that food than purchasing a single pork roast. But yes I agree, with all that juicy fat, pork roasts are delicious.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #237

I’m very sorry to hear that. Here, where decent-quality beef costs at least $6.00/lb., or about £11/kg, a pork shoulder is about $1.25/lb., or about £2.25/kg, a much better bargain, even with the bone!

#238

I don’t know how good the quality of the meat I get is, but I never worry about such things. Any decent quality steak is too pricy here, so I get the Scotch Aberdeen Angus beef burgers with just pepper and salt added, they’re great and £2.79 for a pack of 4, I tend to get 2. As I’m too lazy to make burgers myself. I also eat a ton of eggs, typically 3 a day. But nothing beats bacon.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #239

That would be extremely cheap for mince here. Lucky you!

I’m with you there! :grinning:

#240

@PauL: I think it’s not about glucose but modified gut biome on carnivore…? I’ve read about that way before I tried out this woe, our bacteria change and digesting vegs become problematic, of course we can go back to it through difficulties…? As I couldn’t imagine ever eating like that and I can’t research everything I am curious about, I didn’t go deep there (or at all, I just read about it somewhere and it made sense to me).
Now I am even less sure this happens but I still know little about it. The way I do things (pure carni times are short, eating tiny amount of plant matter may last longer), I don’t lose any ability to digest anything, apparently. I even can handle a high-carb day WAY better if I normally eat very low-carb. It depends on the items though, some are just so bad my body doesn’t accept them and my mind totally agree. I am more careful at relatives now (we don’t buy so very much subpar items).
But I experienced that if I show a better woe to my body, it gets reluctant to go back to something worse and staying there is out of question :smiley: I consider it smart and no problem :wink: It’s not like I get SICK immediately, I get warnings.

I think I have phases and I can change these things if I have a reason for it.
My perfect fattiness isn’t high at all, it’s pork chuck level. But I learned to enjoy… I think fresh ham is the right word for that cut? Way leaner but still nice when juicy and it does have fat :wink: I need to eat something fatty with it or else I overeat protein due to hunger as I don’t get enough fat from it and I need my calories.
Pork chuck poses no such problem and it’s the loveliest and perfect for roasts or just to fry it in a pan…
And of course, there are the fatty cuts. I am not into them, they may be too fatty. Pork shoulder is what I tend to buy sometimes as it has irresistible sales, I need some lard sometimes and I easily eat it. Too easily, see my 2 days with 1000g pork shoulder… It’s not satiating enough. But I actually strongly prefer the taste of my leaner cuts, I just can’t eat this much of them because they satiate me better.
But there is the odd thing where one slowly boils pork yowl as I LOVE it and I can eat it even alone despite it is almost pure fat tissue. The label says 86g fat in 100g so yep, it’s something serious. But it has a little meat so I can eat it. I don’t eat pure fat (except a little butter).
I don’t eat pork loin (we don’t have it in cuts as pork chop normally) as it is too lean for me. But as with all cuts, it depends on the actual slab of meat… Maybe even the country. It is quite lean here and it never has that shape with a bone handle… Still with a little visible fat (when I saw there is light pork chops with NO visible fat, I was a tad surprised but of course, some people are into super lean meats) but definitely lean, I never liked it.
I don’t like bacon. I realized that today when ate some. Some more expensive one may be better but I have better ideas. Smoked pork hock, that’s amazing. Some really good (and expensive) ham, both are wonderful in scrambled eggs, WAY better than the tiny bacon cubes I put into it today (slices make crunchy loveliness but cost twice as much and it’s not worth it too me, bacon is inedibly salty so I need more than an egg for every 10g).
Pork belly is way too fatty and not expensive but not cheap enough considering it’s mostly fat. Fat is easy to buy for cheap, I want meat for my money! So I never buy any.

And even the meat is quite fatty, it’s even too fatty to me and not one of my favs taste wise (it’s good but my favs are better). I like the lean fresh ham with its fat layer (it just should be more fat somehow…), pork chuck with generous fat layers and ideally marbled, mmm… But of course, fat content wildly varies (at least here), that’s why I can’t accurately track when I eat fatty pork.

It’s the cheapest pork here if we don’t count fresh ham with its price cap (or organs) and the 70/30 scraps I only found in one supermarket. There are great sales, that’s why I buy it instead of my perfect fav, pork chuck sometimes. But I suppose it does good not to overuse my favorite…

I don’t know how heavy they are… We have meat slabs in various sizes, once we bought a 4.5 kg piece of pork loin (my SO loves it even if I don’t. but it’s edible especially the fattiest parts. he can enjoy the rest :stuck_out_tongue: he doesn’t mind almost no fat meat).
And I buy chicken drumsticks or turkey wing bases per piece in the meat counter :slight_smile: 8 sounds a good amount at once (to buy, I roast half of it at a time. it’s very little but it’s not satiating anyway so I stick to my pork as my main meat).

Okay, we don’t have THAT sales. What we have is irresistible enough, maybe 1.5 times of it. But my data is weeks old, maybe it went up like crazy since though pork doesn’t tend to do that, I don’t even understand, we had an awful year with serious drought, I saw dead corn crops everywhere. Wheat was better but suffered a lot.

Oh with the bone? It’s almost always boneless here. But the bone probably isn’t so much… No idea, I never bought it with bone and don’t even remember seeing it like that. I buy pork chuck with bone sometimes (it’s common with and without and I buy whatever has a better price, not forgetting that a bone gives me some extra work and a tasty soup).

The price you mentioned is for chicken drumsticks on sale and they were at 30% of it before the big inflation (it was a crazy sale but happened sometimes) :frowning: Chicken is still the cheapest meat.

Oh my, even my SO eats more I suppose. I ate 6 in my egg hating times (after I tried to continue carnivore with zero meat, oh the early times when I refused to buy supermarket meat :D), they were tough, I need my eggs. Not many, just 5-10, it depends on the day. But if I manage to eat mostly meat, I can go way lower now, it’s useful in hard times when we just can’t get eggs for a while (very rare but happened).

A good pork chuck roast, the right kind of ham and some good sausage beats anything else without trying if you ask me :wink: (I probably didn’t meet some really good bacon, I do like the flavor of a good one and the crunch so it has good chances but the mentioned ones are all number one…)

#241

@never2late I’m curious to know how well you think your lipedema is under control since your dietary changes. Are symptoms still up and down? I am also trying to control an inflammatory condition with diet, but so far, it has only helped a little. I don’t have metabolic problems from a history of SAD or genetics, so probably have different issues from most on this site. Thanks.