Tuesday, April 30, 2013

DAY 1 MY MENU


Staring the first day came after a little experimenting with menus and recipes.

Start Weight 85 kg

Fasting Nutritional Ketosis reading 0.2 on my Freestyle Optimum meter.

Breakfast was Coconut flavoured Coffee adapted from Dana Carpender's Keto Coffee from her Fat Fast Recipe book. I used what was in my pantry.

Coconut Coffee

 Take 1 cup hot black coffee
Add 3 teaspoons coconut oil
Add 500 ml coconut cream
Sprinkle light shake of cinnamon
Beat with a whisk until all the coconut oil has melted and you have a nice frothy top.

Nutrition:-  463 cal; 6 gm carbs; 3.9 gm protein; 47.5 gm fat

Does that make you cringe. I never could have guessed I would one day drink such a concoction but it worked and I got to enjoy it more as the days progressed.

Most of my lunches were a Fat Fast version of my regular berry smoothie. It is a little high in carbohydrates and protein so I had to work at balancing out the day with my dinner and snacks.

Fat Fast Berry Smoothie

50 gm boysenberries .... most other berries will also work.
100 gm Greek Yoghurt
10 ml cod liver oil (Best is from Norway and has a lemon flavour. Arctic Brand works for me)
2 scoops of vanilla flavoured whey powder. (Active Woman from the Leppon Brand)
500 ml whipping cream (I pre-whip mine and keep it in small containers in the freezer)
1/2 cup cold water

Place the ingredients into a jug and mix until smooth with a stick whizz.

Pour into a tall glass and enjoy. I use a large straw to drink through.

This is quite thick, the lemon flavoured oil is never fishy although I did get some back when I could only find the orange flavoured oil.

Nutrition:-  416 cal; 13 gm carbs; 28.5 gm protein; 27.5 gm fat

I made up dinner with eggs and Swiss chard or silverbeet to we Kiwis.

Omelet with Silverbeet

2 eggs
1 tbs water
1 tsp butter
1 cup cooked and drained silverbeet or similar green veggie

Melt butter in an omelet pan
Mix egg and water together with a small whisk, but not fluffy
Cook omelet to you preferred firmness.
Fill omelet with hot silverbeet
Fold and serve with seasoning.

This is such a simple meal and made in minutes if you have cooked greens handy in the fridge. It was a satisfying meal although I was glad I still had snacks to come.

Nutrition:- 215.5 cal; 7.5 gm carbs; 13 gm protein; 15.5 gm fat

At the end of the day I only had 55 cal remaining so I counted out 7 almonds.

Nutrition: 49 cal; 1.7 gm carb, 1.8 gm protein; 4.3 gm fats


I have simplified many of the numbers by rounding up or down and some diet calculators will be different to the one I used. I use The Perfect Diet Tracker. I doubt if it's the best one around but it works for me. My only grump with them is it is copyrighted and I seem to be unable to copy and paste into my Blog.

End of first day.

1144 calories; 9.9% carbs; 16.2% protein; 73.9% fats

I did 20 minutes exercise on my cross-trainer

So there you have it. I don't think there is anything too unusual about my plan and the first day went well.

MY MODIFIED VERSION OF A FAT FAST


Dr Atkins used a Fat Fast to help someone who had stopped loing weight yet still had a significant way to reach their goal weight. I have never followed an Atkins Diet but now I want to get my body losong weight once more. I think the original idea was to limit calories to 1000 and eat 90% of those calories as fat. It was recommended that this type of "Fast" should be limited to 3 days.

I modified the ratio of macro-nutrients to a level I thought was safer for me and settled on 1150 calories with a ratio of  75% fats, 20% protein and 5% carbs. I decided this ratio was safe for me to follow to the letter for 10 days. That's a very long time for someone who wants to eat naturally and not be bothered with weighing and recording every mouthful. I guess that this is more like an induction into LCHF diet but I want to see if I can do it and I want to know how well it works for me.

It didn't take me long to realise that even at 75% fat I would be challenged to eat enough fats. In practice an even greater challenge was to keep my carbs at 5%. Most days I went over this. I could have continued eating this way for a longer period but it involved working out my menus everyday on a diet tracker and that becomes tedious after a while. For me it's not a sustainable lifestyle.

It really was not too difficult and I was never truly hungry although in the beginning I often felt as though I wanted to eat a larger dinner. We arrived home from Hawaii on April 13th and I began my 10 days on April 18th. Looking back I'm glad I didn't let the grass grow under my feet.

My first weigh in after returning from Hawii was a couple of kg higher than before we left. This was all due to my feet and legs swelling in the heat and humidity of Honolulu. I began My Fat Fast weighing 85 kg and at the end of 10 days I weigh 82 kg. Success! The main purpose of doing this 'Fat Fast' was to break through a plateau situation which was frustrating me.

My main concern as I write this and move to a more reasonable diet is the fear of stalling my weight loss again. I am going to continue to be careful for the next several weeks. My main goal will be to stay in ketosis as I increase calories, carbs and protein. I am choosing a macro-nutrient ratio of 10% carbs, 25% protein and 65% fats. This will be changed as necessary to stay in nutritional ketosis. I really need to lose somewhere between 18 and 24 kg. I will know when I have lost enough weight and I have no intention of getting caught up in an eating disorder at my age. I know some people think measuring food is a sign of an eating disorder. My take on this is that I have tried many things and I want this to end. I know maintenance has it's own challenges but at my age I have, maybe, done permanent damage to my body and how it works. It is safer for me to keep a close track on what I am doing. There is no-one that I know of who is working as hard as I am to be as healthy as possible, after being out of shape for so long. Most of the stuff I read seems to be for under 50 year olds and those who are older need to remember their bodies are a lot different. Those who are closer to my age seem to be more conservative and not be aiming to lose as much weight.

I welcome support from anyone and if you are closer to 75 years old than 65 I would be even more delighted to have your support.

This Blog is really just to make my experience available to the public and to fulfill a promise to make my daily menus during my recent Fat Fast available. You will not find anything exciting here. You will find a few recipes and my macro-nutritional data for each day. I have no idea whether or not I will add to this in the future but I intend to stay in Nutritional Ketosis for the rest of my life if possible.

INTRODUCTION TO NUTRITIONAL KETOSIS


I first heard this term from Jimmy Moore of Livin La Vida. He discovered that he might be eating too much protein and negating his weight loss efforts. He read the book, The Art and Science of Low Carb Performance, and decided to experiment on himself and you can read all about Jimmy's n-1 life here.

I had begun to buy into the science that says fat is an extremely important part of our diet and in the right balance will contribute to sustainable weight loss. I lost a lot of weight in the first six months after cutting out wheat from my regular diet in 2012. Then I went into a very slow weight loss period that felt more like a total stall. With only half the weight gone that I intended to lose this was becoming a problem. I decided that it was time to change things.

I read the Volek and Phinney book, The Art and Science of Low Carb Performance,  and continued to follow Jimmy's self experiment and decided I had nothing to lose.

I have come a long way from Weight Watchers. I went to my first meeting in the '70s and lost some weight eating a lot of canned salmon. It is now one of my least liked foods. About 10 years ago two of my sons introduced me to Lean For Life, a low carb diet that included a daily urine test for ketones using small test strips, (Ketostix). I was reasonably successful eating this way but I could not sustain the lifestyle.

In the past few years I have had more exposure to low carb, high fat diets and the paleo/primal lifestyles. Nothing quite gelled for me until I read Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis. John, my husband, also read it and since then our home has become a wheat free environment.

I stopped being scared of terms like LCHF, Paleo, dairy free, grain free and possibly many more. That doesn't mean I wanted to buy into any of the specific lifestyles for myself. But there is something about Jimmy Moore that impresses me and one reason must have to do with his quiet but firm Christian Faith. All my reading, successes and failures, were leading me toward nutritional ketosis. I decided to do my own self experiment. This has been going on most of this year, 2013, but somehow I was missing the point somewhere. I was probably eating too many carbohydrates.

We were away from home for 5 weeks, see my Hawaii 2013 Blog, without any real weight gains in spite of having many treats including the occasional dessert or cocktail. I came home refreshed in mind, spirit and body and decided to take a closer look at the Fat Fast Recipe book by Dana Carpender.

Her recipe for a fat fast is something like 1000 calories a day at 90% fat for a maximum of 3 days although someone has tried up to 10 days successfully. I modified the ratio of macro-nutrients to a level I thought was safer for me and settled on 1150 calories with a ratio of  75% fats, 20%protein and 5% carbs. I decided this ratio was safe for me to follow to the letter for 10 days. That's a very long time for someone who wants to eat naturally and not be bothered with weighing and recording every mouthful.

My plan is not a true Fat Fast according to Dana and others who talk and write about this. Nonetheless for me this is a Fat Fast if modified greatly from the ideal.