Archive for May 2018
I’ve been getting in a short cardio workout each morning soon after getting up. These workouts, using the new aerobic step I bought, run just 10 minutes. Basically I’m getting the engine primed first thing in the morning to run smooth all day. Between the 10 minutes of exercise and the minimum 3 minutes of cold shower I’m hitting the ground running when it comes to fat burning and ketone utilization.
This morning, however, I woke up feeling sub par. I got in and got my cold shower and still didn’t seem to get going fully. When I’m finding it difficult to get started in the morning and I know I got enough sleep my first thought is electrolyte depletion. This is a real issue in the ketogenic diet because you don’t retain water as well. And when you don’t retain water well you also tend to drain your electrolyte balance. So I’ll take an electrolyte supplement to see if that works. I’ve used Keto Vitals, and it’s really helpful, but for some reason shows as currently unavailable on Amazon right now. Another good choice, which you can get from Amazon currently, is Nuun Hydration electrolyte tablets. Here is an Amazon Affiliate link for the variety pack, just click on the picture.
The flavors are pretty good, although some do have a slight bitter aftertaste. But I’d say the aftertaste is worth it for how I feel after I take them. It really does get me back on track most times.
Unfortunately this morning wasn’t one of those times. And that’s when you need to make a decision. I know you get a lot of advice saying “push through it” or “cowboy up” or any other variation on you just keep going anyway even though you’re sick. Here’s my take on it. If your car was overheating you wouldn’t go straight for the nearest incline, accelerating all the way. That’s crazy because you’re likely to damage your engine. Yet how often do we overlook that mindset when it comes to our own bodies, which I would hope are more valuable to you then your car. When you are having trouble getting going, and you’ve taken some electrolytes to try and fix it and still can’t get going, take a hint. I took some DayQuil for my stuffy nose and slight headache and got an extra half hour sleep before heading to work. Could I have tried the workout anyway? Sure I could, but why tax your body further when it’s already hurting. When your body is telling you it needs more rest, treat it like you would your car, and take it easy on your body. Trying to push through and get to your goal faster could wind up costing you a lot more then the slight delay would.
So I’ve been a little busy the last two days and didn’t realize I had skipped the update on my progress. For that I apologize. Keeping accountable on here is important to me and I shouldn’t be allowing it to get lost in the rush.
As expected this week was actually a gain in weight. The Wednesday before was my monthly day off from keto so I knew I would be heavier this weigh in. I had seriously considered cancelling or putting off this month’s day off because I had just gotten back under 300 for the first time in who knows how long last weigh in and didn’t feel like immediately going back over. In the end I decided that not doing the day off for that reason would go against what I’ve said all along, which is don’t focus on one number, focus on the whole journey. So what if I went over again because past experience with my days off show me that I’ll lose it right back. So why deny myself the plan I set because of one silly number, 300. Which is a great movie by the way if you haven’t seen it.
When I did my weigh in Monday morning my faith in my game plan was rewarded. On previous days off I put on an average of 3 pounds each time. On this one I only gained a pound. So I weighed in at 300.2 lbs and 41.8% body fat. So I only went up .3% body fat. I gain a little more then a pound of body fat if you run the numbers, so I had to lose a little water or muscle to account for the difference. As it was less then half a pound I’m ok with that because that difference could be accounted for by the slight inaccuracies of weighing in. Which is another good reason not to get caught up with the numbers of a single weigh in.
I think that the reason I only put on one more pound this time around is because I’ve been doing a lot better with my exercise. I invested in one of those plastic aerobic steps with the adjustable height. The one I got has a 300 lb limit so I realize I am technically over it. Since I know I’ll be below 300 lbs soon I think it can take the extra .2 lbs for a week. It was a $45 investment, mainly because it’s designed to be extra sturdy. The best part is there is now no excuse for not working out. Can’t say I didn’t get to the gym, because the step is right here in my bedroom. Can’t say I couldn’t because it’s raining outside because I have a good roof over my head. Can’t say I don’t want to disturb my family because I can do this in the privacy of my room. So no more excuses. I’m only on the 3rd day of my tracking week and I’ve already gotten 5 workouts in totaling 1 hour 7 minutes. So I’m thinking the weigh in this upcoming Monday is going to be great. Until then take care and be happy.
I follow Matt and Megha on YouTube and other social media. Their main site is https://www.ketoconnect.net and I highly recommend it. They are a wonderful couple and great Keto role models. Their YouTube channel features lots of recipes and info on the ketogenic diet, but now they’ve upped the game by putting all that information into a new book, Keto Made Easy. I purchased the Kindle edition of the book and have seen the paperback.
The book has a quick intro to the ketogenic diet with helpful tips on how to transition over, but the majority of the book is recipes to try on the diet. If you want a nice and glossy looking book the paperback does look sharp and is well laid out. But if you just want the info I’d recommend the Kindle version. It does have color pics of the recipes if you are using the Kindle app on your tablet or smartphone and it has the added benefit of a clickable table of contents to take you right to each recipe. It has breakfast items, baked goods, keto versions of popular take out, and most importantly, desserts.
If you’re interested in getting your hands on a copy, and supporting some really nice folks who have been very good for the keto community, here is a link below. This is an Amazon affiliate link so keep that in mind when you click.
So I usually wait until my monthly update to add pics but today’s weigh in was a milestone so I wanted to add a comparison pic.
So the pic on the right is from Dec. 12, 2013. My friend Whitney and I were out on a walk in a nearby park and we took this picture before I climbed the stairs, I lovingly refer to as the Staircase of Death, near the end of our walk. I did get to the top of the stairs but I was winded and had to take a minute to recover to walk back to her place. I don’t know my exact weight in that picture because I didn’t weigh myself back then, mainly because of the theory that ignorance is bliss. But I’d wager I was pretty close to 360-370 lbs at that time. Fast forward to the pic on the left which was taken this morning. I did my weekly weigh in and my hopes of matching last week’s progress were realized. I weighed in at 299.2 lbs. I actually can’t remember when the last time my weight was below 300 lbs, it’s been so long. That means I lost 3.2 lbs last week brining my total to 53.4 lbs lost since January 1st. And my body fat percentage went down to 41.5%, from last week at 42.2%. So crunching the numbers I actually lost 3.4 lbs of body fat so I gained .2 lbs in either muscle mass or water.
The bigger picture is this, although I don’t have access to the Staircase of Death anymore because I live in a different state, I rest absolutely assured I could climb those stairs right now and just keep walking back to her place. Would I still be catching my breath at the top, you betcha. Would I have to stop a couple times along the way to get up them, probably not. The thing is my overall health has improved a lot since that picture was taken because of the keto diet. Do I know if that means you’ll have the same success. Nope. We’re each different. Would I recommend you trying and sticking to keto to find out, yup. And sticking to it is the key. In the nearly 5 years since I took that pic I have tried to lose weight a number of times. And I’ve had some success. But I’ve also lost ground and gained some weight back. Each time though I moved a little forward and didn’t get discouraged. And then I found keto. But I wouldn’t have found keto had I just given up because I doubted myself or my ability to eventually get the weight off. I’m going back to Washington State to visit in August, where the Staircase of Death is, and I’m looking forward to climbing those stairs because how great I’ll feel at the end of that climb will outshine any negative feelings I’ve had along the way to get there. And that’s why I keep moving forward.
Because this is an accountability blog I will add here at the end that I don’t feel I met my exercise goals this week and kick myself a little bit because if my progress was that good without meeting the goals who knows what I would have accomplished had I done so. Next week I won’t have to make this admission again I assure you.
So I did my weekly weigh in yesterday. I came in at 302.4 lbs and a body fat percentage of 42.2%. So very close to the 300 lbs and 40% marker. This was down 2.4 lbs and .5 percentage points body fat from the week before. I did do better on meeting my Move goal every day of the week and closed all three rings on my Apple Watch on 3 of the days. And I am doing better about tracking my nutrition using the Cronometer app (which I highly recommend if you’re looking for a good ketogenic tracker). So hopefully this progress will continue this week and I’ll be almost at, or maybe even below, the 300 mark.
Another reason why I think I did a little better this week at my weigh in is I’ve been better about taking cold showers in the morning. For a while I was getting one or two in a week, maybe for three minutes tops. This past week I did four cold showers with three minutes being the minimum. I believe in the efficacy of cold showers and should be doing it every day but I usually let the clock talk me out of it. Last week when I was looking for ways to get myself back on track with “good” weekly weight loss (2lbs or more for the week) I realized that I was engaged in wrong thinking about the clock issue. Yes, on a morning when I’m heading to work adding 3 extra minutes to the shower to take a cold shower would seem like 3 minutes subtracted from something else, but in reality it’s a gain. I say that because nothing quite gets the motor running like being under cold water for 3 minutes. Your body really has no choice but to rev up to generate heat to offset the heat loss due to the cold water. And that extra energy created also creates an alertness that allows you to make up the time “lost” in the cold shower by being more productive and efficient when you get out of the shower. So the benefits of taking a cold shower aren’t just for fat loss (although the extra heating your body goes through does help there, as well as generates more brown fat, which is a good kind of fat you actually want to develop). If you’re interested in the topic of brown fat and why you should want it (quick answer is it burns more calories) there are plenty of resources on the internet if you do a Google search for brown fat/brown adipose tissue. If you guys would like a quick blog about it let me know in the comments and I’ll put one together.
If you’re interested in trying cold showers, this is how I got started. First, I bought a waterproof stopwatch that I could hang from the shower curtain rod so I can time my cold shower time. I suppose you could just “feel” how long it is but if you want to know for sure that you’re improving, nothing beats the hard facts of the readout on your stopwatch. As for the shower itself, I start out taking my regular shower to get clean with very warm water, but you can start with whatever temperature you’re used to. I don’t start with the cold water because I think the warm water is better for proper cleaning, and it also gives me a moment to get prepared for the switch. If you want to just go straight cold that’s fine but I’d take a few moments before getting in the shower to get yourself mentally prepared for the shock to your body the cold water will give you.
After I’m done with the actual shower part I switch the water to pure cold. My shower allows me to adjust pressure and temperature independently, but if you have just the one knob on your shower turn it all the way down to the point where you have just enough pressure so the water is coming out at you and that should be the strictly cold water feed coming out.
When I first started I set my goal for 30 seconds and was shivering by the end. From there I increased the time by 30 seconds per cold shower until where I am now. One of the side benefits of cold showers is along with fat burn and brown fat creation, you also build a bit of mental discipline. At this point I can easily go 8 minutes without shivering. Part of this is adaptation, the other part is mental discipline telling my body not to shiver. The reason you want to learn not to shiver is that shivering defeats the growth of brown fat because your body doesn’t need it if it can just use the muscles to shiver you warm. That’s why babies have so much brown fat. They haven’t developed the shiver response. As adults we have, so we have a lot less brown fat.
One of the ways you’ll know you’re creating more brown fat is when you take the cold shower, even as long as 8 minutes like I do on the weekends, and after you get out your body goes back to warm quickly, but you didn’t shiver at all. You’ll notice as a side benefit that you don’t get the cold feeling as much throughout the day either.
So that’s this week’s blog post. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below. And I’ll see you again in a week for the next update.
Just a quick post. On my Monday monthly update one of the things I said I needed to start doing to get my weight loss progress going ahead full steam again was getting more exercise in. And the main goal was to make sure to close the Move ring on my Apple Watch on my weekend (which for me is Tuesday and Wednesday). Well I just wanted to thank those of you who’ve checked in with me because accountability works. Not wanting to have to come back here and explain why I didn’t get it done, which would mainly be feeding you all a bunch of excuses, prompted me to get it done this weekend. Including today when I woke up feeling sick. I got up, got moving today, and it passed and I got it done. Closed the Move ring both days so mission accomplished.
Like the last book I reviewed, I got through this book in short order. Not only because it’s well written, making it an easy rid, it’s also great information. The audience for the book are people who are having trouble getting started or staying on track when trying to make changes in their lives. Which I’m guessing is a lot of people, myself included.
I won’t spoil any of the book telling you how The 5 Second Rule came to be, but after it entered Mel’s life, things started changing fast. She went from a long list of things she felt were spiraling out of control to being in charge of her life. And that’s important. We have a choice in life of being on a boat with no paddles, being taken anywhere the currents decide, totally out of our control, or we can choose to grab the paddles and direct our life. And this book is about a simple strategy to help you get that control, as well as an explanation for why it works.
With a lot of self help books they’ll tell you their secret to success but don’t go into a lot of detail. It’s just a set of rules or principles you follow and the expectation is that you’ll have the same success. The problem is that sometimes when you don’t know why things work you just don’t have any buy in to make use of the tool. This book creates the buy in by giving you a great explanation for why this Rule works, and follows it up with a lot of success stories from people with all sorts of difficult situations who made amazing changes thanks to the Rule.
The key to the Rule is you simply have to use it. Which is easy because it’s so simple. But if you want to see how simple it is you’ve got to read the book, which doesn’t take long. I’m not a particularly fast reader and I was able to finish the book in 2 hours. It’s 241 pages long with lots of screen caps of the messages people have sent Mel of the success they’ve had. Which brings me to my one criticism of the book. I read it on my Kindle and some of the screen caps made the text so small I couldn’t read it which required zooming in. That definitely slowed the reading down. I don’t know how the screen caps look in the physical book, as I only get books for my Kindle, but if the text is small in the physical book you better have a magnifying glass. I think that copying the text into quote boxes with a different font of the same size as the regular text would have made for a much easier read. This of course is a minor criticism and doesn’t really detract from the enjoyment of the book, just the pace of reading.
As I said earlier the Rule is easy to implement and I’ve been doing so in my life. The first area she suggests you use the Rule for is getting yourself out of bed in the morning, which is where I started using it. And it works. I don’t use the snooze nearly as often as I used to, which was pretty much most mornings. Now I get up and use the Rule to make sure I stay up. And that little extra time in the morning makes all the difference. Plus it’s nice knowing I’m starting the day taking charge on my terms and not just rolling out of bed because I’ve backed myself into a time crunch. And once you see how the Rule can make positive changes there you’re motivated to start using it on other things (like getting blog posts done or meeting your exercise goals).
So if you’re looking for help to get started on anything, be it getting up earlier or getting tasks done you keep putting off, this book can teach you in short order a simple and easy to follow Rule that will change your life. If you’d like to see for yourself just click on the book cover below (which is an Amazon Affiliate link, just so you know). Have a great day and I hope you enjoy the same level of success with the book that I’ve had.
So it’s the first weigh in of May so I’m doing my monthly update with pics. This month’s progress is 4.6 lbs lost. My first weigh in of April had me at 309.4 lbs with a body fat of 43.6%. This morning’s weigh in had me at 304.8 lbs with a body fat of 42.7%. Now The actual difference in body fat between April and now shows a body fat loss of 4.8 lbs so I gained .2 lbs muscle. Which isn’t a lot but since every bit of extra muscle burns a little more fat it’s a step in the right direction. So this month is progress overall but I feel I should have done better. I’ll explain why below my progress pics.
The reason I think I could have done better is I’ll admit I slacked in one major area in the last month, and that’s tracking my food intake. I’ve gotten to the point where I know if something I’m eating is keto or not so I’ve gotten a little lazy about tracking to make sure I’m staying on point. So who knows if I was. So I’m back to tracking. This will insure that I’m keeping my macros in the correct ratios and I’m not going over on carbs. I’ll also be doing better about testing my blood ketone levels to make sure I’m not just in ketosis, but I’m well into ketosis.
And the other reason I know I could have done better is that while I am doing more exercising then I was before the last update, I still feel I could be doing more. Especially since with the keto diet one of the best ways of exercise to boost progress is just going out for walks. But you know it’s been raining, or there’s construction going on in the neighborhood, and blah blah blah because it’s all silly excuses. So the one improvement I’m stating for the record I’ll be making between now and next week is no more not meeting my move goal on my Apple Watch on my weekends. There’s simply no excuse for it. That should help a lot. Also I’m going to start jump roping again. I had started but my ankle got really sore so I stopped to let it heal. But it’s been long enough I should have restarted. I went out and bought some exercise matts for the garage so I can do it on a surface that’s not as rough on the ankles. So no excuses there either. Just need to do it. I know the issue is just motivation but I read a good book from Mel Robbins titled “The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage.” I’ll post a review of it tomorrow but if you’re interested in checking it out now I’ll include the link below. As a quick reminder this is an Amazon Affiliate link so I do profit from it, but wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t think it was a good read.
Thanks for reading the update and I’ll be doing weekly updates between now and my first June weigh in where I’ll post more progress pics. If there are any suggestions or requests on how I can make these posts better, feel free to comment. Take care.
Here’s the link to Mel’s motivational book:
https://amzn.to/2K08hzh
Hello again, time for the weekly accountability post. And I’m happy to be held accountable for this. Last week I actually gained weight due to my monthly day off from Keto. This week I not only lost the 3.2 lbs I had gained last week I actually dropped another 1.8 lbs on top of that. This puts me at 304.8 lbs for this weigh in with a body fat percentage of 42.8%. So I’m very near two goals I’ve been looking forward to. The first being to go below 300 lbs weight. It’s been such a long time since I was under 300 I can’t actually recall the last time I was. I know for sure it has to be at least a decade and a half ago. And more likely two decades plus. So looking forward to that in the next few weeks. Maybe even next week if I manage to drop another 5 lbs like I did this week. The second goal I’m looking forward to is being under 40% body fat. I don’t know when I was that because unlike weight I only started tracking my body fat percentage when I started my Keto journey. But I’d wager it’s been well over two decades on that, maybe three. I did the math on how much body fat I had last week and this week and all 5 lbs I lost came from body fat. I’d have liked it if I had gained some muscle mass but on the whole I’m calling this week a big win.
Next week is the monthly update where I’ll include pictures. Another reason to hope this week’s success is next week’s success as well. But no matter what I’ll be happy because the biggest things I’ve learned so far on my self improvement mission is there’s no point in improving if you aren’t happy when you do. And that’s my parting thought for this post. Don’t look at your long term goal and imagine how great life will be then. Don’t wait for happiness to arrive when you reach your destination. Be happy now. And if you aren’t, spend some time meditating on why you aren’t and along with your body, change your mind. There just isn’t a good reason why you can’t be happy now. See you next week.
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