Starting Keto: Day 1

I like to fiddle with my diet. This time I’m going to try and track the experience as a series of posts; mostly in an attempt to keep myself honest.

• Through long-established habit, Mrs M. and I tend to eat separately-prepared meals (often, but not always at the same time.)
• I’ve been weighing and recording what I eat fairly religiously in the MyFitnessPal app (MFP) since November 2014.
• I’ve been weighing myself more or less daily on my Withings scales since 2010.
• I have semi-regular DEXA scans – which give me a good sense of body composition – how much of me is lean mass, and how much is lard. “Lean mass” is a more complex concept than simply “muscle”, but it’s most affected by how much muscle I have.
• I eat a lot of the same foods all the time (lean pork, chicken breast, tofu, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, Greek yogurt, nuts etc). If I’m not experimenting or entertaining, this week’s shop often looks more or less like last week’s shop.

This makes it both relatively easy and rewarding for me to fiddle around with what I eat from time to time. I’ve tried various diet protocols, including intermittent fasting (16:8, 5:2), and an abortive vegan experiment. Less said about the latter, the better.

For a while now I’ve tried to follow a fairly stable pattern:

• 2,000 to 2,200 calories a day (roughly a 5% to 10% deficit).
• Energy contributions from Protein / Fats / Carbs in roughly equal amounts. This is very protein-heavy compared to a normal person’s. diet: I eat a lot of lean meat and drink protein shakes. I do this because I lift weights and want to preserve strength and muscle mass. as much as I can while still shedding the kilos.
• 16:8 “Intermittent Fasting” protocol (IF). This means I skip breakfast, and eat all my meals in an 8 hour window between around midday and 8pm. I do this for a couple of reasons, of which by far the most important is “I’m not hungry in the morning and it means I can eat larger meals later when I am hungry.”

The big “but”

This all works very nicely with one significant exception. For various reasons (old bad habits, ego depletion, etc) I fall off the wagon from time to time.

Falling off the wagon means “consuming far more than my planned calories.” And by “far more”, I mean around 1.5× to 2× my planned calorie intake. These are self-destructive binges, often carrying over into the next day, and they undermine a lot of my good work in the kitchen, on the road and in the gym.

These binges are becoming increasingly frequent. I need to do something about them.

I’ve known for ages that my binges are triggered and amplified by certain foods (breakfast cereals, bread, granola bars among these). On the whole, these are high in refined carbs. Porridge is fine, but Weetabix is kryptonite.

I’ve nothing against carbs – starchy, refined or otherwise. It’s not them, it’s me.

Keto

I’ve long been interested in trying a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet – one in which the bulk of one’s energy intake comes from fats, and where carb intake is very low (20g to 50g per day.) Originally intended to reduce seizures in epileptic children, this diet protocol became popular among the bodybuilding community, and from there, spread rapidly through Internet forums. As a result of this diet, one’s body becomes “fat adapted”, relying on dietary fat rather than dietary carbs to fuel one’s metabolism.

There are several reasons I’m attracted to this possibly extreme diet change:

• Protein-sparing: evidence suggests that there’s a decrease in protein breakdown while eating at a deficit. In the past I’ve lost weight only to discover that hard-gained muscle had been lost in equal amounts to fat.
• Appetite suppression: apparently I may feel less hungry.
• Increased insulin resistance: or “increased insulin sensitivity.” This may have some impact on the way my body stores fat.
• I am more or less forced to eat cheese, bacon, and the fatty cuts of meat I miss so much.

But the main reason? No carbs -> fewer triggers.

Day one review

Got up early, took fish oil, vitamins, double espresso — then went for 8km run. That means I’m going to be at a bit more of a calorie deficit today. Probably another 800 kcal or so. As I understand it, before my body goes into ketosis, the glycogen stored in my liver and muscles needs to be depleted.

The meals I ate are listed below.

Lunch (midday)

• Raw spinach (50g)
• Poached Egg
• Grilled halloumi (50g)
• Butter (20g)
  Net carbs: 1.3g
  kcal: 382

“Net carbs” may be an unfamiliar concept. The calculation is carb grams – fibre grams fibre isn’t digested by the body as it passes through. The problem arises when looking at UK/EU nutritional labels: whereas US MFP users are entering ‘gross carbs’ (fibre inclusive), over here we automatically report net carbs. So my locally-bought linseed label shows 1.7g carbohydrates, but 22.8g of fibre per 100g, whereas a sample entry on MFP (for ASDA linseed) shows 28.9g carbs of which 27.3g is accounted for by fibre.

Even more confusingly, the entry for Waitrose Love Life Golden Linseed (the variety I actually purchased) lists 1.5g carbs and 27.3g fibre. This is closer to the nutritional label I have in front of me, but not the same. Another entry for the same product has exactly the same (gross) carbs figure as the ASDA entry.

MFP’s data are crowdsourced to a large degree — which accounts for these discrepancies. Normally this doesn’t matter to me at all. Macro counting (even calorie counting) has a fairly wide tolerance. But since I’m trying to hack my autonomic nervous system and hormones to get me into ketogenesis and keep me there, it feels like these kind of errors and confusions could present a problem.

So – despite calculating that I can afford to take on about 33g of carbs a day, I’ve purposefully set my target at the lower limit.

Lunch (midday) felt fairly light; and there’s a reason we don’t make butter-based dressings. Mayonnaise and bearnaise will feature heavily in the coming week’s plan, I think.

Afternoon snack (3pm)

• Keto shake
  Net carbs: 4g
  kcal: 342

I’ve come up with a simple keto protein shake recipe — flavoured protein powder, double cream, milk (or almond milk), and ice. Had this at 3pm

It’s surprisingly good. I’ve another of these as an evening snack, and I’m looking forward to it.

Supper (5:30pm)

• Feta (120g)
• Streaky bacon (2 rashers)
• Avocado (60g)
• Brazil nuts (15g)
• Pecan nuts (15g)
• Olive oil (10g)
• Spinach (50g)
  Net carbs: 4.2g
  kcal: 890

Mrs M & I eat with the children. Grown adults do not normally eat so early. But it pretty much suits me.

This must be one of the most calorie dense salads I’ve ever eaten. In Bavaria once, I ate something called käsesalat — literally “cheese salad.” It was the only salad that the Germans (who appeared to survive exclusively on cured meats, bread and cheese) could countenance. This salad brought back the memory.

Snack (6:30pm)

• Pork scratchings (40g)
  Net carbs: 0g
  kcal: 238

For non-Britons, pork scratchings are deep-fried, heavily salted pieces of pork rind. This was a test: I’d searched “zero carb” on Ocado, and some bright spark had tagged these among all the faux-food substitutes. I bought them as an experiment, but one I suspect I won’t repeat. Need water.

Evening snack (7:50pm)

• Double cream (40ml)
• Almond milk (150ml)
• Cocoa powder (5g)
• Stevia-based sweetener (10g)
• Ice (~2 cups)
  Net carbs: 2.5g
  kcal: 219

What with one thing and another (mostly the pork scratchings, damn them), I didn’t have room left in the budget for the same double cream & protein powder keto shake I had as an afternoon snack, so hastily improvised this to take its place.

It’s 8pm, the end of my feeding window — and I’m not planning to eat again until midday tomorrow. I’m not feeling hungry, but I’m not sure that I’m feeling too healthy either.

Daily Subtotal

Net carbs: 12g (almost certainly an undercount, given issues identified above. Could be as high as 34g, but again, almost certainly isn’t.)
kcal: 2,072

That’s 12g × 4 kcal/carb g = 48 kcal from carbs for today. By comparison, yesterday I consumed 1,848 kcal of which 592 kcal came from carbs.