Away Too Long, and a New Scale
December 2017 — about six months in
On December 12th I shot a quick handheld video. Hair a mess, fresh out of the shower, on my way to a haircut. I said it out loud: I'd been off too much. So I said I'd just try to hop on whenever I had a thought, even short and unpolished like that one (live LXTA1256).
The holiday lesson
The thought that day was about the holidays, because everybody was about to go into them. My take was that it takes two things together to really knock you out of fat adaptation: excess calories and excess carbs (live LXTA1256). The way I understood it, the slow start of keto is your body drawing down glycogen, your carb storage in your liver and muscles. You refill that storage when you eat carbs on a day when you've also eaten more than you need. One without the other doesn't do much damage.
So if you have to go off script, pick one.
- Have a keto feast and go over on calories. Call it a maintenance day.
- Or have the dessert, the pie, whatever it is, and keep the rest of the day light. Get your protein in early, take your multivitamin, keep total calories low, and the party exception is a lot easier to recover from.
- Just don't do both on the same day.
The other thing I said was the line I kept repeating that season: don't make mistakes, make decisions. Decide before you go. "I'm going to have a brownie" is a decision. "I cheated, I slipped" is a mistake. Your diet isn't your only value. If there's a family or cultural reason to eat something off plan, eat it on purpose. Keto is a tool, and it'll be there when you come back.
The scale
Around Christmas, a member of the group sent me a gift: a Bluetooth scale that does electrical impedance and estimates body fat percentage and lean mass (live ISEN0955). I'd told the group I'd give zero preference to people who sent me things. I appreciated it, but I wasn't going to single anybody out or pay anybody more attention because of it, because I didn't want money to change why I was doing this. So I'm not naming them here either. But it mattered.
Up to then I'd mostly watched one number. Now I started tracking body fat and lean mass alongside weight. That changes what a "bad day" on the scale means. If the weight goes up a pound, you can at least ask what kind of pound it was. And it changed what I was aiming for. Losing weight is one goal. Losing fat while keeping the muscle I'd built training is a better one.
The scale number was never the whole story. I knew that in theory. I'd told the group more than once that the big first-month drop is mostly water and salt coming off with your glycogen (live RFTC2543).
What I'd tell you now
By June 2018 I said on a live that the scale had let me track smarter markers of my health, and that I was working on keeping lean mass and lowering body fat percentage without getting crazy about it (live ISEN0955). I'd still tell you the same, with two cautions. First, these home scales give an estimate, so watch the trend over weeks, not one morning. Second, if you want to keep muscle while you lose, protein does a lot of the work. A review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition linked moderately higher protein with more fullness and better lean-mass retention during calorie restriction (Paddon-Jones et al., 2008). If numbers on a scale tend to take over your head, or you have a history of an eating disorder, more numbers may not help you. Talk to your care team first (keto and eating-disorder history). More in non-scale victories, body recomposition on keto, how often to weigh yourself and fat adaptation.
Earlier / Later
- Earlier: Six thousand members, and behind
- Later: Water in the kitchen, off the plan