I start my year in September. This was a habit started after Ketofest 2018. I was flying home and thinking about all the wonderful health recovery stories I had heard, especially those shared on Carl Franklin’s back porch. What surprised me the most was how much other people thought my story was “amazing”. I never thought of it that way…it was just my story[1][MR1] [MR2] . I still chewed tobacco then and I really enjoyed it. I had given up smoking and chewing in 1998 only to start again while under the influence of oxycontin. Seemed like a wonderful idea, then. As I flew home I felt awful about not doing my best. I have always strived for a standard of excellence. I thought I owed it to these remarkable people that I could still do better. As I got off the plane I threw out my tin of chew. I have not chewed or smoked since then[i]. This was mid July. I changed my data metrics that August and as a result I liken my year to a school year. Starts in September.
Among the awful things that occurred for so many the year of 2020, we lost our boy Herakles. He was an amazing friend and he happened to be a dog. He never held my being human against me. His illness of cancer which we had held back for so many years with a ketogenic diet was now failing.
The vet after his passing told us we got an extra three years with him and that he had not seen anything like it. I gave him my information and told him that we also followed the same diet. I digress. September I was rapidly losing weight as I focused on care for my boy. My lifts went from 5X a week to maybe 2? I spent a great deal of time with him and I regret nothing. Yet you can see my weight plummet in the green chart. Also I highlighted it in red as I know now I gained fat pounds and lost lean. OUCH. Still, I regret nothing.
Dr. Nadir Ali asked me to limit my heavy cream consumption. He thought that perhaps I was taking in too much energy and I could easily balance this by intermittent fasting from awakening till noon. He also asked me to workout in the mornings fasted. I did not due that due to time constraints but I also now appreciate that it is better to do cardio fasted and to do resistance training fed for reasons of glucose and energy use. Anyway- you can see this period marked out immediately after Herakles passing in the blue. I since have realized that I can easily drink a pint a day of Heavy Cream. I suppose I like coffee in my cream.
I was following a course of Alternative Day Fasting defined as 36-42 hours fasted and 8-12 hours feasting in Dec & January and then went into a 2×2 defined as 60 plus fasting, 12 eating, 60 hours fasted and 48 eating. Repeat. This can be found in the yellow areas. The farthest right in magenta is a feasting period. Done poorly. Here is why:
In February either from anxiety or the fasting I felt weird in the chest. As I have a Bifascicular Block ( branched block or BBB) I kinda freaked out. What really got me going was my ALiveCor6 EKG portable machine started to tell me that after 18 months of GREEN light activity I suddenly was having YELLOW with a SINUS Rhythm Wide QRS. Ah fuckity fuck! I was doing so freaking well! I panicked. Here is a look at what I saw.
From steady GREEN to WTF in an afternoon. Well, I must be doing something wrong and began eating everything in site. Lots of hearty healthy cod livers to drive up that HDL. Avocados like apples to drive up my potassium. And my belly expanded and I could literally see the inner tube reinflate around my waist. IDGAF! I want to be healthy more than I want to look good in a tank top. I called a friend with heart disease and he said the Alive Cor had upgraded its software. I then sent this to my local cardiologist Dr. Peter Diamond in Elkhorn WI. I sent him July, December and February. He said whoa son, calm down, it hasn’t changed. So I reacted with panic and then felt a distress in my chest now properly attributed to anxiety. SONUVa..bi….. deep breath. Breathe. And you’re fat. MFer!!! There went three months of work.
The panic as such induced a feeding frenzy as I said, I stopped fasting and ate with abandon. All keto foods but I grazed and ate an extreme amount of fatty foods. Now the fatty foods did increase my HDL tremendously but I also gained back 15 pounds in less than 3 weeks. Only my upcoming Dexascan will tell me true what happened.
Now it could be as simple as I did indeed gain back that weight and that weight came as energy toxicity or a calorie excess or exaggerated insulin ( which I know to be one of the factors, I tested 11.1 uIU/mL. Even in Keto one cannot eat with impunity
whenever and the high amount of fats that I was. I had been indulging in the pure fatty goodness of COD LIVERS and also made the mistake of thinking one can was one serving. God fookin dammit. I again missed the fine detail that it is two servings giving me an excess of 500 kcals. I have to go back over my data. SO I did.
And the after correction.
I could have left it alone. 400 extra kcals a day for only ten days over the course of eight weeks is not a significant change. Here it shows my daily average changed by just 41 kcals. AND FOUR grams of fat. However daily this seemed significant. The body reacts better to trends than it does one time events so I am pretty positive I am not showing any detrimental correlations. When I chart this against my glucose or weight gain there is not a significant change. Here is an example:
Blue Bars are Fasting Periods, red is Fat in Grams and Blue Line is Blood Glucose. Yet when I chart exogenous fat consumption against weight there is a minor correlation.
What will be interesting here is my DXA on Friday. You can see my fat consumption falling on the left but body weight staying the same. This could be water & glycogen OR it could be added fat pounds that will take another round of fasting and LCLFHP to prepare for summer tank top season!! SO as you can see like many people I struggle with vanity over health. This coming week I have two tests. One is a stress EKG, the other a DXA scan. Lets see how to create a panic in the upcoming 5 days.
[1] This refers to my recovery from osteoporosis, disk herniations and oxycontin addiction.
[i] I will add a story about what I learned about nicotine and insulin sensitivity. I went from 15% Bodyfat to about 20 in months. I added a shit ton of weight as well.
Keto Police 