Bloody Fats!

OH YEAH - lipids results! My triglyceride level is down about 15% (from 0.95 to 0.81), which is great. My HDL is up from 0.91 to 0.93 (probably not even statistically significant, but I'll take it because it's also good). My LDL is up from 4.38 to 4.63, but I'm not worried. LDL levels GO UP when you're experiencing fat loss, because fat mobilizes stored cholesterol. So it's not necessarily a bad thing so much as an indicator that I am actively losing fat, which I am (59 lbs off, I guess still a ways to go but 59 lbs ain't shabby).

And now I'm at 59 lbs down

Also, officially class II instead of class III obese.

Keep it coming, fat-laden diet! :)

It's been a LONG time, Internet

I'm at 45 lbs lost and this keto shit is hella easy. Like crazy, stupid easy.

Today's dinner will be beef tenderloin stewed in a rosemary whiskey cream sauce, with onions. I used to work at a catering hall which had this DELICIOUS specialty of chicken in rosemary cream sauce, and the sauce included Irish cream. Since I can't do sugar, straight whiskey will have to do. :) And beef, chicken ... honestly, just jazzed it's MEAT!

So, yes. 45 lbs since April 19. What have I learned in that time?

• For a week of every month I gain back some weight, then I lose it in the following week. That's a monthly 2-week plateau, basically (well, more of a hill, really). It's all about the progesterone, baby. Not much I can do about that, but UNDERSTANDING is 99% of acceptance for me. So I'm pretty chill about it.
• Meat is the best. The best of the best. I've been buying meat at a local grass-fed farm: beef, chicken, pork, even lamb (which, yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of). 
• Diet pop is AMAZING. It's nice to drink things that aren't just water.
• Tea is ALSO AMAZING. See Diet pop.
• I love Torani sugar-free syrups. I have had the butter/coconut/cream/salt coffee every day for the last five months. Putting a little sweet somethin' somethin' in it makes it SO delightful.
• Retiring pants is fun. Bye bye, butt and belly.
• I bought a Magic Bullet after using my brother's, it is SO great for morning coffee. Mmmmm.
• You can't trust everything you read. Really, you can't trust much. "Trust no one." Question everything you read, no matter its source. I learned I lost my critical eye over the last decade. I'm working hard to get that back.

This has been the easiest weight loss ever. I have lipids test results coming in a week or two, and I'm keen to see how triglycerides and HDL are responding to diet. Will post when in.

Cinnamon for Insulin Sensitizing!

I just added cinnamon to my diet (1 tsp a day) because there is strong evidence that it regulates blood sugar levels by decreasing insulin resistance.

That does 2 main things: 

1. It makes sure that the glucose you get from your food (or the glucose you make through gluconeogenesis, if you're following a low-carb high-fat diet) gets absorbed more readily by your tissues that need it for energy, and 

2. Because your glucose gets used the way it should be, your body produces less insulin.

Now, that insulin thing is fantastic, because what THAT then allows your body to do is SHED FAT. If you get the insulin out of your blood stream, your fat cells will start to convert triglycerides to fatty acids so they can be shipped to your bloodstream and converted to energy.

That is insanely fucking kickass. It ALSO improves your blood lipid profile, by markedly (by a factor of 10–20%) reducing your LDL and VLDL cholesterols (the bad cholesterol), decreasing your triglycerides, and therefore decreasing your total cholesterol. 

I'm adding 1 tsp a day to my coffee. You could have it in a glass of milk (I'm pretty sure you can also buy cinnamon supplements). I think 1/2 tsp is enough, according to 1 randomized controlled trial I saw. The 'dosage' is 1 gram of cinnamon per day. 1 tsp of cinnamon is about 2 grams per day. Also, it's easier to measure, in my mind. 

It's seriously worth trying, especially if you're a fan of cinnamon.

I had a two-week stall because I was in the last phase of my menstrual cycle, which increases insulin resistance because you have increased progesterone levels during that phase. My blood sugar was fairly high compared to the week before, and my ketone levels were low (and low ketones for me means my body isn't accessing my bodyfat for energy, because my insulin levels are too high). So, two days ago I added a tsp of cinnamon. Literally overnight, my beta-hydroxybutyrate [which technically isn't a ketone but I'm calling it that anyway] level tripled and my blood sugar started to decrease.

That could be either because of progesterone, or it could be because of cinnamon (or it could be because of both), but either way, I'll see next month how my body reacts to my period while I'm taking daily doses of cinnamon. 

Try it!

Incidentally, my weight is NO LONGER stalled since starting the cinnamon. I am now at 269, under 270 and almost at the 20 lb mark. :)

Ooh, also - this is day 28, I've lost 17 lbs :)

Breakfast of Champions

For at least the last week, my breakfast has been salted caramel coffee. I make this using my stick blender and lots and lots of fat!

Salted Caramel Coffee
2 tbsp butter (salted or unsalted, doesn't matter)
1 tbsp coconut oil
3 tbsp heavy cream
1.5 cups (or 2, or thereabouts - a big mug!) of coffee
1/8 tsp salt
a splash (maybe 1/2 tsp) of Torani sugar-free caramel syrup

Blend (takes SECONDS) and drink. This is so beyond fantastic, I just love it.

Weight Tracking

And why not graph weight?

My goal is 144. That's heavy for some people, but it's half my starting weight. As you can see, that'd be super light for me. I haven't weighed that 'little' since my teens.

Yum Yum Blood

That's my blood, yo! I've been tracking Beta-hydroxybutyrate and glucose levels in my blood, and acetoacetate in my urine (yum!) for a while now, and this is what I've found. My blood glucose levels have stayed pretty consistently 4.5ish since my BHB levels hit above 1.5. Today's reading of 4.4 for BHB was the highest I've seen yet, and it occurred a half hour after a 15 minute walk. 

Exciting stuff, to me. I love data.

And I can't get the graph to publish, so I'll be posting it in an upcoming post as an image instead of en embedded link to the Google sheet.

This is day 16. I've lost 10 lbs.

'nuff said.

Pickled Eggs

I moved on to pickled eggs today, after having a conversation with my brother about them. He's been home pickling eggs for about a month now and he loves them. He's gotten me past the initial fear of unknown territory, so I dove right in.

I couldn't find my pickling spice (which was hiding in plain sight all along), so I added the following to 1 cup white vinegar plus 1/2 cup water, and brought to a rolling boil:

about 1/2 tsp mustard powder
about 1/8 tsp each of ground ginger and allspice
about 6 whole cloves
about 1 tsp of whole coriander
1 cinnamon stick, broken in two
1 bay leaf

Once boiled, I poured the whole thing into a mason jar into which I had already put my still-warm peeled hard-boiled eggs, about 1/4 tsp of whole peppercorns, 1 thickly sliced shallot, and a few cloves of garlic, very roughly chopped.

You let it cool (I'm doing so now) and refrigerate. I'm told you need to give it a couple of days, but I'm probably going to dig in tonight.

Moroccan preserved lemons

Here's a look at some Moroccan preserved lemons I'm making. I used these old fliptop caning jars that Country Home Candles used to sell their candles in. These things are great, and they seal air-tight. I love this style of gasket-sealed canning jars, and I think I'm going to buy myself more.

I think I bought fourteen lemons. I was able to fit about four and a half lemons in each of these jars. Three of the lemons in each jar are sliced nearly to the end in quarters (but held together at the end by a bit of flesh). I sprinkled coarse salt into each lemon as I held the lemon bottom slightly open. It probably took 1 to 1.5 tbsp of coarse salt to 'fill' between the cracks of each lemon. 

I then sliced up another 1.5 lemons completely in quarters, and tucked them down into the spaces in both jar between the whole lemons. There's probably an additional 4 tbsp of lemon in each jar, for a total of maybe 8 tbsp in each jar (maybe more). 

I used a wooden spoon after adding each lemon to sort of mash each lemon and each lemon quarter down, releasing their juices and compacting them in the free space of the jar.

I had bought 14 lemons, so I juiced the remaining 5 lemons and split the juice (and seeds, I'm lazy) between both jars. They JUST filled each jar to basically at what I'm going to call 'the lemon line'.

You're supposed to keep the lemons completely submerged, but the lemons don't really soften up until a few days in, so every day, I'm going to have to take these out of the cool dark corner cupboard, open them up, and tamp down the contents to try to get the lemons to stay under the juice.

They sit for six weeks in a cool dark place, and you are supposed to turn the jar occasionally to distribute the salt and juices. 

I've had these before and they are phenomenal. I can't wait until these are ready to use!

Day 6: Urine Ketones

I'm on day 6, and my urine ketones are finally up around 4 mmol/L. The urine ketones should be in this range for about a day or two, then when my body figures out it should use blood ketones for energy, it'll drop down to be nearly absent in my urine.

Yeah. Love talking about pee.

Let's talk about poo.

One of the common questions (and past experience for me on this diet) is "How do you deal with the constipation?" My answer previously was to eat more fibre, which ended up increasing my sugar/starch carbs since I was eating my fibre in veggies, and that screwed up my macro balance (I was eating too many carbs). NOW I know that I need to: EAT. MORE. SALT. So I make sure I'm getting 4g /day or thereabouts in salt, and miraculously there is absolutely no constipation even though I'm not going out of my way to eat tonnes of servings of veggies. In fact, I might eat 1 or 2 servings of veg a day and that's all.

Pretty darned happy with the state of my excrement. That's not something you hear every day. Or ever. Who says that?

Recipe: Orange Chocolate Cheesecake Fat Bombs

Ingredients
1/2 cup coconut oil (I used Ziggy Marley Organics Orange Almond Coco'Mon Oil, for orange flavour)
1 100g bar of milk chocolate, in pieces
1 8 oz package of cream cheese
1/2 tsp of coarse sea salt

Instructions
Melt the coconut oil in the microwave on 15 second bursts. Stir between each.
Add the milk chocolate pieces and continue melting and stirring on 15 second bursts.
Add the package of cream cheese, in chunks, continue melting and stirring on 15 second bursts.

Whisk vigorously to remove lumps (or be lazy [smart?] and use a hand blender).

Pour into 8 muffin tins.

Divide the 1/2 tsp of sea salt among the tops of all 8 cheesecake bombs.

Refrigerate.

Makes 8 servings.

Macronutrient info per serving:
29.3g fat
263.5mg sodium
8.1g carbohydrate
2.9g protein

I heart salt.

Time to Get Back on the Wagon

Fatty fat fatness. I fell off the wagon following a miserable heartbreak and hating the world.

I weighed in at 288 lbs.

Wow.

I'm back on high fat. I'm four days in, I'm starting to drop already, and I'm sticking the hell with it.

I realized I fell off last year because I (a) wasn't eating enough salt and (b) was eating too much carb.

I know I definitely wasn't eating enough salt. I was working out in the mornings three days a week, sweating my ass off, and feeling like a sack of shit all day. I even have an older post where I point out that I hit 4300 mg of sodium and I say in the post that it was too much. It's twice the recommended daily intake according to Health Canada. That recommendation, however, turns out to be a fairly poor recommendation. It seems that sodium levels near 4.5 g a day are actually the ideal in terms of heart health, according to an article in NEJM.

O'Donnell et al. 2014. Urinary Sodium and Potassium Excretion, Mortality, and Cardiovascular Events. NEJM, 371(7): 612-623.

Having sodium targets is a thing. Who knew?

Lesson: take in 5 g of sodium a day.

The other thing, the eating too much carbs thing, came about because I was incorporating small amounts of fruit. Well, forget fruit. Fruit doesn't exist for me anymore, unless it's in sugar-free fruit gelatin format.

What did I eat today? 

morningtime beverage/noms
1 tbsp of coconut oil before leaving the house

3/4 c of half and half in my morning coffees (3) at work
a few shakes of salt in each cup (salt improves shitty coffee, also, I heart salt)

lunch
5 cheddar cheese sticks
1/4 cup salted roasted macadamia nuts
10 big Brazil nuts

dinnerishness
1/2 cup cream cheese
1 shallot, chopped
2 pieces of artichoke heart (maybe 1/2 a heart?), chopped
2 tbsp shredded parmesan

blended into a dip to eat with
1 head of broccoli

I'm going to have a cup of boullion now.

Numbers of the Day
160g of fat
42g of carbs (10.5 were fibre so they don't count)
52g of protein
3900 mg of sodium