More Vanilla for breakfast, lunch and dinner today, that’s all pretty unremarkable. The fun part for today is I just launched a new home page. Hopefully this should give people more information in a nicer format. Let me know what you think!
Had a fun(ish) weekend – we did a lot of mixing and packaging on Thursday and Friday so we could go for a drive on Saturday. Our family gave up trying to drive up the snow and mud after seeing the snow getting worse and decided to hike, our friends had new tires and made it up further, then they broke through the ice crust and got buried up to their axles. We had to dig it out. Memorable trip! The kids had sandwiches and I had a vanilla Keto Chow with some peanut flour (yum!) that my awesome wife made.
Looks like my order for 100kg of the vitamin pre-mix is confirmed and should be shipping by April 18th (to me), still no word on the protein and flavorings though. Baby steps to Keto Chow 2.0!
In his own words:
Overall, I would probably give Keto Chow a 4 out of 5. The top flavors are fantastic, and I only give 5 out of 5 for things that really blow my mind. Chris commented that the “build a month” deals are cheaper, so I’ll take a look at that. It comes to around $4 a meal after shipping, so there is quite a bit of value in ordering Keto Chow.
Honestly, if you are looking for a keto soylent option, you are probably more worried about time and health than money. The amount of hassle saved from fewer dishes, decreased time going through security at work, and cooking is worth the money. Don’t listen to me though. I’m a guy that prefers Five Guys over Eleven Madison Park and has a suitcase that hasn’t been unpacked for half a year because I hate laundry.
Jefferey Zhou posted a review of Keto Chow back on March 19. A few days ago he posted an update. While I think he’s completely crazy for scoring SnickerDoodle lowest =) it was a nice review. The clumpiness he mentions does indeed happen if you don’t mix it up a second time:
I find that after 10 minutes or so, the fiber collects in the bottom; give it a good shake to stir things up. If you don’t mix it up, you might get some clumps of fiber which are a bit weird, it’s also the #1 complaint so make sure you mix it up!
So after yesterday’s post where I was befuddled with the lower ketone levels in the morning, a nice redditor pointed me over to an article about the Dawn Phenomenon. That article was really cool and explained a lot, I also found a bunch of outer really interesting posts on that site. If you have some time and want to learn some really cool stuff about metabolism, insulin and fasting I would recommend checking it out.
The take-away from that article is that in the morning your body releases glucose, which in turn will lower ketones. This is normal and natural, even in ketosis. So measuring ketone levels in the morning turns out to be a bad idea. So 89 days into this experiment I’m going to start measuring ketones in the evening after I get home from work. Wish I had known that earlier.
After the crazy fasting I expected to gain back some water weight and I did not disappoint =)
Also: http://radiopaedia.org/cases/cactus-disease-paleo-induced-mineral-periostitis and http://www.questnutrition.com/quest-protein-spray-tan
Alright, so I made it to 46.4 hours without eating – let’s analyze how it went!
Mood and how I felt. First off, my lack of sleep yesterday was the biggest detrimental factor in the experience. If that had not happened (thanks a lot brain!) I probably would have gone longer, maybe 48 hours, maybe 72 – dunno. I don’t think I’m going to make not eating for several days something I do often since it was rather extreme (obviously); I’ll likely continue doing intermittent fasting here and there. I think I might have also been low on electrolytes since I was feeling sluggish, then again that could have been the sleep (or lack thereof).
Let’s look at the blood results. Tuesday morning (~8 hours) I was at 0.2 mmol/L of ketones in my blood. That evening (~18 hours) when I tested myself again I was up to 1.1. The next morning (~32 hours), even though the only thing I had “eaten” was two fish oil pills the night before, I had gone down to 0.9. When I came home from work that evening and tested again (46.4 hours) my ketones were all the way up to 3.5 mmol/L. After which I had two Keto Chows (Chocolate Peanut Butter), 4 pickles and a couple spoon fulls of ham soup my awesome wife had made. When I tested my blood again this morning, my levels were all the way down to 0.6. Honestly it makes no sense why it’s down again, it just further re-enforces the notion of “don’t chase ketones, just keep calm and keto on” – or don’t do what I’m doing and test your blood every day, just keep doing keto (no cheating!) and it’ll work out. You also shouldn’t get too anxious about the scale, which brings me to…
Weight results. Well, I came into this from a rather large (keto friendly) Easter dinner which loaded me up on salt and lots of water weight – all the way up to 208.3 lbs on Monday morning. By Tuesday morning (8 hours fasting while sleeping) I was only down to 207.8. lbs. By Wednesday morning I had dropped to 203.6, a slight up-tick Wednesday evening when I weighed myself again and as of this morning I was down again to 202.9 lbs. Monday – Thursday difference is 5.4lbs. Now it will be interesting to see if I can stick with it and continue going down. On a happy note, yesterday was also the weigh-in day for my city’s weight loss challenge. According to the scale there, I was down 6 lbs from the previous week. Nice.
Looks like I had inexplicably stored up a bunch of glycogen – the difference between yesterday morning (~8 hours fasting while sleeping) and this morning (~32 hours fasting) is dramatic: 4.2 lbs down and 0.9mmol/L of ketones higher. That’s a lot of water weight! I’m still trying to decide what I’m going to do regarding eating today. I feel fine, pretty good aside from being terribly tired; but that doesn’t have anything to do with fasting, it’s the fault of my brain.
I got an email yesterday evening where a user reported getting a time-out during payment, they recommended I try a different shopping cart. I looked at a few, then went to bed. Then around midnight my brain turned on, sleep was a lost cause so I decided to research a bit since I was awake anyway. After spending a few hours setting up and then decommissioning test shopping carts with various providers here’s what I have gleaned: Shopify is a crowd favorite, until you need to calculate shipping based on dimensions (which I do). Most of the other ones also can’t handle dimensions. WooCommerce handles it just fine, it’s a standard “out of the box” feature that takes the box sizes you provide and “packs” them, then gets a shipping quote with the weight and box. I (wrongfully) assumed this would be standard with other shopping carts. The only one I found that supports it is BigCommerce, which looks fine until you get into the pricing – their highest plan allows for 3000 orders a year after which it’s and additional $80 per 1000, PER MONTH. Based on my order volume over the last year, my monthly costs would be between $500 and $700; assuming no growth. That’s nuts.
Anyway – yesterday the clouds broke for a few hours after I got home and I was able to do some work on the shed, which was a good thing since I didn’t eat dinner (the kids ate Hot Pockets, my wife had a Keto Chow) though I also fell over backwards twice, got a real nice bruise on my rear. I also ran again. I did “mess up” and technically broke my fast when I took two fish pills after brushing my teeth – 15 calories each. CRON-O-Meter says I could eat 2892 more calories to reach my weight goal. Fun Stuff =)
Here’s the first time I fell over, bonus points if you can find the second time in the video.
Today I’m doing intermittent fasting, but for kicks I’m going to see how long I can go without eating and just running off the copious stored energy I have. I’m planning on possibly eating tomorrow, not sure though. Going off my DEXA scan I have approximately 220,000 calories stored, and going off my Resting Metabolic Rate test that means I have enough for almost 70 days. Yeah, not going to do that =) 24+ hours should be just fine. I am still drinking water (today it happens to have “Blackberry Lemonade” Crystal light in it, I also added “ElectroMix”) as dehydration would stink.
I planned on building the shed yesterday, unfortunately it was snowing pretty much all day. I did have some time to make some test batches of Keto Chow and to play around with the potential packaging. I stopped in at the container place on Friday and picked up some plastic containers to test out, of note I got the half gallon and 1 gallon square bottles. I was able to fit 30 meals of Chocolate Peanut Butter into the 1 gallon and I’m assuming I can fit 15 meals into the half gallon.
Got the floor/platform for the new shed built on Saturday, even got some of the shed put together before it got too dark:
I was going to finish building the shed today, but it’s snowing. Bah. Guess I’ll do something else, like see Zootopia with the kids (the ones that have their rooms clean). Yesterday we had a fun keto breakfast (pictured above, that’s what happens when the guy doing keto is in charge of breakfast) and a bunch of keto friendly stuff for Easter dinner; like smoked chicken legs, non-glazed ham, mashed cauliflower. The outlier was the funeral potatoes. I can report that I successfully DID NOT eat any of the potatoes, nor did I eat ANY Easter candy. Not even cadbury cream eggs, nor the malt eggs (these were particularly hard since it’s up there with kitkat as my favorite candy of all time. Despite that, still not worth it, I would only be sabotaging myself.
Didn’t have a chance to post yesterday, probably because I spent most of the day going to the landfill 3 times with the remnants of our shed, then we went to dinner. It was actually a really nice dinner, especially since 4 1/2 of us are doing keto and another couple that came is doing Atkins. They were really surprised at the wide variety of low carb food that was on the menu. From the low carb cocktail sauce to go with the shrimp, to the bacon wrapped steak bites; the salmon, the chicken, the low carb lobster bisque and the twice baked cauliflower. Yeah, it was pretty epic.
Today (Saturday) we did a mixing party, when that’s done I get to build a floor for the new shed, should be fun.
Well, despite doing pretty well yesterday I was still up in weight for the weekly weigh in for my city thing. I think it may have to do with eating the cheese and meat off some pizza yesterday. I guess today is a new day and so far today I’m doing perfect. I’m probably going to swing by the container people tomorrow and grab some sample containers so I can start experimenting around with the packaging for the new formulation.
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