I’m currently in the midst of an experiment for fat loss and body recomposition using a variation of a cyclic ketogenic diet called the Carb Nite Solution, which essentially has me in ketosis for the entire week with a single day where I am required to do an aggressive carb re-load within a window of 6-8 hrs.
I wanted to provide an update on the effects of this diet on prurigo pigmentosa, which is the rash that many of us have discovered appears when we are in a state of ketosis.… Read More
As you can see with my cholesterol numbers, despite cutting back on my saturated fats for 3 weeks by restricting the amount of coconut oil and grassfed butter that I typically eat, my LDL-C and Total Cholesterol have continued to go up!
Here is a brief summary of potential explanation as to why LDL and total cholesterol can be elevated in people who are in ketosis from Part 2:
So it looks like I’ve eliminated #1 as a potential explanation. … Read More
After 90 days of nutritional ketosis, I managed to reach a new low in weight, only to see it bounce back up. I’m now only 1.6 lbs down from my starting weight of 180.0 lbs. Seeing a graph like this really shows how variable daily weights can be!
In the past 30 days, I spent 21 days over the minimal cut off of 0.5 mmol which I’m happy with. This is a little worse compared to days 31-60 where I was in ketosis for 25 days. … Read More
Here are my cholesterol tests from the past couple of years along with my most recent results. My initial results from 2010 when I was following the standard american diet actually look remarkably ideal, despite the diet, however I was running almost 3 miles a day during this period AND I was carrying around more weight and a greater body fat percentage. So while my blood work looked ideal, my outside appearance didn’t really reflect it… and I was exhausted from all the running I was doing.… Read More
Before I go into what my lipid results were, I thought it would be a interesting to do a literature search to find what data there is in the academic literature looking into the effect of a ketogenic diet on cholesterol.
This is a pretty comprehensive list going back 15 years to 1998. I limited it to papers that either provided enough information in their abstracts and those that I could actually access the entire paper for free. I didn’t want to actually shell out money for papers that required payment since they typically cost around $30 per article!… Read More
In part 1, I tried to find a reasonable explanation as to why my HbA1c remained elevated at 5.7% before and after 72 days of nutritional ketosis where I remained in ketosis (documented with blood ketone tests) almost the entire time, and to top it off I had low fasting AM blood sugars (avg of 83 mg/dl).
The most plausible explanation I came across was:
Low Carb -> Lower Blood Glucose -> Longer RBC lifespan -> Higher HbA1c
Even though this explanation made the most sense, at least in my situation, I still wasn’t satisfied and had to prove it to myself. … Read More