Day 54 – Nutritional Ketosis

Weight: 177.8
AM Ketones: 0.3
AM Blood Glucose: 88
Hours of Sleep: 8:03
Energy Level: Good
Physical Activity: IFAST exercises
Nutritional Ketosis Streak: 0

Abdominal Circumference: 34.08 in (initially 34.5 on 12/8)
Hip Circumference: 38.08 in (initially 38.5 on 12/8)
Right Mid Thigh Circumference: 21.6 in (initially 21.5 on 12/8)
Left Mid Thigh Circumference: 21.93 in (initially 22 on 12/8)

Good news and bad news this morning.  The bad news was that my ketones dropped below 0.5 mmol… meaning I fell out of ketosis and broke my streak of 27 consecutive days.  The good news is that my weight went down to 177.8 lbs which is an all time low for me.  I don’t think I’ve been this weight since freshman or sophmore year of high school!  That’s a pretty big achievement for me.

I’m guessing the reason I fell out of ketosis was all the sweet potatoes I ate last nite.  They were made with rosemary… which is my favorite herb of all time!  Oh well.  One of the phrases that has really stuck with me from a financial book I read a while ago was “no shame, no blame.”  It was about budgeting, and they used the phrase for those months when you didn’t meet your budgeting goals or when you look back on your year and realize you didn’t save as much money as you wanted.  “No shame, no blame,” was their way of saying, “Its ok that it didn’t work out this time, don’t kill your self over it.  Just try again next time.  Don’t be too discouraged.”

I think the reason it resonated for me so much was that it was a way to relieve myself of the guilt I felt for those times I screwed up and fell off the wagon.

So I ate some sweet potatoes and a few bites of pie and fell out of ketosis breaking my streak.  It’s all good, I’ll just get back on the horse and try to push my self back into ketosis again.

When I’ve cheated previously it’s taken about 4-5 days to get back into ketosis… hopefully it won’t take that long this time, but I guess it depends on how much glycogen I’ve stored.

Had delicious bone broth today made with ox tails.  Lots of fat, lots of protein.  I used the nutritional information from here, but when you cook things like this it’s really just a shot in the dark in terms of what the macronutrient content is.

Macros were good today, except that I can’t seem to get my proteins lower.  I think the main thing was the oxtail soup… from that site that listed the contents, they said that oxtail broth contains 19 grams of fat at 41 grams of protein per cup!  That’s a lot of protein!  I expected it to be more fat because of all the marrow and what not being extracted… but I guess if there’s a lot of collagen in there, that may be the source.

I didn’t feel too bad about my broken ketosis streak because as I was reviewing the criteria, Volek and Phinney stated the optimal range is between 0.5 mmol and 3.0 mmol.  I’ve been mistakenly interpreting 0.5 mmol as the minimum level need to be in ketosis, when in actuality I think they’re saying that you have to have a level HIGHER than 0.5 mmol (0.6 mmol or above) to be in ketosis.  Using this interpretation, my streak had actually been broken already a few times when I went down to 0.5 mmol (what’s a few mmol between friends?).  So going forward I’ll be using 0.6 mmol as the cut off for being in ketosis.

I intend to dedicate more posts and probably an entire n=1 experiment to what IFAST is, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

I added body circumference measurements today as well.  Since the cheapest and most convenient way to track body fat is actually by using pictures (I’m not quite ready to do this yet) and body circumference, I’ll start to track this weekly.  I measure each location 3 times and then take the average of all 3 measurements.  I’ve measured these intermittently throughout my experiment and will include those next time I post (I included the measurements I took right before starting this just so you can see that there’s been a small change).

After my first 60 days (6 more days from today), I’ll change my nutritional ketosis posts to be weekly (I will still test myself daily).  This will give me time to write posts about other topics rather than a daily log.

Since my carbs were low and I had a good hour of low intensity physical activity this should raise my ketones, but there will also be an inhibitory effect due to my higher proteins which could potentially lead to gluconeogenesis exposing me to more insulin which will bring my ketones down.  Because of these factors, my forecast for tomorrow is: 0.4 mmol.