Ketosis Experiment Update

I've been down many more rabbit holes, very strange places where there is stuff called biohacking and cold thermogenisis and quantum tunneling and oh all manner of weirdness.  I can't tell if these people are genuises, batshit crazy or pulling off ingenious marketing scams but I'm fascinated by it all nonetheless.  At some point I'll try to put a post together if I ever get my brain around it all in a cohesive fashion.  In the meantime I won't be plunging my face into a sinkful of ice water anytime soon.

Maybe Huey Lewis was ahead of his time?



I loathe Huey Lewis but he was all I could think about while reading the cold thermogenisis protocol, Step 1 of which involves plunging your face into a sink full  of ice water.  Did this guy really invent something new or did he pass out while watching Huey Lewis videos after a night of too much tequila and 'special' mushrooms and think, 'Hey, I think I'm onto something?'  Or again maybe he's a genius. Or batshit crazy.  Still not quite sure.

Anyway, it's been a few weeks now since I started the great ketosis experiment which actually never ended up in ketosis, not even a little bit, but was interesting nonetheless.  Before the experiment my typical diet consisted of 47% fat, 33% carbs, 20% protein.  Ish.  On weekends when we went out to dinner or pizza night I'm sure the number of carbs were way higher but it's hard to tell with restaurant food.

Next I made a few minor tweaks and came up with 58% fat, 22% carbs, 20% protein.  A ketogenic diet would call for something like 70-80% fat, 15% protein, 5-15% carbs/20-50 grams of carbs.  After a few more days of tweaking I was able to bring the totals to 61% fat, 21% carb, 18% protein with the number of carb grams varying with calories per day.  The higher calorie amounts were training days, the lower amounts were rest days or lower volume training.

Some sample days looked like:

Carb=21% (69.5 g), Fat=61% (121.4 g), Protein=18% (57.4 g), Calories=1595

Carb=21% (47.6 g), Fat=61% (94.6 g), Protein=18% (63.1 g), Calories=1245

Carb=20% (41.0 g), Fat=62% (105.1 g), Protein=18% (60.6 g), Calories=1285

Carb=19% (57.7 g), Fat=63% (107.4 g), Protein=18% (70.2 g), Calories=1459

Then the weekend would come and Jonny and I would go out and I don't know the totals but I'm sure they were still too high to be in ketosis.  In general I would get vegetable dishes with white rice which oddly enough is supposedly less 'toxic' than brown rice.  And I'd generally have longer training sessions beforehand than during the week.  But ketosis is a pass/fail thing and it can take weeks to months to become adapted.  After 3 weeks I realized I was not going to be able to work out ways to follow this strict regime in enough time to adapt before I amp up my triathlon training for my summer races.  And supposedly adaptation involves being tired and having athletic performance declines for the several weeks, maybe months it takes.  You want to do this in your off season, not while you're gearing up for summer.  So the rest of the experiment will wait until fall/winter.

However I did have a lot of good fallout from the tweaks to my diet and I learned a lot about nutrition, exercise, insulin, weight loss, etc. that will be invaluable in helping clients.  The biggest tweak was giving up the last of the wheat and grains I was eating.  I'd been giving up things like pasta and crackers over the years because I didn't feel well after eating them.  But I was still having the occasional piece of bread and of course there was pizza night.  Of course those had to go in the pursuit of ketosis as did refried beans and tofu and the occasional taco shell.  And wow, I couldn't believe how much better I felt.  HUGE difference.  No way those things are coming back, at least not on a regular basis.  I found some interesting videos about the effects of wheat and grain, very eye opening.

Wheat Belly author



Grain Brain author


I've got 'Grain Brain' and 'Wheat Belly' on reserve at the library but there's loads of info. in those videos.

Also I've noticed that with the increase in fats and decrease in carbs my appetite has plummeted and I no longer have to eat all day long.  When I do get hungry it's a totally different feeling as well, no more sudden deep hunger pangs.  No more feeling like, 'I must have food.  NOW.'  And I can easily go on a 2 1/4 hour bike ride without taking any food, bars, gels, etc. and not be bonky afterwards.  My hope is that with my current not-quite-ketogenic-but-close ratios I can keep these good effects and hopefully even be able to race with little or no race nutrition which was the main goal of it all in the first place.  Stay tuned to see how that works out.

I also feel like I have more energy and less mental fog.  Had a 3 day USDAA fest agilitython a couple of weeks ago and held up way better than I normally do, even for the full day of team.  I spent one night in a hotel because there was a snow storm and it was a bit of a challenge to work out the food.  Soups and salad at Panera worked out well but breakfasts and lunch on team day when I couldn't get away for long enough to make it to Panera was challenging and I had a bit of wrap and bread but mostly I was able to manage.  Will have to work out better solutions for future trial days but that's always been a challenge.  But it was nice not being hungry all day or having sudden, craving hunger signals at unpredicted times as I sometimes do at trials.  And I was a bit tired by the last runs of the day on Sunday but we managed a Q in Snooker then a really nice run on a complicated Masters Challenge Jumpers course for our last run, 2 of the most brain drainy events in agility.

Being a vegetarian was not a problem at all, in fact the biggest problem I had was having too much protein.  No matter what I tried I couldn't seem to bring up the fat and lower the protein and meat would actually make that problem more difficult.  The diet involves-or can involve-loads of vegetables.  In fact I found that I was eating even more vegetables because I had to substitute the bread and quinoa with something.  However in the past couple of days I have been trying to re-introduce meat into my diet.  The main reason is that while I'm fine with eating loads of fat, I'm not so happy about eating in the form of only dairy products.  I was already a bit iffy about the amount of dairy products I was eating before this adventure and the huge increase in them is making me nervous.  I don't want to develop an allergy, especially to eggs which I love dearly and eat almost every day.  And believe it or not I'm SO sick of the heavy cream.  At first it was such a luxury and now, ugh, I can barely think about it.  Also it will give me more food options especially in restaurants.  Cutting out grains/wheat/bread/etc. is no problem but I have to replace it with something other than veggies all the time.

So on Saturday we went out for breakfast and the omelette I normally order comes with bacon and I always ask them to leave it out but instead I let them include it.  Unfortunately it came in the omelette rather than in strips on the side and there was a LOT.  Especially for someone who's been a vegetarian for 30 years who never particularly liked bacon in the first place.  It was nitrate free, healthy happy sing the pig a lullaby before it goes to sleep each night bacon but still, pig meat.  All I kept thinking was 'Unclean Pig Meat'.  Which let me tell you does not aid in digestion.  I picked a good portion of it out and took it home for the dogs.  My stomach was roiling for an hour or two afterwards but after that I was fine.  I was very concerned about meat staying down because I had a bad experience many years ago with a 'friend' giving me meat without my knowing.  But by evening I had completely forgotten about it.

Today I experimented with some wild sockeye salmon and so far no puking.  I can't say that I thought it tasted all that great, would have preferred my normal Chard/onion/eggs fry up but it was not as horrible as the bacon and so far I'm keeping it down.  I've never cooked fish in my life but I found an electric griller on clearance at Target for $12 and it worked great (can't stand the thought of meat splatters all over the inside of my oven).  Of course I ended up cooking it with lots of dairy products but I wanted my first experience to be tolerable.  I'm sure I'll find other ways to eat it now that I know it isn't very fishy tasting and horrible.  I still have one more portion of fish in the fridge so I can experiment some more.  Not sure if the meat thing will stick but if it does it'll give me more options when I go to restaurants provided we go to places that have grass fed or pastured (turns out there's a difference) or organic or whatever humanely raised type of meat.  Which is not a huge problem to find in Boulder.  What this does to the budget is another matter but at least it's only me eating the stuff, Jonny is not interested which is fine.

I have plenty more to write about but I'll leave it at this for the moment.

Ketogenic Diet for Athletes/Agility?

Wow, where did that come from?  I've been down some rabbit holes the past 2 weeks, mostly doing research for my weight loss clients.  I mostly don't give out dietary advice.  People come to me with their own plans for weight loss and I help them with the behavioral changes they need to make for their plan to succeed.  I urge them in the direction of eating healthy portions of healthy, whole foods and I leave it up to them to decide what that means.  Because there are a lot of voices out there having a big old food fight over what is a healthy diet and I'm not about to start throwing plates of spaghetti around in that mess.

Nonetheless I've had some clients who claimed to be eating a healthy diet, calorie restricted (some so much so that I wondered how they were still standing by the end of the day), getting regular exercise.  For some reason eat less/exercise more/healthy whole foods (whatever that means) wasn't working for them.  And I wanted to know why.  Were they deceiving themselves?  Underestimating how much they were eating, overestimating their exercise, overeating to make up for their exercise?  Or was something else going on?  I didn't feel comfortable just brushing them off, after seeing enough of them, hearing their stories, I felt like I was missing something and I felt I needed to find out what I was missing.  No point helping people change their behaviors if they succeed in making those changes yet still don't reach their goals.

So many voices out there, so many opinions, so much bad science and politics and bad studies and even worse science and politics and ranting and raving.  This journey is not for the faint of heart.  In the end the conclusion I came to, and have been coming to for about 5 years now, is that insulin is largely at the heart of it all for many people who struggle with their weight.  And this means restriction of carbohydrates, even whole grains.  It's taken me a while to fully understand this because I could think of so many exceptions, so many people for whom 'eat less, exercise more' works.  But the idea that's emerged this time down the rabbit hole is the notion that insulin sensitivity is different in different people.  And that there are people out there who are 'insulin resistant' and these folks can't tolerate carbs.  They can cut calories down to ridiculous levels, exercise 2 hour a day and still not lose weight if they're following a high carb/low fat diet.

Case in point, Dr. Peter Attia.  He has a great blog called The Eating Academy, very technical, maybe you need a degree in biochemistry, but still very interesting.  Below he describes how he lost a bunch of weight and turned around his metabolic disease and improved his cholesterol numbers by following a ketogenic diet consisting of 80% of calories from fat.  Yeah, you heard that right.  All I can say is watch the video.  And be prepared for charts and graphs.  Lots of charts and graphs.



This led me to start looking into low carb/high fat diets.  Of course these are nothing new, Atkins back in the 70's and in fact these diets were used to treat kids with seizures as far back as the 1920's.  And here's where the politics comes in and the conspiracy theories that are maybe not so wacky and Nixon and the Farm Bill and suddenly fat is bad and carbs are good and now 40 years later we have a worldwide obesity epidemic to beat the band.  Probably some of the best voices here are Dr. Robert Lustig and Gary Taubes.

Do not mess with Robert Lustig, he is on a mission from Sugar.  I think he is kind of my hero.




Gary Taubes (the intro is 6 minutes  if you want to skip to the lecture though the intro is interesting)



Yeah, I know, it's a lot of material but very worth it if health and nutrition are important to you.  I found a lot of my ideas about 'healthy' turned upside down, inside out and scrambled around.  Like someone declared it Nutrition Opposite Day.  And I became even more surprised when I decided to track my own diet for a few days and found that I naturally eat more fats than carbs (average of 47% fat, 33% carbs, 20% protein).  And I found that with a few minor tweaks (eg, no more toast with my eggs) I was able to bring it to 58% fat, 22% carbs, 20% protein.  A ketogenic diet would call for something like 70-80% fat, 15% protein, 5-15% carbs (usually 20-50g of carbs depending on insulin resistance but some high volume athletes can maybe go to 100 g), depending how insulin sensitive you are among other things.

There are a lot of voices out there.  Very loud and shouty voices, very sure they know the answers.  I'm not saying these guys and only these guys know all the answers.  If this subject interests you you should investigate it for yourself and most importantly experiment with your own diet and decide what works for you.

And in that spirit I've become interested in the potential advantages of a ketogenic diet for triathlon and agility.  Over the years I've become less and less able to tolerate sugar and processed carbs (especially pasta and bread, even the whole wheat versions).  I cut breakfast cereal out many years ago.  I can eat these things but they cause bloating and a even a mildly ill sort of feeling sometimes.  I eat them but rarely and usually on the weekend when I've got a big training day planned.

Further I discovered that carbs and all that I knew about timing of meals pre and post workout might not only be wrong but actually might be having a detrimental effect to my triathlon training.  For the first time I was unable to tolerate the sugary gel packets in my last 2 races last year and in fact they made things worse for me.  My theory is that I've finally become unable to tolerate sugar even during races.  One of the reasons I switched to racing Xterra's is that they're shorter and require less energy bars and gels both in training and races (plus the added benefit of they are so much more fun).  But they still require some fueling.  Or do they?

Nutritional ketosis is difficult to explain and requires diagrams and chemical equations and maybe even a biochemistry degree.  Hands up who remembers the Krebs cycle?  Well I remember learning about it somewhere at some point a long long time ago.  But in short the idea is that you limit carbs and keep protein low so that the body burns fat rather than glycogen.  Because we can only store about 2000 cals of glycogen but fat stores are endless, even in a scrawny triathlete.  Plus the claims that the brain stays more alert when running on ketones.  Imagine feeling mentally sharp for that Snooker run at the end of a long agility day.  I've been entering half days of agility these days because after about 3-4 hours I'm tired and crabby and mentally drained and don't want to be there anymore.  Would a ketogenic diet allow me to handle a full day?

Some ultrarunners and endurance athletes are adopting these diets and I'm intrigued.  I've bought a $6 e-book from Amazon called 'The Art and Science of Low Carb Performance' and it's fascinating stuff.  One of the authors discusses the concepts and recent research findings below.

Jeff Volek




I'm interested enough to consider giving it a try.  I have the added challenge of being a vegetarian so I'm not entirely sure how this will work but I think I can find some hacks for it and I know Peter Attia has said that's it's possible.  I'm not completely sold but I love a good experiment.  I'm going to start gradually, not going to shoot for ketosis right away but I'm already a good way of the way there so I'm not anticipating too many problems at first.  The biggest challenge is the world at large, eating out or at other people's houses.  And Jonny who does most of the cooking and still likes him his grains.  He was not happy with me picking out 2/3 of the sweet potatoes from dinner the other night.  But I think if I leave my carb allotment for dinner we should be able to live in peace.  My grocery cart is getting weirder that's for sure. And if there are any athletes out there who have given this a try please feel free to offer up experiences.  For those who are interested, the Paleorunner blog has loads and loads of podcasts offering up all manner of opinions about diet and training.