Weight Loss

Exercise whilst in ketosis, don’t drink it too fast

This entry is part 9 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I read a really interesting paper that gave some background on Inuit hunters and keto diets. One very interesting thing that stuck out near the end was the length of time required to adapt to ketosis and its effect exercise. The paper pegs the time needed to adapt to 2-3 or even 3-4 weeks. I have noticed a significant difference in how difficult it is to do my standard Elliptical routine in the morning now that I’m doing ketosis. The program has two spikes of resistance that just about wipe me out every time now. A month ago (normal diet) I didn’t notice it being so hard. Conversely, it’s about the same to do my running program. Anyhow, here’s to hoping it gets easier to do aerobic activity. The paper I linked at the beginning has a really good rundown on the history of ketogenic diets. If you’re at all interested, I’d recommend reading it. Along with the stuff about exercise I also learned that I need more sodium and potassium in my diet for happy ketosis, I’ll fix that in my next batch; until then I’ll just eat some pepperoni.

One other “experience” thing I wanted to relate: Ketofood is pretty intese stuff with a lot of nutrients in a tight space. It’s not a good idea to chug it down in a few minutes and be done. With People Chow I had no problem at all with doing exactly that and I have to remind myself that if I don’t slow down and take at least a half hour or so eating my food I’m going to be sorry.

Eating ketofood too fast makes my intestines hurt. I’m saying intestines instead of stomach because it’s far lower (belly-button area). Slowing down to drink my ketofood goes in line with other admonitions to drink it slowly so I’ll feel more full.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 14th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|Comments Off

Ketosis – the “cheat”; Raspberry Ketones are useless

This entry is part 8 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

So first off I’d like to change my description of a Ketogenic diet. I have been referring to it as “The Nuclear Option” since it’s sort of a last-ditch final effort to lose weight. Over on a reddit thread there was a great write up about how when you force your body into ketosis, you are deliberately creating a (non-fatal) deficiency in a (mostly) essential nutrient: carbohydrates (glucose). Yep, that’s exactly it. Our bodies have the ability to run on carbohydrates, amino acids and fatty acids; essentially we’ll take anything we can get so as to not starve.

Ultimately any time you lose weight it simply comes down to your body using/burning more energy than you recently consumed so it’s forced to use reserves. You have some glucose reserves in your liver and muscles, protein that can be broken down into glucose in your liver; and you have fat. Some cells burn fat just fine, most would rather use glucose. Traditional weight loss (just less calories) works because as you have a calorie deficit, your body will eventually convert stored fat into energy. Some will be made into glucose via Gluconeogenesis, some will be made into ketone “bodies”. Specifically forcing your body into a state where it is mostly doing the ketones is the cheat.

Ketogenic Diet: the Konami Code for your belly

Here’s how I normally play a video game: I’ll start it out normal, playing along, collecting ammo and dying every once in a while. After a few days of 1-2 hours playing in the time I can get, I’ll start to notice that I need to concentrate on other stuff (kids, wife, yard, etc…) so I’ll find the cheat codes, give myself all the weapons, ammo, health, the ability to fly and walk through walls; all the good stuff. Then I plow through the rest of the game and I’m done. I think Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of the few that I did (and still do! Onslaught FTW!!) play normally.

Ketosis/ketogenic diets as a biological cheat? Absolutely. Is it something I’m planning on doing forever? Probably not as strict, but more on that in just a bit. Is it difficult to not eat pizza when lunch at work is from The Pie? It was brutal. Will being on a ketogenic diet teach me to eat better after I go off it? …

UPDATE Feb 18, 2015: Initially I didn’t think it would be a lasting change, reexamining this after a few months on Keto I think I have changed my eating habits permanently. If I ever get down to the point that I’m happy with my weight and am super skinny I guess I can lay off being such a stickler on ketosis and eat a few carbs on select occasions. The new recipe that I’m using (Keto Chow) is better tasting than People Chow ever was, I’m not going back. I see no reason NOT to continue on Keto Chow unless something even better comes along. END UPDATE.

One other fun aspect of ketone bodies is they are water soluble. If your body produces too much for you to use, they do not get re-converted back into fat; instead they are excreted from the body. along with coming out in urine, they can also come out in sweat and even respiration. In really high concentrations (undiagnosed diabetes, for example) the amount coming out through respiration cam give the person “acetone breath” which is usually described as “fruity”.

Well, that was fun, now let’s talk about “Raspberry Ketones”. Raspberry ketones are all the rage right now for weight loss. A while ago I ordered potassium citrate from bulksupplements.com and they offered to send a 100g packet of anything they sold if I would review it on Amazon. I had already gotten the stevia, MSM (for kicks, you should be getting all the sulfur you need if you have the right amino acids balance), and they didn’t have pure caffeine that I could give to my brother-in-law as a Christmas present; so I had them send me some raspberry ketone powder. I figured “ketogenic diet, raspberry ketones? why not!” After mixing some into a week of ketofood I actually did some research and found out more about raspberry ketones.

There is nothing to actually, for realsies, indicate they help with weight loss in humans
They don’t come from actual raspberries (unless it’s crazy expensive and even then there’s no way to know)
For all intents and purposes, “raspberry ketones” is just “artificial raspberry flavoring” but new and fancy somehow
It will give a marked raspberry flavor to stuff, I don’t like it in my ketofood

I can’t find the original source, but there’s a great write-up about why NOW doesn’t do anything with raspberry ketones. So my official recommendation: don’t bother with it. I really (really) don’t like the additional flavor even though I like raspberries; and it’s not even going to actually do anything for you.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 13th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent, Keto Chow|Comments Off

Ketogenic update: don’t eat carbohydrates

This entry is part 7 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Ok, so this is fairly obvious, talking about a ketogenic diet where you have to keep all carbohydrates below 30g/day, but you should not decide “hey, I’ve had a good 2 1/2 week run, I’ll go out to dinner with my wife to Texas Roadhouse and get the Cactus Blossom and some grilled chicken and I’ll be fine” I say that because that’s what I did. Here, you can see the bars at the far left where I was on a more regular diet, and the spike on Friday:

My progress up to this point was steady and beautiful; based on some research I had done, I figured that if I did eat some carbs Friday at dinner, I should be able to get rid of them by:

Doing a crazy workout Saturday morning (the elliptical usually says I burned 850 calories). Your muscles should blow through glucose with aplomb.
Not eating anything at all until Lunch on Saturday to further get it going.

Yeah, I did that and my progress completely stopped. I checked my ketone levels on Saturday and Sunday and it didn’t even register. Today I finally got up to 1.5 (goal is around 1.5-3). One other major problem is: it’s far easier to do something 100% than 99%. Since Friday, sticking to just ketofood has been far more difficult. I’m guessing my brain’s going to take about a week to cut it out and be quiet. So now I’m doubling down and am re-committed to just ketofood. Let’s see how it goes.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 11th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|Comments Off

Preparing Ketofood

This entry is part 6 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

So I’m doing ketogenic DIY soylent right now (the “nuclear option” for losing weight, as I like to call it). There’s info about ketosis in a previous post and info about how bad the “induction phase” recipe is in a different post (the “ongoing” one I’m using now is WAY better and quite tasty).

I’ve talked about some of the issues with doing ketogenic DIY before, one thing I didn’t cover much was how expensive it is. If you want to buy the stuff to start outright and don’t have any of the ingredients already it’s over $300 unless you can find smaller packages. The daily cost is around $5.50, which is quite a bit more than People Chow which is around $3.50.

What about preparing the stuff?

When I started on this I was dismayed that the official recipe doesn’t list how much water you need to mix it with(!), so I’ve had to wing it and come up with my own preparation methods.

700g of coconut flour for a week’s worth, banana for scale

I’m using roughly the same mixing method that I still use for mixing up People Chow (I mix for others, the masa smells really good when you can’t eat carbs): a big giant Utz cheese puffs container with ingredients for a weeks worth.

That’s a LOT of Chia seeds (pre-grinding)

Unlike many other seeds, chia seeds are supposed to be just fine if eaten whole (you body can digest the hull). That said, you apparently don’t get the right Omega-3’s unless they are ground. So I bought a small coffee/spice grinder (cheapest I could find on Amazon with OK reviews) and run them through in batches grinding up the seeds. Another good reason to grind the seeds is so when the seeds soak up the water and form a gel (seriously, Google “chia gel”) it will be in smaller bits. Combine with the lecithin and you want it in small bits.

Ketofood all mixed up

There’s really a lot of cocoa powder in the recipe too. Coupled with the coconut and a 1/2 teaspoon of pure stevia that I added and you get that “mounds” flavor I mentioned in an earlier post. The black flecks are ground chia.

One of the pillars of a ketogenic diet is the fat/oil. This recipe calls for 39.4ml of oils per meal which is 24 pumps of my newer, larger (hand lotion) measuring pump I got from Wal-Mart for $2. I just measure the weekly amount of MCT oil and Canola oil and pour both into an empty canola oil bottle I had. That gets put into my measuring pump as the pump gets low.

I found that I need to let the ketofood sit for a few hours for best consistency so I’m trying to mix it up the night before:

Grab 3 blender bottles and remove the mixing ball or mixing screen or whatever
Zero out my 0.1g scale and measure 81.4g of mixed powder into each one
Put 24 pumps of the oil I previously mixed onto the powder
Fill up the blender bottles about 3/4 of the way with water
Mix it up really well with an immersion blender (I got this one from Walmart)
Stick it in the fridge for tomorrow

I guess a progress update is in order:

By the way, did you know that even if you don’t have a Withings scale you can freely run their app, manually enter your weight from a different scale and get the cool graphs? It’s much less convenient and doesn’t have the other measurements their scale does but it will send weight data to other fitness apps like Up, Runkeeper, MyFitnessPal, Fitbit and others so you only have to enter data once. They also offer exceptionally easy CSV import and export of your data which is why my log goes back to 2006.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:27-06:00November 7th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|4 Comments

My Experience so far with Ketogenic soylent (2 weeks)

This entry is part 5 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Well, I’ve been doing ketogenic soylent for 2 weeks now, sounds like time to write down my experience so far. I looked at various recipes and QuidNYC Ketofood seemed to be the most popular, was fairly simple, and didn’t sound horrible. I noticed that there was an “Induction Phase” variant with mostly the same ingredients and both used stuff I already had (Potassium Citrate, Choline etc…) So I decided to buy the ingredients to make the Induction Phase recipe, and planned on getting the stuff I needed for the “Ongoing” recipe in a week or so.

The Induction Phase DIY soylent is the most awful stuff I have ever tasted in my life.

I’m still not sure if it was the Soy Lecithin granules, the Chia seeds, the Psyllium Husk powder or what but I don’t like the flavor at all. By the end of the third day I was experiencing a gag reflex from the smell. At that point I didn’t care how long the induction phase was supposed to be, I was ready to move on (frankly I still don’t know how long it’s supposed to be) so I ordered the Coconut Flour, Raw Cocoa and other ingredients that would move me over to the ongoing recipe. I ended up on the induction formula for 7.5 days. There are a few things to note: One of the key components of most ketogenic diets is MCT oil. This stuff is crazy expensive and isn’t something most people are ready for in the quantities specified in the induction recipe. It’s Medium Chain Triglyceride oil and it’s made from Coconut Oil but is liquid even when refrigerated. MCT can more easily be turned into ketones and it will get you into ketosis quicker and more effectively than using any other oil. Did I mention it’s expensive? It is and it’s something you can’t swap out for something else, like MOAR canola or olive oil.

If I was going to start ketosis again I would skip the induction recipe and go straight for the ongoing one.

Since I didn’t have a control group I can’t say definitively what was caused just by going into ketosis and what was caused by the nasty experience of hating what I was drinking. I can say that a commonly known side effect of ketosis is the “ketogenic flu” where going into ketosis will make a person exhibit flu-like symptoms. I started on a 4 day weekend and am exceptionally happy that I did. Another common side effect is constipation, I apparently bucked the trend and went the other way (likely thanks to the oil is my guess). Took about a week to get into the <5 on the Bristol Scale (and I’m done with this subject now).

OK, so the induction recipe and experience was awful, how’s the ongoing… going?

The change in the recipe flavor was massive. I have no way to describe the induction one, the ongoing is overwhelmingly coconut, chocolate and cinnamon (in that order). I added a tiny amount of stevia to help the taste be less bitter (raw cocoa FTW!) and it now tastes an awful lot like a “Mounds” bar (Almond Joy without the almond) that somehow got the sugar taken out and was put through a blender. If I don’t swallow it directly I end up with a mouth full of coconut that’s entertaining to chew for a bit; I usually swallow it directly though.

How long am I planning on continuing this madness? For a while. I’m down 13 lbs in these 2 weeks and it’ll be “fun” to keep it up during Thanksgiving and Christmas.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:28-06:00November 6th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|3 Comments

Ketogenic Diet, what is it?

This entry is part 4 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

So yesterday I posted about starting Ketogenic soylent, I thought I’d take a little time to explain what that is and what’s going on. DISCLAIMER: This post will contain some generalizations to simplify things, if you want to do real actual research you’ll want more specifics elsewhere.

The cells in your body like glucose. A LOT. Given a choice between glucose and other energy sources, your cells will say “come back when you’re glucose and we’ll talk.” You get glucose from sugars, starches; in general: from carbohydrates. If your body has glucose to burn, it’s going to use that first (for the most part). If your body *doesn’t* have glucose to burn, it’s going to need a different fuel source. It can break down muscle that’s not being used into glucose, it can also process fatty acids into “Ketone Bodies” that your mitochondria can use for fuel.

Burning fatty acids as fuel through varied levels of ketosis is really the only way to lose excess fat since it doesn’t magically turn into glucose. Apparently normal people will naturally switch into a mild ketogenic state while they’re sleeping and the supply of glucose is low, then they eat breakfast and it goes away. One other place you see ketosis happening, though not in a good way, is with Diabetes. Without the right amount of insulin to help with the glucose, your body freaks out and goes into ketosis overdrive. While a ketogenic diet aims for 0.5-3 millimolar of ketone bodies in your blood, uncontrolled ketosis ends up as ketoacidosis in the 15+ range. At high levels, the slightly acidic ketones pose a significant problem, lowering the pH of your blood, damaging tissue and de-mineralizing bones. Not a good thing. I bought some ketone test strips off Amazon so I could check my levels.

The crucial element to a Ketogenic Diet is to give your body as few carbohydrates as possible, like less than 30 grams a day (which should be around 120 calories). Instead, you feed your body enough protein so that it’s happy and not tearing apart your muscles for fuel, and… a lot of fats and oils. Sounds like the Atkins diet because the Atkins diet is a modified ketogenic diet.

Ketogenic Diets have been around for a long time, but using it for weight loss is relatively new. Personally, I first heard about it in 2009 as a potential treatment for seizures if my son continued to not respond to anti-consultants (which he responded just fine and has been seizure free for 5+ years). A myriad of studies have shown outstanding results with ketogenic diets for the treatment of seizures, it’s just *really* hard to do with traditional food and involves an awful lot of heavy cream.

Anyhow, there’s a little about the diet. You can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis and the links that come off it.

By chris|2014-11-05T11:06:52-07:00November 5th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|4 Comments

The Nuclear Option: Ketogenic soylent.

This entry is part 3 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I started consuming People Chow back in January 2014 for a variety of reasons, but primarily to lose weight. Initially it did an excellent job of doing just that with around 14 pounds going away over about a month. The main reason for the loss was I was exceptionally good about only eating People Chow with maybe 100-200 calories of other stuff a week. Unfortunately I didn’t continue losing weight because I got lax in my adherence to People Chow only. I did do a fairly good job of maintaining my weight for the next several months with a sharp uptick more recently due to a bunch of parties. I had been planning on trying a Ketogenic diet for some time and the imminent Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas trifecta of overeating seemed like a good time to start.

The last year in review

It’s pretty easy to see where I started People Chow, where I failed utterly to lose weight in mid-October (thanks Dreamforce parties) and where I started Ketogenic soylent. The most fun was one day when I weighed 4.2 lbs less than the day before (yes, that would be water).

Just up-to and the start of Ketogenic soylent

I’m going to do a series of posts about my experience thus far with Ketogenic soylent, Ketosis and other factors. Let me clarify one thing though: doing a ketogenic diet, using soylent or regular “muggle” food is kinda a big deal and not something you can or should do willy-nilly. If you go for ketosis, you’re going to run into “ketosis flu” which feels a lot like having the flu. It’s a difficult diet to maintain with all of society blissfully chowing down on sugar and carbs. Let me put this into perspective: if you’ve heard about Atkins, South Beach or any other carbohydrate restrictive diet: those are modified Ketogenic diets (though they emphasize protein too much). The closest thing I’ve had to candy for the last 2 weeks was a single raisin that I ate without thinking.

Anyhow, be ready for some Ketogenic diet, ketosis and ketone information; whether you want it or not!

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:30-06:00November 4th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|1 Comment

1 month on DIY soylent

This entry is part 13 of 39 in the series DIY Soylent

So I’ve been eating (mostly) just soylent for a month. Unequivocally I’d say it’s been great. I’ve learned some things (don’t go calcium deficient, my original harbor freight scale stunk), lost some things (almost 1 “stone”), and likely saved a bunch of money though it’s hard to tell since I still have to buy food for the rest of the family. It’s excessively convenient to have all my food for the day in a ziploc bag that just needs water.

I’m losing weight again. I slowed quite a bit. It turns out if you bow to social pressure and eat muggle food (ok fine, it’s Asparagus season and there is Nacho Cheese) but also finish that day’s soylent because you don’t want to have fun with deficiencies again…. well you end up over the 2000 calorie mark. Crazy stuff. It wasn’t from being hungry, that only happens if I don’t drink my soylent.

Weight log - I started soylent on that last upward spike.

Weight log – I started soylent on Jan 14th (it’s when the line goes down).

This last week I switched to using Olive Oil and some vitamin K supplements instead of the Soybean Oil that’s part of the official People Chow recipe. This is due to several factors:

The whole phytoestrogen thing in Soy has me skittish
It’s likely the lights in the supermarket are breaking down the vitamin K anyway
Olive Oil is something humans have been consuming happily for a long time (corn flour is too)

So there you have it. Now on to month 2 of soylent!

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:37-06:00February 18th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|Comments Off

Life on soylent – Week 2

This entry is part 11 of 39 in the series DIY Soylent

So I’ve been on DIY “soylent” (People Chow 3.0.1) for 2 weeks now, let’s see how it’s going:

Weight Log January 2014

Not bad. So this last weekend I went on an outing with my wife and had normal food for dinner and breakfast, then some more muggle food on Sunday. I was starting to miss the plain simplicity of the soylent, so was my GI. It’s been quite a relief yesterday and today to go back to just the soylent. To say it’s grown on me would be a vast understatement. I think the only thing I think I would change would be to find a decent vitamin K source so I could switch the soybean oil for olive oil. Aside from eliminating the potential phytoestrogen (there’s still a lot of debate on that) issue there has also been lots of rumbling regarding “oxidative stress” as QuidNYC puts it in his DIY soylent formulation’s notes: “In the end, it’s your call. Maybe canola isn’t that bad. But personally, I’d rather consume something that has been demonstrated as safe — and even beneficial in terms of human health — over a period of thousands of years (i.e., extra-virgin olive oil).”

People Chow 301 Nutrition Label

The official soylent recipe just got their final nutrition information done so they have a label. So just for kicks, using this generator, I made a nutrition information label for People Chow 3.0.1. Here is the PDF version. This is the ingredients list:

Ingredients: Selected Corn Treated With Lime, Microfiltered Whey Protein Isolate, Soybean Oil, Mega Man Sport

[contains: Whey Protein Concentrate, Nonfat dry milk, natural and artificial vanilla cream flavor, DiArginine Malate, Sodium Citrate, Maltodextrin, Xanthan, Lecithin, Potassium Citrate, Sodium Chloride, Sodium Caseinate, Potassium Chloride, Sodium Caseinate, Dipotassium Phosphate, Tricalcium Phosphate, Mono & Diglycerides, Sucralose, Acesulfame Potassium], Calcium & Magnesium Citrate Powder with Vitamin D3, Potassium Citrate, Iodized Salt, Choline bitartrate, Soy Lecithin (< 1%).

Contains: Milk, Wheat, Soybeans

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:37-06:00January 28th, 2014|Weight Loss, Soylent|Comments Off

Video of mixing 3 days worth of Soylent

This entry is part 10 of 39 in the series DIY Soylent

So I wanted to do a video of mixing up a few days batches of soylent – mostly because it’s the sort of thing that would have saved me a bunch of time and spilled powder when I was starting all this but also because I made the claim that “I’ve gotten to where I can mix up 3 days worth in about 6 minutes” and po2gdHaeKaYk called me out wanting to see it =)

So here it is. Turns out (at least in this video) that it takes me almost exactly 12 minutes from the time I start measuring the first ingredient (0:31) to the time I finish measuring the oil (12:34). So I was only off by half? I suspect mixing another days worth would only add an additional 3 minutes and so forth.

https://youtu.be/ir04Yv5Gj9w

The biggest time saving tips (in my opinion)

use a bowl large enough to hold your largest ingredient (in this formulation that’s 345 grams of corn flour)
dump each ingredient into a container large enough to hold everything with an opening larger than your bowl from tip #1
measure each ingredient separately, don’t stack them up and “tare” or zero out the scale. In addition to it being hard to take out extra overage; many scales are less sensitive/accurate at higher weight loads
I forgot to put this one the video: a new $0.05 nickel weighs exactly 5.000 grams – if your scale can be calibrated using a specific weight and you don’t have one to calibrate it with you can use a stack or two of nickels.

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:37-06:00January 24th, 2014|Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Weight Loss

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

What about preparing the stuff?

Share this:

The Induction Phase DIY soylent is the most awful stuff I have ever tasted in my life.

If I was going to start ketosis again I would skip the induction recipe and go straight for the ongoing one.

OK, so the induction recipe and experience was awful, how’s the ongoing… going?

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: