Not losing my gut!


(Todd Chester) #34

The “energy deficit” comes from my weekly fasting. The other 6 days, I keep the Glycemic load to under 15 and mostly eat meat and fat. I don’t pig out. I just eat what makes me satiated. Any overeating gets blow off though my respiration or urine. And it does not happen very often anymore. I can tell by the smell on my hands. (And from the toilet, but this is a family forum, so you did to see me write that.)

I have wondered if I should extend my fast to two days in a row. But I do believe Aqua nailed it. It is stress. I am only fat on my gut. If I can come up with a way on processing the stress in my life better, I do believe the fasting will take off the gut in short order.

And all my scars are gone. Means it is working.


(Todd Chester) #35

What is your favorite method of dealing with stress? I mainly just internalize it. Cussing only helps a little. Getting angry does not help either, so I don’t. I try to just bob along like a fish bobber. But sometimes I just feel like crying. I don’t actually, but …

I do notice I have a calmness after going fly fishing. It is a great upper body work out and as such great for my blood sugar. And when I catch my first fish, suddenly, the world looks different. The flies buzzing my head no long bother me. The weather is not too hot or too cold. I can’t believe a customer pissed me off so much. The world comes into a much better prospective. And I do catch a lot of fish. It wears off though. I only get to go out for 30 minutes or so, once every two months between customer calls.

I think if I could get out in nature a bit more would help. Trouble is, I have only tiny fractions of spare time available to me.


(Robin) #36

Stress.
It’s big. I had a moment of complete clarity about stress at a hot yoga class many years ago. A hard time in my life. But the instructor spoke about Equanimity, as it relates to yoga. When every fiber of your being is screaming to get out of the pose, every muscle is begging for mercy, and you simply cannot hold the pose for one second longer.
But instead of stopping or running away from the pain, you breathe and you lean in and breathe deeper and you allow the muscles and the strain to surrender to the pose. You don’t run away, you lean in and breathe. And stay.
Equanimity. If I ever get a tattoo it will be somewhere I can see it easily and often. It applies to every aspect of my life.

And…. Back to basics. I agree with Paul. You eat too much.


(Todd Chester) #37

If that were the case, I should be getting fat everywhere on my body, not just my gut.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Equanimity&ia=definition

Easier said than done. What is your trick when your body hurts?


(Stickin' with mammoth) #38

Already told you, I transform it.

Robin already told you, she breathes into it and surrenders to it.

When I said that I see who you are, I wasn’t agreeing with your assessment, I was reaffirming mine. I don’t know what exactly your agenda is here on Ketogenic Forums, but from what I’ve seen so far, I fear you’ll get little out of it. That “high IQ” of yours seems to act like Teflon in the face of transformative information. Enjoy your demons.


#39

To use myself as an example let me preface: I’m currently 77 years old. Whether due to luck, genes or a combo of both I’ve led an active life with no serious illnesses or injuries. I still work full-time in retail. Until keto I ate bog standard SAD. That included 30 years making and drinking my own beer every day! During the decade of my 60s I gained about 35 ‘excess’ pounds, which I now attribute to a combination of insulin resistance and metabolic slowdown due to age. I’ve eaten keto for 5 1/2 years. The first 6 months or so I intentionally underate and lost those 35 excess pounds. For the succeeding 5 years of ongoing maintenance I have been 145 pounds total weight and 15% total body fat. Neither weight nor comp have varied by more than +/- a pound or per cent in those 5 years. I maintain a spreadsheet to record exactly what and how much I eat daily. I also want to say that the last day I felt ‘carb hunger’ was day 2 of the 4-day water fast I did to initiate ketosis and I have been in continuous ketosis since day 3 of that initial fast.

From experience I know that if I eat daily within a ‘caloric window’ that is a range of approx 350 or so kcals. I will maintain weight and comp. If I eat below that window for several days I will start to lose weight, if above for several days I will start to gain.

What’s my point? I eat to maintain because I’m where I want to be. But if I wanted to lose or gain, I would simply eat outside my window more or less and however many days it takes to do so. The change takes place in my abdomen, both gain and loss.

Hope this helps.


#40

It’s interesting that you say this - because generally men do put fat on in their stomach region first. I’m happy to be guided by you on this, as only you know your own body - but my uneducated guess would be that you’re in an energy excess, but that it’s only slight. So you’re adding fat in the primary storage area, but you aren’t taking in enough excess to add fat elsewhere. I think this is why the others have recommended eating less.

I am not a fan of CICO, although I do believe in intake vs expenditure. (My resistance to CICO is that I’m female, and we’ve been told all kinds of nonsense about very low values for decades - so I think starting numbers are often incorrect for women.)

I explain all this because I suspect I have been overconsuming energy due to medical factors. I ignored CICO and ate to satiety, but I suspect my appetite has been falsely inflated due to medicine.

However, despite this false appetite and overconsumption, I still lost a lot of fat, albeit relatively slowly compared to others in the keto/carnivore world.

I suspect my success despite having high intake was because my carbs were so incredibly low (I eat carnivore) - and perhaps also because I increased my activity. Exercise makes you hungrier in the short term, and this is definitely the case for me - but perhaps the trade-off in overall metabolic rate in the long term was worth it, and the body recomposition is definitely worth it.

So if you’re not keen to change total intake or to take the advice further up the thread from others, you might want to refactor your macros, or to adjust your activity - or both.

Good luck.


#41

I don’t know mate.

Keto worked for me…I’m actually, for the first time, hitting my BMI target.
Family members are telling me not to lose any more weight.

I’m like, ‘Piss off, you slated me when I was fat.’ No pleasing some people!

It’s a balance. I hope you find yours. :slight_smile:


#42

Back to Basics!

That’s been on my mind for weeks, not joking.

:slight_smile:


#43

Back to Basics!
A club used to frequent in Leeds, England, lol…as a student.


#44

Some people gain fat on carnivore too, without those things…

I don’t know why it’s so odd that the body can store up fat as fat… It’s pretty logical and very useful for survival… Protein may be a magical macro that didn’t become fat often (but we hardly eat insane amounts of it anyway, most of us don’t) but fat is great fuel and can get stored.

Fat gain and loss is purely a CICO for many people anyway. I may eat sugar, I will lose fat as long as I eat little enough, the same for my SO but he can do it with lots of sugar while I must be moderate (though if I walked 15 hours a day, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem). And I may do keto, I never will lose fat unless I figure out how to eat little (didn’t happen yet but I have theories :D) and even carnivore isn’t enough there, it does other great things to me though.

But I actually didn’t want to talk about CICO just that fat isn’t a magical thing we can eat galore without consequences for our fat mass. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t. People do gain weight and even fat with very low total carbs. It actually would be quite creepy if we couldn’t gain fat on keto…


#45

Why do you eat so much carby food then? I truly don’t understand. Or you need sugar due to your condition or something? I am not knowledgeable enough about diabetes though I have a relative and know a few things…

Your level of carb intake is more than enough to mess with me and I surely never could lose fat at that level.

Wait, the original thought was not losing fat. It doesn’t even matter if one can get fat from fat. Us normal people (maybe some are special, I can imagine many things) clearly can’t expect fat-loss while eating too much fat… Even if we eat a tiny fragment of your carb intake.


#46

Oh those numbers aren’t CICO’s fault. I lost fat through CICO (what else? I am not magical. I didn’t track but I did for some days to figure out how should I eat to stay low enough), eating only 2000 kcal on most days and I wasn’t even active… 1200 kcal usually isn’t enough for me for my first meal even being a short woman, and as a healthy one, my energy need isn’t that insanely low. Calculators (at least there were some numbers too, not just my mere biological gender) gave me bigger numbers but still too tiny ones so I just ate as little as I could (2000 kcal, sometimes more :)). And it worked well for some time but not nearly all the way.

These numbers can’t be calculated. There are guesses and they may be very off…

Activity matters for sure. It helps some of us, vital for some but makes some people too hungry, it’s odd to me as activity typically lowers my calorie intake unless it’s much but then I get a decent deficit anyway… But people are different and some do get way hungrier that way.


#47

I am not talking about 2000 calories.

Most calorie calculators are set an awful lot lower for women - more like 1200. I’m glad you didn’t have that experience.


#48

Nope, I’m not. Hormones 100% matter. But so do the calories. The problem is blindly accepting that one matters and completely disregarding the others. Our metabolisms are way too complex for such a simple approach.

We all store fat differently, that’s genetic.I’ve got a buddy who will continue to store belly fat until he tips over and remain lean everywhere else. Another who has the famous spare tire look, yet his face is scrawny and has a neck like a pipe cleaner. Mine tends to go everywhere. We don’t get to target fat in any specific area, only liposuction can do that. All we can do is reduce bodyfat as a whole until it comes off.

Don’t over-science it. Track everything you eat for a week in Crononmeter, then go get your metabolic rate measured. Willing to bet you’ll be very unpleasantly surprised, just as I was.


#49

I apologize if I missed this earlier in this thread, but my guess is that you could have the belly fat only due to having fatty liver disease and possibly a fatty pancreas (very likely reading about your type 2).
I was exactly as you described, almost no body fat anywhere except this huge gut. I am an avid exerciser/weight lifter and I could never figure out why I could never get my midsection to shrink. I was diagnosed after getting extremely ill with advanced stage fatty liver disease. Mine was so far advanced that even though I have made great progress, I have long term damage that I will never be able to fully reverse.

Again, I may have missed this info, but if you haven’t done so recently, please ask your Dr. to order a complete liver panel for you including a liver fiber test as well as an upper abdominal ultrasound. Please don’t let what happened to me happen to you.

Anyway, I realize that you have been living Keto for many years and usually that is enough to fix both of those conditions. However, if your body reacts similar to what I have experienced, that may not be enough. My body will only begin to cleanse my liver with deep ketosis. I have to fast regularly and have to eat pretty much straight carnivore to see any improvement at all. And even at that, it is a very slow process. Just reading about the berries and vegetables that you listed at the beginning of this thread would be enough for my body to not only stop burning the stored liver fat, but also quickly start to reverse any progress that I have made.

So, as others have mentioned above, I would seriously consider going as near to strict carnivore as possible as well as implementation of a fasting protocol. Don’t expect to make that transition over night, but the sooner you get as many carbs out of your system as possible, the better it will be for you. And then, please see your Dr. to discuss the tests I mentioned above (Ignore if you have already had them done in the last few months and I missed it in the thread).

Best of luck.


(Todd Chester) #50

Ahhh, you did not look too closely at my Glycemic Load and my carb budget. I am very low carb. Anything more and I might as well see a lawyer and get my will in order.


(Todd Chester) #51

Trouble is most allopaths around these parts is they have no understanding how to treat T2. One does. He is an Emergency Room doctor and the one who diagnosed me, but you have to hurt yourself to see him. Finding a competent allopath for T2 and getting him to go along with what I want will be next to impossible.

My wife has been telling me I have “non-alcoholic fatty liver disease” for years (as she just reminded me). Looking at Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), I have “Liver Wind” out the wazooo (American slang for “plentiful”): the key symptom of Liver Wind being irascibility. (Wife confirms it.) Also strong or vivid dreams, a stiff neck, dark or scanty urine, and constipation. Got them all. So poop (not my actual word)!
http://www.tcmstudent.com/journal/Liver%20Wind.html

Love their colorful descriptions. TCM is 3000 years old and they have kept their descriptions. “Wind”: think of a tree being assaulted so hard by the wind the its leave are starting to be torn off. The “wind” being bad things your body is throwing at it. An OMD would both treat the resulting liver damage and remove the cause of the wind. An allopath would only treat the damage, if he actually could. It is not in their bad of tricks.

There is a full OMD an hour and a half’s drive away one way. Maybe I should bite the bullet. He has a full western medical degree (PHd) as well as the seven years of herbal pharmacology, so he could order up these test. He is also a cardiac specialist. He probably won’t order up tests as OMD’s diagnose things differently and I am sure he has seen this stuff before hundreds of times. OMD’s do not look at the organs separately as do allopaths, so he would probably go after several factors at the same time. I still have my free(ish) initial Medicare physical still, so, maybe…

I think I will do an extended fast more than a day until I reek of keytones. Really, really reek. I have noticed that I am not hungry that much after a one day total fast. And maybe lower my Glycemic load to under 8 from 15. (Oh goody, I get to eat three green beans!) I really can not afford the day lost to seeing a doctor due to my responsibilities though.

Those stupid ketone pee sticks only check for one form on keytone and completely miss me. They caught me the first year on keto, but not since then. And it is obvious from the smell.

Thank you for the wonderful, insightful response and the time your spent with me! God bless!
-T


#52

You are certainly welcome. Please let me know what you find out once you get to see your Dr.


(Todd Chester) #53

And what you remove with lipo returns elsewhere on your body. My father had a gut, but nothing like mine. My wife agrees with midnightmoon about “non-alcoholic liver disease”. I have learned after 48 years of marriage (if you are from California, that is to the SAME woman) to trust her judgement. She did a lot of research on the matter.