Troubleshooting Fatigue

(Andrew Stouppe) #1

Hello

I started keto last monday 5/14 after eating the last of my moms homemade chocolate dipped oatmeal cookies.

After two days I felt great with a lot of mental clarity and a feeling of energy all day. However after a few days I started getting tired and stopped going on walks in the morning.

I guess I am under the assumption that you don’t really need to eat any calories if you are in fat metabolism since you should be able to burn body fat in the absence of dietary fat.

Im thinking that I just want to go into nutritional fasting eating a lot of non starchy vegetables with a bit of fat and burn off whatever else I need. What I want to avoid is wasting a lot of time figuring out how much of what is in what I’m eating.

Ive read a lot of different and sometimes conflicting things:
Avoid carbs and protein because of gluconeogenesis
its just the keto flu, it will pass but it takes a few weeks
insufficient b5 is causing fatigue
you have to be zero carb to start

Any insight would be helpful. Thanks.

#2

Maybe you can tell us more what exactly you are eating, how tall you are, weight, goals, etc.

Are you supplementing with salt - that may solve your fatigue instantly.

#3

If you’re only a week or so into this, your body has not yet learned how to burn it’s body fat as fuel, you need to FEED IT FAT. You may not even be in ketosis yet, and are definitely not “fat adapted”. You need to eat, the beginning is not the time to be scrimping on calories or fasting.
Sue

(Omar) #4

for me depleted electrolytes makes me almost faint.

eventhough I know it, I keep letting my body deplete and discover that it is electrolytes every time.

(Alec) #5

Andrew
Some answers:

  1. Eat 20g of carbs, 0.8-1g per kg of lean body mass of protein, and fat to satiety
  2. Very likely keto flu. Just stick with it, and it will pass
  3. No idea
  4. Incorrect: per above, 20g of carbs (some suggest if you want to ease into it, do slightly more than this, but my opinion is go 20g as best you can to start with)

Have a good sniff around the forums here, you will learn loads from other topics.

As Susan said, you won’t yet be fat adapted (ie burning fat for fuel), that comes after say 3-6 weeks of being keto. So, stick with it, and give it time, don’t be impatient. You will feel tired for a while as your body gets used to burning fat.

If you would like feedback on what you’re eating, pls post a typical day’s food for you, and we can advise on what’s good and what’s not so good. :stuck_out_tongue:
Cheers
Alec

(Andrew Stouppe) #6

Thank you everyone for posting. After I wrote this I decided to eat a lot of food and see how it went.
I had:
Steamed brocoli with some cheese and what was left of some “fajita” filling I had made. This is basically peppers and onions with some chicken, butter and a packet of taco seasoning. I added a liberal amount of seasoned salt to this.
A handful of slivered almonds
a light handful of pumpkin seeds
three big bites from a one pound slab of cheddar cheese
an avocado with a lot of salt

After eating all this I felt a lot better and basically forgot about food for the rest of the day.

Yesterday we did yardwork in the afternoon and I may have chomped a few bites of that slab of cheese in the morning but I didnt really have anything until late afternoon then I grazed all night on bascally the same things as the day before plus two grilled hamburger patties that I dressed with mayo, mustard, relish and cheese. Both nights I slept well.

This morning I was tired and kind of felt off all day. I was really hungry when I got up and killed off two of the hamburger patties from the night before plus some cheese. After that I was not hungry at all but I started getting really irritable and sad around 2pm.
So I ate broccoli with some ground beef, cheese and salt
a handful of pumpkin seeds
a handful of walnuts

I felt a bit better after that but was still off so after another hour I decided to drink a teaspoon of baking soda in a cup of water. I had been thinking I sweat a lot yesterday and maybe needed some salts.

I have to say I’ve never experienced drinking something salty and experiencing it as sweet. It felt like it was getting absorbed through my gums. I have drank baking soda in water like this before and it made me nauseated probably because i didn’t need it and my body was considering getting rid of it. This time it gave me a little gas reacting with my stomach acid but I could tell right away that it was the right call. Over the last hour I’ve slowly ramped up to being in a great mood.

I’ve got some collard greens in the water I boiled them in in the fridge. Im thinking of making a broth with it; adding some more sodium to get a bit more of a complete electrolyte package and having another cup.

(Chris W) #7

Salt is very important
AS you experienced salt will taste sweet if you need it. I average at least 2 teaspoons a day now but its safe to say 1-2 is the norm, and it is directly linked to energy output. If you are feeling tired, or lethargic take salt.

Also so you have no miss understandings you need to intake fat, your body does not quickly convert fat into energy esp the first few weeks, it takes time to become keto adapted. You really will suffer if you try and abstain from fat your BMR will lower and you will be in starvation mode. Eat to your macros for another week or two so you understand what you need. Around then you should start to eat to satiety with a target of the protien macro then fat till full/satiety. It takes a little while to figure out satiety, it was around 6 weeks for me.

(Andrew Stouppe) #8

Appreciate this comment.

I have been doing IF for over a year. I regularly only eat once or twice a day so while I think that is generally good for getting insulin down and all the advantages that go with that, changing your metabolism over is not business as usual.

I was thinking that paleo people go in and out of ketosis without even understanding what it is and it didn’t make sense to me that a paleo person would feel lousy for two weeks when they needed to be running at 100% on body fat to get something back to camp for the tribe to survive on. What I’m starting to gather is that this adjustment period is more like my body has never really used the keto mechanisms so they have all been mothballed and need to be pulled out, tuned up and lubricated before i can expect them to really keep me going on not much more than salty water and sunshine.

I do intend to eat moms oatmeal cookies at christmas and feast up on everything in sight on holidays. (except HFCS garbage) I assume switching back to fat metabolism isn’t really much of an issue once you have overcome a lifetime of running on sugar?

(Chris W) #9

I was paleo previous to this and no I would say the protocol I was following was no where near keto.
Paleo in the end for me was a disaster and lead to more problems than anything it was supposed to be solving. The period between the two was even worse filled with solid juice and crap but hey we all have our flaws. Paleo is a way of eating made to make you feel good about eating, whereas keto is a WOE designed to make your health better.

Switching back to a carb burner at certain points can be problematic, later on after fat adaption many people can do it with little trouble, I can do it but its not pleasant if I go to anything with high GI like french fries, oddly cake has not really bugged me the couple times I have had it. Some people report energy problems, almost everyone will gain water weight for a day or two, people with IR or T2D can take several days to get back into ketosis depending upon the volume and type of carbs they have ingested. Before fat adaption it can be at the minimum unpleasant to down right nasty if you are in the first month of so. Keep in mind that you are changing the energy system you using when you go back to carbs, the switch is not instant when you go back to keto, even though your body has things in place to prevent low blood glucose its not an ideal place to be.

(Andrew Stouppe) #10

I’m sorry. I accidentally confused you. When I used the term paleo in that post I am referring to tribal hunter gatherer societies whether ancient or modern. I’m not referring to paleo dieters. As far as I’m concerned you can’t call a diet without any insects in it paleolithic.

(Chris W) #11

Nice,
Yeah well I am not going to be digging up any ants any time soon…

(Andrew Stouppe) #12

I can get through a day or two of burning off the excess sugar and deal with my body trying to make me eat more carbs when it runs out. I just don’t want to go through two or more weeks of adaptation every time I do.

My assumption is once you get down to a healthy weight you should generally eat to maintain yourself but mix in fasts of a day up to a few days for all the benefits that come with that (autophagy etc…) but you should also have feasts where you crank up the insulin to drive excess energy into fat stores. This is what our bodies are designed to do and I feel like going through these natural cycles is important.

(Chris W) #13

I would tell you to eat to maintain at all times, this by far and away for me has lead to the most loss and the best energy. If you cut fat or calories in general you over time will enter starvation mode and start to feel like crap, not loose weight/body fat.
You don’t want insulin to be high ever on this WOE, but that said you still need it. I suppose your goals would also play into this.