It’s been a hectic stretch the past few weeks in my life including my wedding, a funeral and most recently my honeymoon and the switch of my work to some pretty rough hours further exacerbated by jet lag.
With all of these stressors, I estimate that in the past few months my diet in terms of carbs has ranged anywhere from 50 – 150 gm of carbs per day. I haven’t been keeping a food log so I can’t be entirely sure.
During my honeymoon I vaguely tried to pay attention to diet, but since I was in a foreign land I wanted to enjoy and experience as much of the country as possible, I wasn’t too strict. So when I came across a new delicacy, I tried it wholeheartedly, gluten carbs and all. When an alcoholic digestif was offered, I took a swig, and promptly chugged the whole thing guiltlessly. I ate ice cream, gelato, and various other sweets and pastries that I normally wouldn’t enjoy.
Each bite was taken conscientiously with full enjoyment and appreciation.
It’s interesting that when I came home, after less than a week of effortless clean eating, which for me is basically primal / paleo type of eating, I figured I’d check my AM ketone and blood sugar status. This was the first time I checked my blood levels in a few months. Lo and behold, as you can see I’m in ketosis, and my blood sugars were doing well (Ketones 0.7 mmol, Blood Glucose 88 mg/dl).
I was a little surprised because I honestly wasn’t trying too hard to eat very low carb. This is in stark contrast to my efforts during my initial n=1 nutritional ketosis experiment in which I felt like I had to keep track of every bite of food that entered my mouth and try extremely hard to cut back on my carbs.
Apparently I’m ketoadapted. Even though I haven’t been as strict with my carb intake recently, it seems my cells still have it in them to go into ketosis under the right circumstances which is good to know.
I’m currently in the process of getting my next set of labs drawn so we’ll see how everything else looks.
I wonder if a person’s gut biome makes big diversion when they first become keto adapted. That might explain why it can take a lot of effort when going from SAD to VLC at first. After a honeymoon of being off of the wagon, your gut biome is just in the ‘WTF?’ stage, but hasn’t had time to shift. Then you slide back into VLC after this relatively short period and you’re easlily burning ketones again. Just a theory.
I haven’t read much about this, but it changes in gut biome may play a role.
My understanding of ketoadaptation is that it takes a while for your cellular machinery, involving enzymes and your mitochondria, to adapt to using ketones and burning fats for energy. That’s why a lot of times as people are undergoing this adaptation they feel horrible, some people have called it the ‘keto-flu,’ but once this machinery is up and running, you’re body becomes adapted to using ketones when needed.
It would be interesting to explore the role of gut flora in all of this. If there are any papers you can point me to, I’d be glad to take a look at them.