My second Keto Christmas has passed, like a lot of people I had social and family events that led to me eating some food that was not essentially “keto”, had a few drinks and enjoyed myself. What I noticed was the tempting sweet deserts, cakes and carb laden foods were really not all that tasty when I tried them, a small slice of Christmas cake and fruit mince pies were nice but easily passed once I had a taste, I preferred the turkey, pork and green vegetable.
The other thing I noticed was how quickly I have started to get back into ketosis, I mostly use a Ketonix and occasionally Freestyle ketone & glucose strips to test my blood, blood ketones yesterday 1.7 mm/l and Ketonix 12 ppm.
I am 68 soon and grew up a fat kid, who loved cakes and bread, because of my fat body avoided sports and all the active things kids did, I was not only ridiculed by other kids but ashamed of my body. As I matured I seesawed through every possible diets, most worked either a little or were just too much trouble to endure until I met Atkins, this helped me shed about 20kg, but the original diet was pretty limited and after about a year I returned to my old ways and piled back on the weight until at 173cm I weighed 95kg.
Diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes three years ago, I began to explore with Dr Google how to do something about it, like everyone my age I grew with the concept of all saturated fats were bad and only poly unsaturated fats and oils were good. I stumbled across Low GI and blood sugar response, this lead me to looking at Caveman/Paleo, Leptin response and similar diets, something occasional kept popping up “ketosis”, I remembered this from Atkins and dug out my original version of “Diet Revolution”, recalling how the diet worked I then embarked on a year of eating a low carb diet, not strictly no carb or even counting carbs, to my surprise my weight started to drop and over a year it slowed at 80kg.
Pleased with my success and wanting to lose more I plunged back into the research and became engrossed in LCHF, it took me some time to accept saturated fat is not the demon I had been raised on. I started listening to Jimmy Moore podcasts, this then led to others, including the “2 Keto Dudes” (list too long to mention all) and a downhill rollercoaster ride of information, I purchased all the books you will be familiar with, at the same time I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Follicular Lymphoma.
September 2017, I went full “Keto”, restricted my carbs to 20g per day, stopped taking Lipitor, kept a strict food diary and spent hours researching the carb content of all the foods I was either eating or was interested in. My first Keto Christmas was not a joy, I stuck to the diet and wasn’t much fun.
By September 2018 my weight was down to 65kg, blood sugar stable at 5-6 mm/l, Type 2 Diabetes reversed, I started to relax the carb limit, introducing more vegetables, but not bad carbs, what I found was that I could maintain a Ketonix reading between 10-20 ppm without much effort. I also found the desire to “break out” and have cake, breads and sweets was declining, it was much easier to pass and not be tempted.
A God send are the Keto Cookbooks and website pumping out masses of Keto recipes, everything from Keto Bread to Jam, these resources have really changed by approach to cooking and meal planning, also I can now easily assess the carbs in recipes by knowing the carbs of the ingredients.
There is hope, its just a matter of sticking to the basics.
