Vacation without Keto

(Meghan O'leary) #1

Hey I thought I would post my very own non scientific N=1 study.

I went to Thailand for the whole month of January. Instead of trying to maintain my Keto way of eating, I chose to eat all manners of fresh fruit, rice, curries and even just sweets. I didn’t hold back and ate much like I had been used to before I found Keto. I had been eating LCHF for 5 months prior and had lost 25 pounds before this trip, weighing in at 208lbs. When I got back (30 days later) the scale had crept up to 216lbs and after returning to high fat for 3 days Im down to 212.

Im not sure what type of conclusions to draw but here are some possibilities

  1. I’m capable of gaining 8lbs (water/fat/both?) in a single month alone when eating carbs without restriction
  2. At least four of those pounds are obviously water weight because they came off so quickly
  3. Keto works wonders for me.
  4. The damage of eating no carbs isn’t undoable for me.
(Ken) #2

Depending on how big you are, eight pounds was mostly, if not all, glycogen. Sounds like you didn’t stuff yourself, so you probably didn’t experience much, if any, overcompensation leading to fat regain. No significant lipogenic readaptation. I’ll reiterate something that I’ve said before: “It’s really kind of hard to regain fat without a chronic, Carb based pattern”.

(Meghan O'leary) #3

Well I’m never going back to chronic carb based eating again and I felt like I stuffed myself the whole time but I’m stoked I don’t have to re-lose the weight I’ve already lost once.

(Dawn) #4

When you say “chronic carb based pattern”, how much time is that? What is considered chronic? I ask because, I was off keto and eating like a uncultured pig for almost 3 months (all the sugar, all the carbs, all the fruit…almost could be considered a binge patter) and I gained 28 pounds during that time. Would 3 months be considered chronic? What is the point where you need to stop yourself at all costs? Greater than 48 hours? I have a cruise coming up and after the disastrous carb up that I went through for 3 months, I am scared that my 3 days of vacation eating might send me into the same spiral.

(Ken) #5

IMO, anything over a week or two would be chronic, and start to enable lipogenic readaptation. A better strategy would be to cycle your carbs. Say, one Carb day, two keto. Two or three keto days would deplete glycogen and put you back into lipolysis, thus halting a lipogenic readaptation. A smaller scale could be one Carb meal, then two keto ones. If you do that, occasionally having two keto days in a row is advised, just to make sure you’re back into lipolysis. If you have a meter you could easily figure out how long it takes you to get back into lipolysis.

28 lbs. Over three months? Well, minus the glycogen, that’s somewhere between 1-2lbs per week. Pretty easy to do…

Three days won’t do it, unless maybe you have your feet nailed down and they feed you like a Foie Gras Goose…

(Dawn) #6

Aw, thank you. You always keep me from panicking. I am not sure how to eat keto on a cruise, but I guess my focus will be to eat the best I can and just enjoy myself. You told me long ago that once we are fat adapted, we can actually eat a few more carbs than we think without falling out of ketosis. I have the comfort of knowing that it won’t be longer than 3 days.