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Day 080 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 66 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.1
  • Blood ketones: 0.3 mmol/L

3 Rich Chocolates yesterday, 3 Chocolate Peanut Butters today. Yesterday I got my web server happy again – I had it kinda working but the load balancer wasn’t handling the requests, the end result was it showed every connection coming from the same address (the load balancer) and that evening I found myself locked out of the admin area because “my address” had tried too many unsuccessful logins. Anyhow it seems to be working properly now. and I no longer have to worry about my server crashing and taking down the site.

By |2016-03-24T12:11:57-06:00March 23rd, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 080 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 65 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.3
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

Yesterday evening I spent some time discussing the possible packaging for “Keto Chow 2.0” with my wife. The company I’ll likely be using can package into “Stick Pack” and tubs/bottles, they aren’t able to handle the stand-up pouches I’m currently using (“yet”) so it’s likely I’ll be using tubs for bulk size and stick packs for the samples. The question now comes to what to do for the days – I don’t have a good solution for that yet. A smaller “day” tub would cost almost as much as the large bulk one, both the cost of the container and the cost of putting it into the container (but x7). I think the solution is going to be to up the volume of the sample size (the “single meal”) enough that the cost of 3 meals is lower than what the “day” used to cost – and just eliminate it entirely because it wouldn’t be necessary.

We’re also hitting some issues with the bulk size container. 7 days/21 meals for most of the flavors is a little too much to fit into a half-gallon size bottle. It fits into a standard 1 gallon (2 lb of protein) size bottle but there’s a bunch of extra space at the top. Since Peanut Butter is the “largest” flavor by volume I used it as my “worst case scenario” trial and found that I could actually get 10 days/30 meals of chocolate peanut butter into a gallon size container. Likely that is what we will do: no more “weeks” – they would be 30 meal/10 day packages. A round gallon size container is an awful waste of space as far as shipping goes so we’re looking into using “square” bottles instead, like these:

Square

This all presents a problem though: Shipping. We currently use a LOT of USPS flat rate boxes; they’re free(ish) and offer low shipping rates where we don’t have to care how much stuff weighs, only how big it is. With these larger, fixed dimension, containers we would be able to fit half as many bottles into the same box as the week bags. A Medium FRB would hold 1 instead of 2-3. A Large FRB would only hold 2 bottles instead of the current 4 weeks (20 days worth compared to 28). It’s likely we’ll have to find our own boxes that fit 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the bottles. It kinda sucks but will be better for FedEx and possibly UPS shipping with all 3 services using the same boxes. Time will tell.

We also hashed out the flavors that will be part of the initial round: Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate Peanut butter, Cookie & Cream and Strawberry.

Flavor Graph

Those first five represent 73% of the total sales of Keto Chow all by themselves, so I think it’s a good starting point; especially with the apparent discontinuation of the different flavors by Dymatize. I found some Chocolate Fudge and some Butter Cream Toffee yesterday but still no joy with Banana and Piña Colada, it may not be long before They go out of stock in the weeks, though we have a nice inventory of days and samples. Cinnamon bun is currently down to just samples remaining, the last day pack sold on Saturday.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 22nd, 2016|Keto Chow, Site or Store Stuff, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Days 077 & 078 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 64 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.74
  • Blood ketones: 0.4 mmol/L
  • Weight: 207.9
  • Blood ketones: 0.5 mmol/L

Well, my ketones are up but I also had dinner with the family yesterday (split chicken breasts with ham and swiss inside, wrapped in bacon and then dipped in eggs and Parmesan cheese) and that was enough salt for me to gain a bunch of water weight. That’ll come out eventually but looks real bad on the scale right now.

Found this interesting review of Keto Chow, says he’ll be following up with updates.

By |2016-03-21T15:22:32-06:00March 21st, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Days 077 & 078 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 076 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 63 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 204.6
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

Some friends took us out to a really nice restaurant last night. Like “valet parking, half of the menu was in french and up a twisting mountain road in a cabin” fancy restaurant. After some extensive study of the menu before hand I ended up getting the “Bacon Wrapped Elk Strip Steak” which as  matter of course comes rare, like purple and cool in the middle. It was really good though. I didn’t eat any of the rolls and I didn’t have any dessert. So two Keto Chows and some elk, not bad for the day! (I also didn’t eat any of the girl scout cookies I got for the kids).

As for today, had a big mixing party and got everything stocked up for the coming week. I’m getting worried about some of the flavors, here’s the list of ones that I still have stock of but haven’t been able to order any more for a while and might be discontinued:

  • Butter Cream Toffee
  • Banana
  • Pina Colada
  • Chocolate Fudge

as for Cinnamon bun, all we have left is samples. It’s a good thing that we’re inching closer to having our own protein powder so we are no longer beholden to the whims of Dymatize.

By |2016-03-22T09:17:51-06:00March 19th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|4 Comments
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Day 075 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 62 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.2
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

 

Dear Texas Roadhouse peanuts,

It’s been fun but I think we need to break up.

Sincerely, Chris.

We went to dinner last night at Texas Roadhouse, I got the pork chops, salad and broccoli. I should have been WELL under my net carbs for the day but then I ate a couple peanuts, then some more, and more, and more. I think I ended up eating like 40-50 of them (the individual peanuts inside the shells). This morning I had no measurable ketones as payment. Dag nabbit. OK, new plan: the next time I go to Texas Roadhouse or Five Guys: no peanuts. I apparently lack the willpower to eat them sensibly and not eating any is frankly easier.

There’s a bug with subscriptions right now, you’ll get a 404 wen you try to view your subscription. I’m hoping a fix comes out in the next day or so – until then if you want to cancel a subscription just let me know and I’ll get it done. I also just changed the web server a bit, it’s now two servers in a cluster and I finally got memcached working for realsies with nginx. Yay!

By |2016-03-18T09:34:17-06:00March 18th, 2016|100 days of keto, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Day 075 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 074 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 61 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.1
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

3 Rich chocolate Keto Chows yesterday, plus some asparagus covered in cream cheese, mmmm asparagus.

I was putting in some details in Cron-O-Meter this morning (the aforementioned asparagus and keto Chow) and noticed there was a shortcut to add blood ketone readings. I was pretty surprised! Turns out they added a whole bunch of features specific to nutritional ketosis including automatic macro calculations and other fun stuff. One of the developers even popped into my thread on /r/keto about the changes to answer questions.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 17th, 2016|Ketogenic, Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 074 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 072 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 59 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.6
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

 

Had a great Pi day yesterday. I went and got a DEXA scan and a RMR test. Drank a couple Keto Chows for breakfast and lunch and made fathead pizza for the family for Pi day. Oddly the kids had no problem eating a low carb pizza with the crust made of cheese, with alfredo sauce, sausage, bacon, ham, more cheese and some avocados.

My business cards came, We’re going to be sticking them into orders so people can share when asked “how on earth are you losing so much weight?!” FYI: there’s a secret on the back side =)

By |2016-03-15T14:07:19-06:00March 15th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|2 Comments
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DEXA Scan Results (body composition analysis)

This entry is part 123 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I’ve been doing Nutritional Ketosis (aka: “keto”) for about a year and a half now. I started out at 258 back in late October 2014, got down as far as 198 but came up some with Thanksgiving, Christmas and the like. For the last while I’ve been (mostly) doing 3 meals of Keto Chow a day and am on a downward trend again:

18 months of Keto

Yesterday I had a “DEXA” scan done, which I wasn’t even aware of until I saw this post on /r/ketochow and later this post on /r/keto. The quick explanation of a DEXA scan is it’s a full body X-Ray, aside from a post-mortem autopsy it’s the only way to accurately measure your body composition. Biggest surprise from mine? My entire skeleton only weighs 8.52 lbs, that’s nuts. Another interesting thing to note is apparently how inaccurate my scale is for measuring fat percentage by passing voltage through my body (24.5% compared to the 31.9% the DEXA measured). In its defense: my legs show as having 24.6% on the DEXA scan which is only 0.1% off – since the voltage is going in one foot and out the other, I’m guessing it only measures my legs.The DEXA scanner

Aside from providing some really fun pictures of my skeleton and soft tissue, the scan also gives some very interesting statistics on distribution (my right side is slightly stronger than my left) and with additional scans (at the same place) they give you a graph of changes to each region over time (I removed these from the report I uploaded here since they currently only have a single data point). There is also the datum that I have 63 lbs of fat on my body so losing 30 or so isn’t craziness. 180 would be sweet.

Feel free to check out my report.

Right after the scan I also did a test to determine my Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) which involved putting a clip on my nose and breathing through a tube for 15 minutes. The tube fed to a machine that measured the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels going in and out to determine how many calories I was using. The lady told me to make sure I had my phone or something else to do because it would be boring. And it was. She also warned me that the nose plugs would probably feel like burning. And they did; after about 3 minutes.

RMR Scan

Angry Birds shirt FTW!

The test shows that my resting energy expenditure is 2219 calories a day. It also assumes I’ll burn another 633 calories from walking around and doing stuff that isn’t sitting in a chair, reading reddit; and it postulates I could burn another 277 from exercise. The DEXA scan put my RMR at 2004 calories/day – so it was kinda close. The RMR report also said I probably want between 1776 and 2218 calories a day for weight loss; and that my metabolism is 10% faster than people of similar sex, age, height and weight. There were some less than useful platitudes about “you must burn more calories than you consume to lose weight” which is the same as saying “you must save more money than you spend to save money” or “if more people leave a room than come in, there will be less people in the room” – um… thanks? Anyway, here’s the front page of the RMR report:

Resting Metabolic Rate

Overall I think the scan was great and plan to do some follow-up one, starting with 6 months from now. The place I went to charges $99 for the first scan and $75 for subsequent ones – I got a discount by scheduling the RMR and DEXA together ($10 is $10).

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 15th, 2016|Weight Loss, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|Comments Off on DEXA Scan Results (body composition analysis)
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Days 070 & 071 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 58 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.9
  • Blood ketones: 0.3 mmol/L
  • Weight: 204.3
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

 

I’m apparently broken or something, when I finally ate yesterday around 5:00 PM my ketone levels were only at 0.3 mmol/L, they should have been up there in the 1.0-1.5 range; and today they’re non-detectable? This is why I would NOT recommend people check their blood ketone levels every day: if you thought stressing over the ups and downs of the scale are bad, this is even worse (plus it costs $2 EVERY TIME YOU TEST).

Whatever. I have three Keto Chows for today (Rich Chocolate), I’m re-testing the vitamin/mineral mixture and so far it does indeed look like the weird flavor was in the protein powder not the mix, I suppose it should be encouraging that I’m still the only one that could taste it. I’m also the only one aside from my mom that I know that doesn’t like cucumbers since, you know, they smell like ammonia. Tomorrow I’ll be mixing up a batch of Keto Chow right off the shelf as a control but it’s looking like I’ll be ordering 100kg of the vitamin mix sometime soon if that tests OK.

On a sad note: I’m still having problems sourcing certain flavors of the Dymatize protein powder. Rich Chocolate is finally becoming available in the 10 lb boxes again (which is nice). But I haven’t been able to find any Cinnamon Bun for over a month and Pina Colada and Banana are getting harder and harder to find. Most of the distributors I get it from are reporting that those 3 (cinnamon, banana and pina colada) have been discontinued by the manufacturer. Now, they also said that about Rich Chocolate a few months ago and it came back just fine so I’m not sure what’s actually going on. Regardless, as of this morning I’ve removed Cinnamon Bun from the “Sample all the things” bundle and I’ll be tracking the remaining inventory of the samples and days closely for removal from the site, week packages of cinnamon bun have been out for the last 2 weeks or so (Snicker Doodle is still available, and yummy).

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 14th, 2016|100 days of keto, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Days 070 & 071 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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