What am I doing wrong?!?!

#41

Sacrilege!! Lol. Just kidding. So far I can cut everything but the HWC in coffee. So if green tea works I can probably do this short term for the N=1 result.

#42

Ahhh. The Kaisen way. “One small step can change your life”. That’s the book that got me started on LCHF. I get that.

#43

Thanks. I appreciate that. Now I just have to try… or be like Yoda. “There is no try, there is only do or do not”

(Kirk Wolak) #44

Okay,
First comment. Kill the sweetener, and definitely kill the snack.

Every time food crosses your lips (even if it is pork rinds)… Your body will squirt insulin (it’s pulsed about every 90 minutes, and more often for obese people). But just KNOW that until you are lean, a snack = a meal to your pancreas.

Second, it is NOT really fasting if you are adding HWC and Sweetener to the coffee.
Again, your pancreas will see this as food coming, and release insulin. You can test this. Testing your glucose/ketones before the coffee, and every 20 minutes after the coffee. If your BS goes down notably, or compared to a morning with water, then you probably squirted some insulin. And that stops all the goodness of fasting and resets your liver. [Healthier people can get away with more. Trust me. My response changed after losing 100lbs. But YOU can’t use MY response! LOL]

Easier to just stop it for a few days and see the response.

I started SALTING my coffee to remove some of the bitterness. FWIW

(Kirk Wolak) #45

I know the feeling.
Yes, green tea works! Good idea.
I actually switched to warm salted water for a while…

(Kirk Wolak) #46

Yeah, I often start people with “Wall Pushups”.
Work your way up from 1-2 a day.
Then go to the counter top. My 79 year old dad is doing 30 countertop pushups/day.

I have taken people who HATE the gym, and turned them into gym rats. I love getting the email “I hate you! We moved, and there is no gym on the way to work anymore, I feel funky if I don’t get a little work out in to start the day!” LOL.

Always try to leave the gym feeling better than when you got there. EVEN if that means getting there and just hitting the hot tub. Because getting there is 90% If you don’t feel like working out you have 2 options: 5 minutes of cardio and the hot tub.
Or the hot tub and sauna, with a little stretching. It actually teaches you to listen to your body and to do things with a better intention.

Good for you!

#47

Now you’re talking crazy talk. :crazy_face:Gym??? Not going to do that. Been there tried it, many times. Hate it. I’ll take a walk or do something at home.

#48

Sitting having green tea. Morning bs was 5.5. Last meal was 12 hours ago. I ran out of ketone testing strips. So that will have to wait until tomorrow. :confused:

(Polly) #49

Hoping you find a way of eating which works for you. Well done on sticking with it for so long with small results. You will have earnt the whoosh when it comes!

(Brian) #50

Not a lot to add but the first thing that jumped out to me was three meals. That would be one of the places I might be looking to change. One or two meals a day would probably be better, maybe skip lunch completely. (?)

My wife and I do 2 meals a day most days, one meal on the occasional day. If we have an extra big supper, sometimes breakfast is kinda on the smallish side, occasionally just coffee. But if we’re eating breakfast, it’s usually substantial with protein! Even if it’s just some Greek yogurt, there IS some protein. (I like that about Greek yogurt.) Eggs n sausage is common. Steak and eggs is a treat. No lunch. The rare times we do eat lunch it kinda throws everything off because if we ate breakfast, it’s too soon, and we won’t be hungry for supper when it’s time. So eating lunch usually means no supper and when planned, there won’t be breakfast or supper.

I went rogue on the HWC and the coffee. I had been using a LOT of HWC, too much. So I started using the immersion blender to blend in some butter and just a little HWC. My wife drinks it like that. I need just a bit more but use a little half n half to make up the difference. It’s what worked for me in that department. (I was consuming something like 800 calories worth of HWC a day, and that’s too much. I may be at 200 or so now with both the HWC and the half n half, I figured it out a while back but forget, and maybe an extra 2 or 3 carbs, which I can deal with. It’s not a choice I’m recommending, just what I do that’s worked pretty well for me.) I don’t do black coffee, I just don’t. Don’t like it. Would not drink it if given the choice of black or nothing. So I can appreciate needing HWC. I do also use a little stevia in my coffee. I would love to be using Bailey’s creamer… sweet and oh so creamy… but the above works for me.

Good luck!

#51

I think you have done some great stuff so far! Being LCHF/keto for a year is awesome and you’re clearly seeing the benefits. But post-menopausal weight loss is a bear and can often require a lot more than just dropping your carbs below 20g/day and calling it good.

You’ve gotten great advice to start a strength training program–building muscle will help up your metabolism, but it’s just a good idea in general to build strength as we age. You can start with simple things at home like Pilates or Yoga and some bodyweight strength exercises like planks, squats, and push-ups (as Captain Kirk mentioned you can start with wall push-ups then graduated to knee push-ups and work your way up to the real thing). Also, some walking. And if you want to get into some occasional “sprints” every week or so, try hill walking if you don’t want to do all out running. Find a steep hill and go all out for 30 seconds or so then rest and repeat.

Most people do just fine using some sweeteners. But they tend to affect people in different ways. One will cause insulin spikes in some people, but not others. And the next one is totally different. You’re not really over doing it, if you’re just using a little in your morning coffee. But if you have a way to test, you could do it both with and without whatever sweetener you’re using. If it’s causing a jump, then you could try switching to something different. You could even try dropping it for a day or two and seeing if there’s a change on the scale, and then going from there. You should see results almost immediately, if this is a culprit.

To me, based on the meals you described, it sounds like you’re not eating enough and you’re not eating enough protein. Ball-parking from what you said: coffee with cream, maybe 100 cals and no protein; salad maybe 450 calories and 20g protein; 6 oz ribeye and veggies with butter is about 700 calories and 42g protein. So about 1250 calories and only 60g protein. As a rough estimate, your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), if you are sedentary, should be around 1600 calories by the standard calculations, higher on keto and even higher if you’re exercising at all. You probably should be eating closer to 80g or more protein.

You’re eating at a significant calorie deficit and should be losing weight steadily. If you yo-yo dieted and were low calorie for so many years, you’ve probably really slowed down your metabolism. Your satiety signals will adjust to meet this, so “eating to satiety” is not really a good way to proceed in this case.

A number of people around here have experimented with boosting their metabolisms using feasting/fasting cycles where they’re eating well over their TDEE on eating days for a few days in a row and then fasting completely for a couple of days. This starts to re-train your body that it’s going to have more calories coming in and it will adjust your metabolism to burn at that higher rate. This is also balanced by the fasting days, which help you lose weight by dropping your insulin very low for long periods to burn fat as well as to just limit your overall caloric intake.

I’d start where @Alecmcq mentioned with a minimum of 36-hours fasting, but 40 or 42 is an even better goal. Then break and eat. A lot. As much as you can really. Eat like it’s going out of style. Skip the salads with a little feta and bacon at lunch and eat some chicken thighs or hamburger or ribs with a small salad on the side. Eat what you’re eating at dinner, at least, twice a day. Then fast again on alternate days–or work up to it with eat two days/fast one. You may eventually want to up these fasts to two or three full days. (Personally, I was always a fasting failure with ADF and always ended up eating on the second fast day. I’ve had better success sticking to two-full days on and two eating.)

Good luck!

#52

Thanks. It’s been a lesson in patience. Lol.

#53

Thanks. I do only eat two meals a day and the morning coffee. But with a good dose of HWC maybe that could count as a meal.

#54

Thanks. I think fasting that long scares me. Lol. I know the benefits but I think mentally I need to work up to it.

#55

Ok captain… riddle me this… I had nothing but one cup of green tea this morning and then had my usually coffee hours later. Total fasting time was 17 hours before the coffee. I was hungry! But drank water and it got better. So I drank the coffee with cream and sweetener and couldn’t test my bs because I left my meter at home. It’s been about 3 hours since I finished that coffee and I just got home and first thing I did was test my bs. 3.9. Soooo. Did it spike my insulin and over react and draw my bs down? Am I still reacting to the insulin Or??? Remember that my fasting bs this morning was mid 5’s right after waking. And I still haven’t eaten anything. But going to soon because that hunger is back. And didn’t take any Berberine today because you are supposed to have food 30 minutes later.

(Kirk Wolak) #56

Well, without measuring, I can’t tell. BUT you are on to it.
There are 2 possible causes:

  1. your bs was low because of fasting (and it should KINDA be)
  2. your bs was LOWERED because of the artificial sweetener triggering insulin!

Your job. MEASURE this just before the first sip. Every 15 minutes until done.
Every 15 minutes until you see 3 stable readings.

I would BET it is #2, for 2 reasons: First it’s probably a 30 point swing (US system), and I don’t see that much of a swing on a 1/2 day of fasting (YMMV, but I dont see it with myself or others). So, that big of a drop, probably an insulin response. The fact that you are hungry. I would test your glucose again. If it is lower. It is DEFINITELY from an insulin release!

But NOW you are seeing the value of measuring, and how these little things are the levers that control your response. You can ONLY control what you consume… Not how your body responds. But buy KNOWING the latter, your can biohack yourself into the state you want to be in. And that, Ketogurl, is Ketogenic! KC and KO…

Let me know what it turns out to be. Do the same thing tomorrow, but do the testing.

(Brian) #57

That’s what I was getting at. I don’t know how you use HWC but when I was using it in plain coffee, I was sometimes getting 300+ calories worth of HWC in my morning quart of coffee, sometimes in addition to my regular breakfast meal. I couldn’t stop at a tablespoon. If I were doing that again and only that, to me, it would indeed be a meal. And sometimes, I’d have another pint+ of coffee with similar ratios of HWC with supper. And that’s why I had to stop doing that. (That doesn’t even mention the 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 carbs added to the daily limit.) You may be different. (?)

I know people say that calories don’t count on keto. But me adding an extra 2,000+ to 3,000+ calories to my weekly intake via coffee just wasn’t working out so well. Your mileage ma vary, as they say…

Good luck!

#58

I took a couple of days off (tomorrow and Friday) It will be easier for tracking etc. Let me catch you up on what happened when I ate after my last post. I was very hungry after not eating all day. I’d gone 22 hours with only green tea, water and that one coffee. I made baby spinach salad with chopped steak and olive oil feta and salt. Maybe a cup of spinach and 4 oz of steak, a couple of ounces of feta and about three tablespoons of oil. I felt nauseous eating it. So while I was eating I made three scrambled eggs with about 3 oz of fried pork belly and ate that. Still feeling off. Started binge listening to 2 Keto dudes podcasts. Laid down and fell asleep almost immediately and woke up 2 hours later feeling better. It reminded me of the old days when I’d get carb coma. I’ve had that nauseous feeling before when I haven’t eaten. Wondering if it came from the low bs?

#59

I use a fair bit. Maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of cream in a fairly large coffee.

(linda) #60

My thoughts:
Reduce stress (meditate using the Insight Timer App)
Get more good quality sleep
and exercise!