Keto made easy

Day 27: The Graph Bends

2017-07-10

July 2017 — day 27

I'm a data guy, so I wasn't just checking my fasting blood sugar. I was graphing it. That's the only reason I can tell you this story with a straight face, because a single morning's number tells you nearly nothing. They scatter. One day's up, one day's down, you had a weird night's sleep, whatever.

But by about day 27, the scatter had a direction.

The line goes down

The readings were still bouncing around the way they do, but the trend was down (video cTGYIFOTPl8). The thing that had sent me to keto in the first place, fasting numbers in the prediabetic range, was close to normal. In my words at the time, I'd almost reversed what looked like prediabetes to a normal fasted blood glucose in about 27 days, and I was really impressed with that (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

I ran a linear regression on it, because of course I did, and it said I should start seeing properly normal fasting numbers around the middle of August (video cTGYIFOTPl8). I also said out loud that progress almost never stays linear, so it was unlikely to play out exactly that way. It was just the best forecast I had (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

And the rest of me was following along. I was fuller than I'd ever been. My energy was better. I was sleeping better, and sleeping less but waking up more rested. For the first time in my life I felt like I could control how much I ate without being hungry (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

The scale, and why I didn't trust it

The morning I talked about this, the scale said 224. I'd started the diet around 236 (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

I want to be really clear about what I said next, because it's the opposite of what most people do with a number like that. I said I'd lost about 11 pounds, and my guess was that at least 7/8 of it was water (video cTGYIFOTPl8). Some of it was also tied to coming back from an injury and getting back to more MMA (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

The reason I said that: in the first couple of weeks, almost everything you lose is water. Your body stores glycogen with water attached, about two grams of water for every gram of glycogen, and when you stop eating carbs you dump both (video cTGYIFOTPl8). Go back to carbs for a few days and it comes right back. So I told everybody listening to stop posting their pounds lost in the first 30 days. It's a terrible metric (video cTGYIFOTPl8). I also said my own weight wasn't a great metric for anybody else, because I was training martial arts hard enough that my calorie burn was all over the place (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

I'd been here before

This wasn't my first time losing weight, and that's the part that made day 27 matter.

I'm six feet tall, and at my heaviest I was 265 (video cTGYIFOTPl8). Most of the weight I'd lost back then wasn't from keto at all. It came from taking up MMA and training to take a fight (video cTGYIFOTPl8). From there I bounced: down into the 230s, back to 240, down to 220, back to 230. In the summer of 2016 I made it all the way to 213 without ever hearing the word keto. Then over the winter I climbed back to 237 (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

And here's what 213 cost me. I was hungry. I missed food. I didn't have energy. I was cranky, and I took naps (video cTGYIFOTPl8).

So when I say day 27 was different, I don't mean the number was better. 224 isn't 213. I mean I got there without the hunger. I hadn't even started trying to restrict calories, and I was eating less anyway, because I wasn't hungry (video cTGYIFOTPl8). That had never happened on any diet I'd tried.

The other thing I said that day, which I tell my small-business clients all the time: it didn't take you a month to get this way, and it's going to take more than a month to get out of it. It took me years to get heavy (video cTGYIFOTPl8). Two weeks of scale numbers don't mean much against that.

What I'd tell you now

The fasting-glucose graph was the real result, and I'd still tell you to measure the thing you actually care about. On the weight side, the literature adds a check I didn't have then. In a metabolic-ward study where 19 adults ate the same calories, cutting carbs lost less body fat per day than cutting fat: 53 ± 6 g/day versus 89 ± 6 g/day (doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2015.07.021). And in DIETFITS, 609 adults over 12 months, healthy low-carb lost 6.0 kg and healthy low-fat 5.3 kg, not significantly different (doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.0245). So there's no fat-burning magic in the carbs. My position then was that keto's edge was hunger, and that I was eating less without trying. Those two studies weren't built to test that. What they do say is that the deficit does the work, whichever way you get there. For me, keto was the way I could live in one. More in Keto vs Low-Fat, Hunger and Appetite on Keto, the Kevin Hall ward studies and DIETFITS explained. On the water: Water Weight on Keto and weighing yourself in month one. And if your fasting numbers look like mine did, show the graph to a doctor. The first update video is 28 Days of Keto for High Fasting Blood Sugar.

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