Week 5 is over and here is my new progress update. I decided to make this update a bit more standardized, so that you will be able to follow my progress easier.
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| My progress so far. Waistline is going down steadily, but my weight is starting to plateau. Read this post to see why I think this is happening. |
Weight
| Today (Oct 21th 2013): | 107,8kg |
| 7 days ago (Oct 14th 2013): | 107,4kg |
| LCHF Day 1 (Sep 20th 2013): | 112,0kg |
| Weekly progress: | +0,4kg |
| Absolute progress: | -4,2kg |
As you can see, I am a bit over 4 kilograms down, but comparing to last week, I am 0,4kg up. Furthermore, I am 0,2kg up comparing to two weeks ago. So obviously, I am back to gaining weight. But before jumping to any conclusions, let's take a look at waistline measurements.
Waistline
| Today (Oct 21th 2013): | 119,5kg |
| 7 days ago (Oct 14th 2013): | 120,5kg |
| LCHF Day 1 (Sep 20th 2013): | 126,0kg |
| Weekly progress: | -1,0cm |
| Absolute progress: | -6,5cm |
I am happy to notice that my waistline is steadily going down. Since the past few weeks, I am noticing a steady weekly reduction for 1cm per week. I am very happy about that, although I do not understand completely how come my waistline and also other parts of my body are reducing, but my weight is slightly increasing. I have an idea though...
Was I really eating LCHF?
Since my weight started to plateau, I became very curious what could be the reason for that. So, last week, I took out my trusty glucose meter and started poking more regularly myself to measure blood sugar. I noticed that on average, my blood sugar was higher than it used to be on the second week of LCHF. It was still low. On average a bit over 85mg/dl and never over 95mg/dl at any time of day, which is withing normal fasting blood sugar limits, but not as low as it used to be.
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| A great self-experimentalist on ketosis, Dr. Peter Attia, interviewed by another great LCHF expert, Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt. In the links section, I included links to their respective blogs. |
Where is this sugar coming from? Since I already started being super strict in avoiding carbohydrates, my blood sugar couldn't have come from food. The other possibility is that my body started making glucose by itself. You may have not known it, but this is possible. Actually, it happens when body runs out of food glucose, but there are still proteins available. Through a metabolic process that I haven't yet addressed in my blog, we can actually turn protein to glucose. This glucose, just as carbohydrates coming from food, also raises our insulin, jeopardizes our ketosis and interrupts our fat burning process.
Happily, I was taking some notes about my nutrition in the past few weeks. I found out that on average, I gained 65% of calories from fat, about 30% of calories from protein and about 5% from carbohydrates. The question is: is this ratio really and LCHF diet?
According to a great expert on nutritional ketosis and an even greater self experimentalist, Dr. Peter Attia, we can achieve nutritional ketosis sweet spot by respecting the following three criteria:
- at least 80% of your calories should be coming from fat
- you should keep your carbohydrate intake below 20 grams per day
- you should keep your protein intake below 150 grams per day
In short, I call it the 80-20-150 rule. It is quite obvious that I failed to follow two out of the three criteria for the majority of the past two weeks. I could say that I was eating "LCMF" (low carb - medium fat) and not LCHF. So it seems that it is not LCHF that has let me down, but it was me not doing it properly. Conclusion: I should eat (even more) fat!
Plans for week 6
In the coming week, I decided to be more strict on the 80-20-150 rule. I will pay more attention on the amount of meat and other protein I eat. I will also cut back significantly on cheese and introduce more vegetables. I suspect that eating plenty of vegetables will help me a lot in following this rule, since a well greased bowl of salad is nutritious and contains over 90% of fat. Definitively a fantastic dish to smooth out any protein spikes.
I will also purchase a device for measuring blood ketones and write a more specific post on how to follow the 80-20-150 rule.
That concludes my week 5 report. It was less successful as I hoped it would be, but it was very educational. If you like my blog, please share it on Facebook or Twitter. It is really easy, just click the social network icon below. Also, if you would like to comment on what I am saying or suggest a diet-related topic you are interested in, feel free to put in in the comments below.
I wish you a nice, successful and healthy week!
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