Weight Loss

Great NYTimes article by Gary Taubes

This entry is part 92 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Linky: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/diet-advice-that-ignores-hunger.html?_r=0

As described on Reddit:

An excellent article highlighting the differences between fat and carb restricted diets, and the aftermath when people end them, and the effect that carbs have on increased hunger.

Gary Taubes is the guy that wrote “Why we get fat and what to do about it” and “Good Calories, Bad Calories

I also found this great (older article): http://www.businessinsider.com/9-lies-about-fat-that-destroyed-the-worlds-health-2013-11

By |2016-10-13T07:28:03-06:00September 1st, 2015|Ketogenic, Weight Loss|Comments Off on Great NYTimes article by Gary Taubes

Awesome article over at Art Of Manliness: Everything You Know About Cholesterol Is Wrong

This entry is part 87 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

This was published yesterday, it’s a really good read and does a great job distilling down how messed up the “Generally Accepted Dietary Wisdom” is on Cholesterol: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/08/25/everything-you-know-about-cholesterol-is-wrong/ Some of the things he wrote lead me to believe he’s at minimum aware of ketogenic diets and maybe even doing keto/paleo.

There’s also an excellent section “Beyond Good and Bad Cholesterol: HDL and LDL Cholesterol” that describes the sub groupings within HDL and LDL. Not all LDL is bad, not all HDL is good and nobody talks about Lp(a).

So if you (or someone you know) has questions about cholesterol and how a ketogenic diet with all the bacon, cheese, eggs, and assorted yumminess (of Keto Chow =) can possibly be good for you, check it out! (also check out the rest of the site, it’s got some awesomely excellent information all over the place)

By |2015-08-26T05:38:07-06:00August 26th, 2015|Ketogenic, Weight Loss|Comments Off on Awesome article over at Art Of Manliness: Everything You Know About Cholesterol Is Wrong

Great interview with a doctor, she explains how low carb works in simple terms

This entry is part 84 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

She’s been doing less than 20g/day of carbohydrates (Keto) for 13 years! She also does a very good comparison of her inability to tan and her tolerance for carbohydrates. Being pale and getting a sun burn doesn’t mean she doesn’t have enough will power – that’s just how her body is.

From the video description:

Nobody knows more about the practicalities of low carb than Dr. Mary Vernon. Here she explains it for you.

Dr Mary Vernon, MD, is one of the world’s foremost experts on treating obesity and diabetes with low carbohydrate nutrition. She is a practicing family physician, educates doctors on low carb and is active in and former president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (doctors specializing in treating obese patients).

By |2015-08-05T09:25:32-06:00August 5th, 2015|Weight Loss, Ketogenic|2 Comments

199.1

This entry is part 77 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

This morning the scale hit under 200 for the first time since… well, probably 1998. For kicks I tried to take a picture but the scale was acting up and gave me numbers higher than 200. I’m going to live in denial and accept the first pronouncement. And hows about a photo? On the left you have two pictures (from the same day) taken in mid October 2014 during the “DreamForce” conference I weighed about 255 at the time. On the right you have yesterday.Before and after

By |2016-10-13T07:28:06-06:00June 28th, 2015|Weight Loss|5 Comments

Keto+8 months=55

This entry is part 73 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Yesterday marked 8 months doing ketogenic “soylent”, and the day before that was my 20 year High School reunion. At the reunion I kept getting “wow, you look exactly the same!” probably because the organizers made us name tags that had our Senior portraits on them. If I remember correctly I was about 200 when I started my senior year and about 210 when I graduated. so technically I weighed a bit less then 20 years prior. I was really working on hitting One-derland before the reunion but didn’t quite make it =( It was nice to be the skinny(er) guy for a change. It was also nice that the dinner had keto friendly foods: Prime rib, as well as some meats and cheeses. Should have gotten a second plate of prime rib.

About a week ago I finally broke through my stall. I had been moving up and down between 206 and 211 for nearly a month. I’m thinking the likely culprit was Malitol which is a “sugar alcohol” that isn’t absorbed and used as quickly as glucose but it still eventually gets through. Other sugar alcohols are much better (Erythrotol and Xylotol) and aren’t a problem. Unfortunately most “sugar free” candy uses malitol so I stopped eating any of that and my weight started moving again.

8 months of keto

Weight progress up until today. 55.4 lbs down in 8 months.

Taken 4 days after I started Keto, weighed 257.8 lbs when I started

Taken 4 days after I started Keto, weighed 257.8 lbs when I started

2015-06-22 09.59.07

Weighed 202.4 lbs this morning, if all goes well I’m going to hit <200 this week!

High School

High School senior portrait. Taken back in 1994. I think I was somewhere between 200 and 210 at the time.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:08-06:00June 22nd, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|2 Comments

Hey, I be famous! Article on Forbes that quotes me (a couple times)

This entry is part 70 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Did an interview with Maggie Zhang a short time ago, she published the article today: How Soylent’s Meal-Replacement Competitors Got A Not-So-Bland Taste Of Success. It’s a good read.

In other related news, the guy in the cube next to me who is mixing his own Keto Chow is now down 33lbs since he started 5 weeks ago. That’s awesome!

By |2015-06-12T14:30:01-06:00June 12th, 2015|Keto Chow, Soylent, Weight Loss|4 Comments

Really, really short version of “Why we get fat”

This entry is part 68 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Found this today via random chance. It’s an article that appeared in Reader’s Digest following the release of Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It – which was a condensed version of Good Calories, Bad Calories. So if you want a really quick summary, from the Author himself, here you go:

http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/WWGF-Readers-Digest-feature-Feb-2011.pdf

By |2015-06-02T10:04:33-06:00June 2nd, 2015|Ketogenic, Weight Loss|Comments Off on Really, really short version of “Why we get fat”

For my own future reference: Exporting custom data from MyFitnessPal

This entry is part 67 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I got a ketonix breath acetone meter and I’m wanting a way to track stuff. I also have arriving shortly a blood glucose/ketone tester (with the way overpriced test strips) and I wanted a way to track blood ketone levels and breath acetone levels. After looking for tools that do this that aren’t just an excel spreadsheet I came back to custom measurements in MyFitnessPal. You can create a new measurement and give it any label you want. Then MFP will make a groovy graph. I’m going to be comparing blood ketone to breath acetone and try to figure out the correlation so I’m going to have to massage the data.

I found a way to export the custom measurements into an XML file. It requires messing around with the data once it’s imported but works fairly well. It was simple to pull weight data for the last 365 days(that link will open your own data if you’re logged into MFP). So now I can track measurements on a mobile app as well as a web site. Cool beans.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:09-06:00May 28th, 2015|Weight Loss, Ketogenic|Comments Off on For my own future reference: Exporting custom data from MyFitnessPal

Recommended Reading: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

This entry is part 66 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I read Gary Taubs’ earlier book Good Calories Bad Calories a few weeks ago, I followed it up with his newer book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. While it doesn’t have the same breadth of information as Good Calories it’s more clearly delivered and easier for non-technical-medial people to understand. Honestly I think it’s one of the better introductions to a ketogenic/high fat low carb diet that I’ve seen yet. Here’s some of the stuff I “took home” from the book.

We don’t get fat because we over eat. Meaning that overeating isn’t the cause of obesity, it’s an effect. If a room has a maximum occupancy of 20 people and the fire marshal gets upset and wants to know why it happened – you’re not going to say “well, it’s because more people came into the room than left.” Well duh, that’s what happened but that’s not the cause, the reason for the overcrowding. Rooms get overcrowded when more come in than leave and I get fat when I eat more than I burn; but that isn’t the cause.

20 calories a day. That’s all that’s needed to take someone from trim in their 20s to obese in their 60s. This is about how much you get by looking at a piece of cake wrong. If our calories in and calories out were regulated solely by willpower, maintaining the razor slim margin would be impossible. Instead our hunger and metabolism are controlled by a set of hormones and other factors. This goes completely contrary to what people like to think: that the obese would be thinner if they just stopped eating too much and got up and did some physical activity. It’s a character defect. They’re lazy and have no will power. Fortunately that entire line of thinking is wrong and it’s relatively easy to turn everything around.

When you eat sugars, starches or other stuff that breaks down into glucose (FYI: starch is just sugar that’s bound together in a polymer); your body reacts to the rising and damaging blood sugar levels by releasing insulin. In fact, your body actually starts releasing insulin before you start a meal; you only have to think of or smell food and your body will start to get ready and release insulin. Insulin does a bunch of things but of primary concern here is:

  • It tells the cells in your body to stop burning fatty acids, we gotta get the blood sugar down.
  • It tells your fat cells to store the free fatty acids that are circulating in your blood along with converting glucose in the blood into stored fat. Again, gotta get that blood sugar down.

So in the presence of insulin you will not burn fat, just glucose. Different cells are more or less reactive to insulin. Fat cells seem to react easily and don’t get tired of it, muscle cells and other cells tend to get resistant to the effects of insulin. When the cells don’t react to insulin at lower levels you’ll compensate by releasing more and more until your Islets of Langerhans can no longer keep up and you end up with type 2 diabetes. Oddly, your fat cells are still reacting to the insulin and dutifully storing energy away. It’s like your fat cells are acting without care for the rest of your cells (kinda like what cancer does). Anyhow, your cells still need energy; there’s no free fatty acids to consume so you end up with cellular starvation as your cells scream for something, anything to burn. If they can’t get anything then they will drop their activity to compensate. Just as you don’t get fat because you overeat, you don’t get fat because you are sedentary. Your desire or even ability to do physical activity drops in relation to the fuel available to your cells (besides the fat cells, because honey badger don’t care). If all the fuel your body can burn is glucose, you muscle cells don’t react to insulin because they are resistant and glucose is getting shoved into fat cells you will want to sit on a sofa and feed your starving cells. You get sedentary because you’re getting fat.

One thing that stuck with me: If you’re going to go to a huge dinner, what to you do to prepare so you can enjoy it as much as possible? Skip lunch and maybe even breakfast. Get some exercise, go for a walk. We call this working up an appetite for a reason. So to recap: to increase your hunger so you can eat more at a big feast you eat less and move more – which is precisely the advice given to lose weight? This is nuts! Exercise will make you hungry. If you burn 100 calories running, your body is going to figure out a way to replenish that missing fuel and hunger will move you to eat a little extra. There are many good reasons to exercise but exercising to try to  lose weight is insane.

The solution? cut the amount of insulin in your system. How do you do that? eat as few carbohydrates as possible.

You’ll have to battle your brain for a bit. Sugar does a really good job at stimulating the reward centers of the brain. Essentially you end up with an addiction to sugar, to pasta, to bread, to potatoes, to fruit. It’s more nuanced than that but when you stop eating sugars, refined flour and other easily digestible carbohydrates, you will feel withdrawals (though we call them cravings). Fortunately, the longer you go without these carbohydrates the cravings lessen. Your brain figures out how to run just fine on your stored fat as “ketone bodies” that your liver makes. Your cells aren’t inhibited from burning free fatty acids by overactive insulin so they increase activity. You feel the desire to get out and use up some of this extra energy. Your cells aren’t screaming for food so you don’t over eat. For that matter in most of the clinical trials of ketogenic diets, people lost more weight when they were told to eat how ever much they wanted, so long as it didn’t have carbohydrates. Eat more than you need? you probably won’t but if you do your body will compensate by upping activity. More bacon please.

If any of this sounds interesting and you want to learn the specifics instead of a general overview, be sure to check out the book: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes. It may even be at your local library. Looks like mine has 8 copies of the book and 1 copy of the audiobook available right now.

2015-05-27 15_38_59-Salt Lake County Library Services

By |2016-10-13T07:28:09-06:00May 27th, 2015|Weight Loss, Ketogenic|Comments Off on Recommended Reading: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

Great opinion from The Times – Cholesterol and Saturated Fat are OK now.

This entry is part 64 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

You can read the full thing here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4449967.ece?shareToken=7dba4f3ccd918bfcc1a900e04c14f6bb

Quick quote:

Indeed, the evidence that insisting on low-fat diets caused people to eat more carbohydrates, and that led to the explosion in obesity and diabetes, looks pretty strong — so far. After all, the main route by which the body lays down fat is to manufacture it from excess sugar in the liver. But why did carbohydrate consumption start to increase so rapidly in the 1960s? At least partly because of the advice to avoid meat and cheese. Obesity and diabetes are the price we have paid for getting fat and cholesterol so wrong.

How about a full, drains-up inquiry into how the medical and scientific profession made such an epic blunder and caused so much misery to people? Consider not just the damage that was done to people’s lives by faulty advice, but to the livelihoods of dairy and beef farmers and egg producers (I declare an interest as a very small producer of free-range eggs). Which has more sugar: an apple or an egg?

By |2015-05-26T15:39:53-06:00May 26th, 2015|Ketogenic, Weight Loss|Comments Off on Great opinion from The Times – Cholesterol and Saturated Fat are OK now.