I've been doing ketosis for about 6 months, after having done twice in the past. From my heaviest to today over the last 2 years, I'm down 50 pounds.
The data in this post was cool. I found Dr. Peter Addia's analysis to be one of my favorite resources. He's a medical doctor who was an overweight endurance athlete, then began doing ketosis. I appreciated an honest scientific analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of ketosis.
I am very interested as well and hope there is a response. Since he was working with an MD, my guess is as follows: insulin is the devil.
Whereas if you look at the old FDA food pyramid and the new food plate, carbs/sugars/fruits take up a significant percentage of the recommended daily diet. Take fruit for example, prevailing norm would be fruit is healthy (especially in its natural state where it is accompanied by fiber), fruit aside most people would believe carbs (especially in whole grain form) are perfectly fine in moderation. My big guess is that an M.D. recognizes any amount of carb (fruit or whole grain being no different that high fructose corn syrup) triggers the bodies production of insulin. More and more, I think M.D.'s will have negative perspective on any/all insulin production if it can be avoided. I have more thoughts on the impacts of insulin on the body, but I hope OP will chime in with a response to see if my instincts are on point.
Interesting. But I thought there's always some insulin after every meal so it's not something that can be avoided. Maybe you mean insulin spikes are the devil?
Basically this. I think it's more about insulin spiking, though, because insulin stops healthy people on a nutritional ketogenic diet from going into diabetic ketoacidosis.
This is all good if your goal is weight loss. However weight loss doesn't necessarily means higher fitness. Glycogen is fundamental if you do sports, and exercise is a major ingredient in getting fit. If I read correctly, exercise was not a big part of your experiment, how would you suggest modifying the experiment to accommodate one's exercising needs?
On a side note, I reached a similar conclusion on the role of "carbs at night", sleeping, and fats, and I read this interesting article https://aeon.co/essays/hunger-is-psychological-and-dieting-o... on the importance, for effective weight loss, of feeling satisfied (I believe there is also a reference to the relationship between eating fats and feeling satisfied).
I'm in ketosis. I can tell when the glycogen in my liver depletes. I hit a wall and can't keep going. I find that it has to do with intensity - for low intensity exercise, I can go forever. When I have to exert more (like running up an SF hill), it depletes me more.
To fix this, you more or less have to keep intensity lower. I think that's why it works well for bicyclists who can change gears.
Good news is that, after endurance exercise, you can replenish glycogen stores - meaning you can have more sugar than normal without leaving ketosis.
Doesn't it depend on what type of sport you play? If you're doing marathons wouldn't ketosis work? and if you're doing high intensity, and short bursts ketosis might not be the best choice?
You will see greater endurance adaptations in response to exercise in the short term on a ketogenic diet, though this effect decreases the longer you maintain the diet. The downside to a ketogenic diet is your total training volume for work above the lactate threshold is more limited.
As a result, high level athletes tend to spend the majority of their time consuming a carb-rich diet, then switch to a ketogenic diet for 2-3 weeks prior to competition. During this low carb period, they just focus on a very high volume of low/moderate intensity work. Finally, 2-3 days before competition, they will carb-load to glycogen super-compensate, getting the best of both worlds.
Losing weight means that your muscles (and also your bones) need to carry less weight, so while technically you're not getting more fit, the fitness you have becomes more effective. So losing excess fat is definitely one of the most important steps towards becoming fit.
If anything, I would question how healthy ketosis is, long term... But I'm pretty sure it's way healthier than any processed-food diet typical in the west...
About 3 years ago I began experiments with paleo, I am 5'6-5'7 started over 190lbs and in about 4 months was down to 152lbs. Weekends I would have cheat meals usually a pizza day and burger/fry day.
Around then I began running for the first time in my life. I started out the first 3 months at 1 mile everyday, which I thought was a lot until a high school buddy laughed when I told him.
I stopped eating paleo and increased to 3 miles about 5 times a week. This went on for about a month, when I decided to register for a half marathon and started a basic 12 week training. I tried to restart paleo, but about a month in my legs began to hurt which I attributed to lack of carbs so I again got off. During Summer in Miami I decreased the mileage due to the heat and would get back on paleo still weekend cheat days.
During any of that time I didn't know about Ketosis or I never experienced anything I would call Ketosis.
Fast forward to this year, I completed the Disney Goofy (half day1, full day2), then another 2 halfs during the spring. I was back to about 170, and despite running more mileage than I ever had, I was not pleased with my physique, feeling I looked better even at the same weight while on paleo. So I decided after my last half of the season, I would try to go full paleo without any cheat meals on the weekend with the goal of 5 mile runs 4-5 times per week. I just completed a half the weekend before and Tuesday I did my 5 mile on paleo and felt fine/normal.
Wednesday/Thursday during my runs I got light head and basically though I might blackout, never experienced that before, but I stuck with it. Then by the 3rd week, I honestly felt I was tapping into a different energy source, not that I was running faster but it was just a different feeling and it was amazing.
Despite having combined paleo and running before, my body had never responded like this before. Having read up on high endurance athletes who do paleo after the fact, I believe what was happening is my body was tapping into and burning fat as its main source of energy and I also learned about Ketosis at that time (I believe/understand these to be one in the same, but they may not be). I will note, even my mind seemed different as I began to really think/feel that sugars were a poison and I was disgusted by the thought of breads/sugars, meaning I didn't even want cheat days on the weekend. This lasted for about 2 months without a cheat day and eventually there was a craving for carbs and I had no hesitation about giving in, so I am back off the paleo, and basically the very next run my body was not performing the same as it was. I look forward to implementing a strict paleo diet again without cheat days when the weather cools and I will try to build my mileage up in that state for the next running season.
One thing. Paleo has nothing to do with Ketosis. While meat and vegetables are encouraged and are the basis of the paleo food pyramid, carbs like from sweet potatos, honey, vegetables with higher amount of carbs and nuts are considered paleo.
You can argue about what is paleo and what not, but carbs are considered totaly fine as long as they come from a good source.
So if you did paleo and ended up in ketosis you probably did something wrong in regards to the paleo idea.
I think your comment it accurate. As I mentioned doing paleo multiple times before I never reached ketosis. Cheat meals on the weekend aside, I also included sweet potatoe (after runs), honey and nuts (almonds, cashews).
This last time around, where I experienced the change (I believe ketosis) I can basically say my diet consisted of: eggs, chicken (mostly dark meat), red meat, green leafy vegetables, and sometimes pork. Honestly before this thread I thought of ketosis as a state, and not a diet, so I will look into it a little more and see if this last diet I was on was more consistent with ketosis than paleo.
I guess you can also look at ketosis as a state. Maybe paleo diet even gets you from time to time into ketosis without really intending to do so.
What I also wanted to say is that you can find sources for carbs in the paleo diet... especially if you do sports (and you did it actually as you mentioned)
Glycogen is necessary for high intensity exercise, but you are mistaken that carbs are necessary for glycogen. When you are keto-adapted and eat low carb, two things happen that most people overlook. First, you get enough "trace carbs" in your diet that you have glycogen in your muscles for exercise. Second, your body can synthesize glycogen!
I've eaten LCHF for 10 years and regularly exercise with CrossFit (arguably the highest intensity workout most people will do) and yoga intermixed with athletic activities like hiking, skiing, and surfing.
My suggestion is to properly keto-adapt over 3 to 6 weeks before concluding that you can't exercise without eating carbs.
The rate of glycogen synthesis is directly mediated by glucose availability, and the glycogen synthase enzyme is also activated by an insulin induced signalling cascade. Glycogen replenishment still occurs on a low carb diet, it just takes longer.
If you only do crossfit every 2-3 days, and rotate the exercises you do somewhat (as is typical at most boxes) you might not notice a big difference between a low carb and higher carb diet. If you train daily and you're doing similar movements every day, you will definitely notice a difference. Since that is pretty much the modus operandi of serious athletes, that is where the whole "athletes don't do well on keto" idea comes from; it definitely doesn't apply to your garden variety recreational athlete though.
Another anecdote. I tried keto on and off for 2 years while trying to achieve my former triathlete performance. I felt good at the beginning; lost some weight and felt more energy, but it quickly declined and I was never able to perform well.
Last year I was introduced to books like Finding Ultra, Whole and Proteinaholic, and went on a high carb diet.
Today my diet is based on beans, lentils, potatoes and fruits and I'm performing 15-20% better than my previous peak from 15 years ago (I'm 37 now). As a bonus, with the amount of fibber I consume, I never had digestive issues again.
I was in Ketosis for 12 months, and the last 6 months was training for my first Ironman (age 37).
I would say most of the benefit from Ketosis while training is the recovery. I had plenty of energy for my long rides, but the lower inflammation was making recovery quicker.
My race was cancelled (Tahoe) and I went to Spain two weeks later and did Barcelona instead.. 10h and 3 minutes. Pretty happy with sub-5h for the bike leg!
Good eye. May be random noise since most daily deltas in the data-set are so small. See comments about over-fitting and noise elsewhere in the thread. Also may be a veggie-style (without the bun) burger. It was over 2 years ago, so I don't remember. I plan to write a separate machine-learning focused doc on this exploratory experiment when I get more time.
Very interesting littlw study. The results seem to make sense, and I'm impressed that his model can learn what causes his weight swings given the low resolution delta-weight data he collects.
Thanks mbrundle. I'm the person behind that git repository and honestly am in a bit of a shock that this is making hacker-news.
As I say in the README.md: please ignore the noise, the scales I used had 0.2 pound resolution, and my data-set was too small (and as one snarky commenter noticed, some words were misspelled). What is important is the big picture. There are actually numerous contradictions and irregularities in the data. In particular, any food item that appears only once or twice in the data-set, and is randomly coinciding with other features that make it biased the wrong way contributes to the error of the model.
So as I say in the README, I would ignore anything that's not near the top or bottom, and even those should be taken with a healthy dose of (noise/modeling) skepticism.
Anyway, the code is free for everyone to use so people are encouraged to run the experiment on themselves using more accurate methods and contributing more data. It only requires R+ggplot2 and vowpal wabbit. Cheers.
I really like your reading because I went to a time period when everything I read was so misleading even words from doctors. That's the time when I tried very hard to improve my health (I gained about 30 lbs since the time I came to this country 15 years ago). To do that, I ate less fat, avoid carbs, getting a lot of exercises (1-3hrs a day, at least 5 days a week), eating oatmeal, even taking statins. And all one failed after another. I went through a lot of things mentioned here. And finally I decided to forget about everything doctors and researchers said. I look at my parents diet and how I was raised and started slowly from there. My health then got improved much better. I'm glad that you wrote something here for everybody to read. But there's one point I would like to add to the recipe:
improve mental state by listening to the body (meditation, yoga, brisk walking are good methods), eat only when the body feels hungry and stop eating when it feels full, eat the food that it feels good after eating (you will develop your own list).
I lost about 10lbs and I don't gain/lose any weight for the last 3 years.
It's astonishing (and really awesome) that they were able to extract such a strong signal from daily weight swings! This makes me a lot more optimistic about the possibilities of quantified-self-type stuff.
Three things I'm really curious about:
- How significant are the estimates of lifestyle factors? Do you have p-values? If you bootstrap resample, how much do the rankings change at the extremes?
- How much cognitive overhead did it impose to collect the data for this? Did you put a lot of effort into designing the tags beforehand or making sure you weighed yourself at a consistent time?
- It looks like the predicted delta from going from a "nosleep" day to a "sleep" days is about 1.4 pounds (sleep coef minus nosleep coef). That seems fishy, or at least like it will stop working fairly soon because you can't actually lose 1.4 pounds/day sustainably. Is it possible there's something weird going on with the data or those variables don't have the obvious meanings?
> - How significant are the estimates of lifestyle factors? Do you have p-values? If you bootstrap resample, how much do the rankings change at the extremes?
His VW script does do bootstrapping ('--bootstrap 16') but he doesn't report it anywhere I see. https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki/using-vw-... seems to not report any sort of p-value or confidence interval which might be derived from the bootstrapping. (The 'relevance' is 'the relative distance of each variable from the best constant prediction', not sure what that means.)
So if you want to know, it looks like you'll have to run it yourself and visualize the output. I would guess that the uncertainties are huge and none of them reach even p<0.05 - it simply should not be possible to get mean loss of like 0.2 and reliable estimates of hundreds of variables like 'melon' out of less than 4 months of data when the random measurement error of the scale itself is on the order of half a pound (I have an Omron body fat scale, and even taking 2-3 measurements daily, there's a lot of error) unless his VW regression is grossly overfitting.
I mean, the uncertainties in the middle are less interesting than the uncertainties at the extremes. I'm sure you can't say anything useful about melon, but it would be interesting to know if (e.g.) "sleep" was consistently that big. He did regularize somewhat (`--l2 1.85201e-08`) but unclear whether that's enough regularization.
Basically I'd love to see some actual diagnostics I guess :)
PS I believe the "relevance" is just the coefficient divided by the biggest coefficient (the `RelScore` column in the printout in the README file).
Well, he also disables the holdout set (`--holdout_off ariel.train`), so between that and not reporting the uncertainties and his absolutely tiny dataset with high measurement error and the low prior probability that any of these effects could be that big... Nah. It's just overfitting noise.
I tried to run the makefile, but apparently the version of Vowpal Rabbit that ships on my Ubuntu (7.3) is so outdated that it doesn't support the bootstrap option.
Thanks so much for all the excellent comments. There was definitely an over-fit with 4-passes.
No more. I've updated the Makefile to run only one pass, changed the options so it runs with older-version vw, Fixed misspellings of 'gioza', removed 'mayo' which found itself on the wrong side because it appeared only twice and always alongside the bun and regenerated the chart.
All the main conclusions remain intact.
In the end, I urge everyone to use their own data, that was the main purpose of sharing this code. My data-set is small, awfully noisy and insufficient. There are no p-values and no rigorous statistics, so please don't read too much into the minute details. It is the discovery journey into the top factors that is the important part, in my view. The ML was just one aid in this discovery process. The proof for me was my actual, and sustainable, weight loss that came after (very slowly) realizing the top factors that eventually worked for me. Thanks again.
I don't think it matters whether you run 4 passes or 1 pass, it's still going to overfit. You can run an online linear regression in a single pass too, but that doesn't magick away the uncertainties. The results are still going to be garbage, and any effects you get are due to your health-consciousness and not any specific dietary choices you make (how could it be, when the data is so weak and noisy that each item can easily flip signs?).
I realized early on that the data is hopelessly noisy, due to the small daily changes and the scales resolution so rather than trying to build a perfect model to gauge the variable importance of each and every kind of food, I focused on the few days when weight change was more significant hoping I could detect some signal in those, and extrapolate and further explore from that. That's why I sorted the data-set by abs(delta) and that's what consistently pointed me towards sleep/fasting as the #1 factor. I do agree that the full list/model is garbage in the sense that probably 80% or so of it is woefully inaccurate/flipped, noisy, overfitted etc. The main point was to lead me in the right direction by looking at the big picture and what stood out.
And what stood out were 2 things 1) sleep (fasting duration), and 2) fat vs carbs. I think everything else should be ignored. I think we're in total agreement on this point.
> - It looks like the predicted delta from going from a "nosleep" day to a "sleep" days is about 1.4 pounds (sleep coef minus nosleep coef). That seems fishy, or at least like it will stop working fairly soon because you can't actually lose 1.4 pounds/day sustainably. Is it possible there's something weird going on with the data or those variables don't have the obvious meanings?
That weight loss doesn't add up in the long term. You lose a lot of weight during your sleep both due to evaporation of water and by burning glucose/fat which you exhale. Obviously longer sleep translates into more water lost and more glucose/fat burned, but it will quickly be compensated by the body taking that water back up again and a larger appetite. You can't consistently lose water weight.
After a night of drinking, I can lose up to 3 kilos due to dehydration. But of course, I've probably gained weight due to the calories in the booze.
This matches my experience of weight loss using high fat diet. I started it after hearing Sarah Hallberg's Tedx talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ&feature=youtu.be
For a vegetarian, starting and continuing the high fat low carb diet is difficult. Are there any resources for more vegetarian recipes for high fat low carb food?
The article was very impressive. I liked the graphs and presentation.
> For a vegetarian, starting and continuing the high fat low carb diet is difficult
Is it? As far as I know you could sustain yourself in perfect condition (and weight) on nothing but butter & eggs (to satiation) for decades --- which most vegetarian regimens seem to allow.
The challenge for me is always knowing what to eat to help me accelerate my weight loss. I need structure. If I don't have structure, it's easy for me to eat things I shouldn't. I started a weight loss program 5 weeks ago called "Ideal Protein," which uses the Ketosis method. They supply breakfast, lunch, and a snack. I only need to make dinner (plus 2 cups of veggies for lunch). I love how easy it is.
I'm wrapping up week 5 tomorrow and I'm down 25lbs (~14% of my body weight)! They promise 2-5lbs of fat loss a week. I generally drop around a pound a day, but I'll get stuck a few days here and there. This method really works for me.
The best part is how fast you lose it. When I did South Beach years ago, it took me months to hit my goal. I have 14lbs left now and I should be able to hit my goal by Labor Day.
I appreciate that the author shared his data because it's interesting to compare notes. I embarked on a strict ketogenic diet in 2012 from a significantly higher initial weight and observed a very different pattern of weight loss: https://i.imgur.com/mOt6P.png
I hit a loss plateau around 180 lbs that I couldn't break through until I began eating on an 8-16 fasting schedule like Ariel mentions in his "Further progress" section.
I gave up on the diet during 2015 and have since regained a significant amount of weight, but I suppose that's just an opportunity to apply some of the tracking techniques in this article to my next foray.
So in the maintenance phases were you lifting, and were you pushing lifts? That's pretty scary that you can lose weight so quickly during a slack fitness period.
I haven't read the book itself, but Roberts' has a reasonable publication history in the peer-reviewed lit and her letters there regarding reduced benefit of statins in women are sound and evidence-based.
That said, it's been known for a while among critical docs that statins should really only be rolled out to high-risk patients. There's been some shady business in the big sponsored trials re. low-risk patient groups that suggests there's insufficient benefit there.
As long as her book doesn't venture far past that territory, it's probably kosher.
Sorry, I've never read that book so rest assured, I'm not promoting it. Please note that the link is not to the book, it is a just a google search for the term "the truth about statins". Perhaps some sponsored ad for the book was added by google? If so, my sincere apologies for the unintended consequences.
Here's my personal experience with statins, I may be wrong here, but I'm following my compass and am open to be proven otherwise:
Doctor: "Your 'bad cholesterol' is borderline, I want you to take these statins". Side observation: when the 'Lipitor' patent expired and it became a cheap generic drug, the suggestion turned into 'Crestor' which I learned has a bit longer effective half-life, and way higher price. Me, researching the subject while adopting a different diet: "Hmm statins would have taken me _maybe_ 3% lower and here I am 20% lower after a year of a simple, self-studied, diet change. Maybe there are better ways to lower the so called 'bad cholesterol'? Further study: there's always a new statin the moment patent expires: check out: Compactin -> Simvastatin -> Fluvastatin -> Cerivastatin -> Atorvastatin -> Rosuvastatin on wikipedia (these are chemical names, not brand names, the last two are the brands: "Lipitor" and "Crestor")
So I don't know. I'm 100% sure all my doctors are well meaning and caring and I have nothing against them, but my confidence in these health suggestions, and in all the research that is funded by big-pharma, and in the new great statin of the era while america keeps getting obese and less healthy, is, how can I put it? a bit shaken.
No zealotry at all. Just prove me wrong, and I'll change my view.
I read that 4 years ago, spent another 4 months reading the listed studies, convinced myself it was a good plan, and lost 40 pounds with no exercises. I still do LCHF after all these years, and likely will never go back to a traditional diet, it feels great.
I was told about Keto diets about three years back by a friend of mine. There's a lot of misinformation about food and health in the US and elsewhere, and for the longest time I thought low-carb diets were stupid.
But after trying it and reading a lot of the research, I was pretty amazing. I went from close to 70kg down to 58kg over the course of the next year (although I've come up to around 62 ~ 63kg stable).
I like how this person mentions in the Github readme that it's not for everyone and "listen to your body." Some people have bodies that do well with high carb intakes. Every body type is different. With all that being said though, a huge issue with being overweight is education. The food industry wants you to buy fast food, pizzas and things that are cheap to create with easy base ingredients (sugar, starch, corn, wheat, etc.)
Sadly, the only way for me to realize this was to experiment on myself, as did this person (although with totally insane amounts of metrics). Kudos!
Whenever I relate my ketosis experience to people who ask, the biggest emphasis is on how "personal" diet is. You really can't just copy someone else's eating habits and expect the same result.
Listening to your body is very underrated skill. You can learn it (helps to have been an athlete at some point in your life) but you also have to do something about it :)
> The 'stayhome' lifestlye, which fell mostly on weekends, is a red-herring, I simply slept longer when I didn't have to commute to work.
Is it?
First, whatever method you use should already take into account that sleep happens together with stayathome. Even basic regressions take into account that.
Second, staying at home means your eating binges are constrained by what's around you. If it is healthy stuff it might mean weight loss, if it is bread and chips the opposite
Totally anecdotal, but I want to second the recommendation of a longer fasting period.
I switched to a strict-but-not-religious "no food between 7 pm and 11 am" system (with exceptions for weekends and social occasions).
Within a few months I was down 15 pounds (~182 to around ~167) and had shed 4 inches off my waist (~34 to ~30). I'm about 5'10" and 41 years old.
It's definitely helped with physical activity (mostly parkour/free running) and I look better. It's also more convenient than what I was doing before, since I don't have to cook breakfast.
The only negative side effect (possibly unrelated) has been that I need a much cooler sleeping environment to be comfortable.
The only thing I would add is that I'm starting to (upside-down) plateau at around 165 and (what my scale says is) 20% body fat. I would love to lose another 5-10 pounds but it'll probably be a slow process.
You would think that less food would make me cold, but I've found the opposite. My hypothesis is that my metabolism switched from consuming carbs (with limited energy storage) to fat (with literally weeks worth of energy) and that that somehow ramps up my metabolic rate.
That logic is fine normally, that's awake and working hours. But sleeping brings in melatonin hormonal effects and the sleep jerk mechanisms into play. So it might be true that his hypnic jerk mechanism triggers on body-env temperature differential and if he lives a warm/hot place.
What is your caloric intake/deficit? Not eating will reduce that. But as your bodyweight drops, your baseline goes down too. So you might just be eating the same amount of food and are at a stable point. Need to cut more food to cut.
If you can afford it (usually around $150 here in Singapore), it might be worthwhile going into a sports clinic to get a RMR reading. It's possible that your body has significantly dropped your metabolism after the weight loss, and is fighting to restore its previous weight - making further fat loss (particularly while retaining most of your lean body mass) really difficult.
Ironically, in that scenario, it might be worth occasional days of increased caloric input, to attempt to trigger your body into believing that it isn't starving, and really can continue to run a high BMR.
At the very least, having the data in hand is pretty cool - and it only takes about 40 minutes, inclusive of the time they need to set up the gear (just an face mask) and get you into a calm/resting state.
in case some people are confused how they can get your RMR from a face mask:
they just have to measure how much oxygen you use and how much co2 is exhaled.
> When a triglyceride is oxidized (or "burned up"), the process consumes many molecules of oxygen while producing carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) as waste products [0]
I'm sorry, this sounds like you're talking about "starvation mode". Do you have a decent source for this because everything I've seen around it is pseudoscience. You're suggesting that they, while feeling fine, have an enormous problem with one of the most fundamental processes which keeps us alive.
Your BMR drops as you lose weight, it might simply be that this hasn't been taken into account.
Fair point. There is research which shows your BMR may drop after sustained reduction in caloric intake, far below what your body weight would indicate. Probably one of the more well known recent ones was: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21538/abstrac... - which shows the effect can go on for several years.
Though, careful reading suggests that the author believes that a day of refeeding (ala 4-hour body), is unlikely sufficient to trigger Leptin such that the body's BMR kicks back into high gear.
I just started my keto diet about 2 weeks ago and I feel great. Did have one rough night of "keto flu" but then I started supplementing with minerals and more water. I'm super low carb right now. Funny thing is to get (about 4 weeks ago) I would get a double big mac or a double quarter pounder but no drink and no fries and that was it till breakfast. That was fun.
Do you supplement with sodium, potassium and magnesium? It might be placebo but I seem to do better when adding sodium (I drink a gram or two via a broth.) Potassium is easy to get from "lite" salt (hard to eat enough otherwise). The amounts required (several grams of sodium, several of K), according to random sites I've looked up, seem rather high for a non-keto dieter. Dunno if they are accurate.
I bought a magnesium supplement that includes potassium and sodium, albeit the sodium is the easiest to get anyway, just salt things. Apparently avocados are the potassium go to as well. I've looked at the recommended numbers, and quite frankly I'm not tracking enough to know if I'm hitting htem. The more I remind myself of the recommended and the easier it is for me to calculate on the fly, it's just a matter of looking at my bookmarked page, habit to build I guess until I memorize it. For now I just go by how I'm feeling. If I think I'm going to be frustrated I'll get a little more stringent and careful.
As a long-term ketogenic eater (10 years), here are my top simple tips. Unfortunately they were not gleaned using machine learning.
1. Watch your protein. Most people when first going keto will eat too much protein and not enough fat. Protein has an insulinogenic effect when eaten in quantity. Keep protein below 8 oz per meal. Don't be afraid to eat more fat.
2. Avoid cheese. Yes, it's technically low carb, but it repeatedly throws me and my girlfriend off (also a low carber).
3. Avoid nuts. Yes, like cheese, nuts are delicious. But they're a slippery slope. Life will be easier if you avoid them.
Can you confirm that when you say 8 oz you're only referring to the amount of protein as opposed to the total weight of the food delivering the protein (meat, eggs, etc)?
Got to be the opposite. 8oz is ~240g and 240g of protein is ~1000 calories. For most people that's ~1/2 their daily caloric needs. If in one sitting you are getting half your daily calories from protein alone, something is wrong.
Sorry that was unclear. 8 oz of meat, fish, poultry, etc (before cooking), not 8 oz of protein itself. It's recommended to not eat more than 200 grams of protein per day on any diet.
I've never been really overweight, but still, even the slight problem I had is gone with the change of some eating habits. Mostly, a lot less carbs - I really don't need a bakery and I have to tell the Thai or Chinese waiter that I need only 10% of that huge load of rice (they always pack more rice than the rest - which already is a large amount).
Next to zero extra sugar (outside food items like fruit), no cake, no cookies. I don't need to, zero appetite for any of it. I don't even touch that honey jar in the corner any more. This is great for my teeth! (also according to the dentist, no sugar - no cavities, general rule). Always had trouble, now non, zero, with much less brushing.
I eat very high amounts of nut cream, which is just nuts but crushed to cream, expensive stuff but soooo tasty. A slice of toast, than add almost 1/3 jar of nut cream (mixed and/or cashew and/or almond white/brown and/or hazelnut) - so, really a lot - add quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_%28dairy_product%29) and some (not too much) fresh fruit and some non-crushed nuts from varieties that I don't have as cream, like walnuts.
No problem at all with my weight, unlike years ago when I really had to watch myself and did a lot of sports and running, so it's not like I can eat anything I want.
Same with cheese, but it's very little hard cheese, and all of it is high quality. A lot of my cheese is from sheep and goats.
Lots of veggies - but always with some meat. Can't eat as much as I used to any more though, my body has settled on wanting only a little bit of it.
Also, I found it important to NOT cut the (easy) carbs completely! Some white bread or rice etc. is absolutely necessary. It's just not very much, not even a full slice of white bread for the nut breakfast, for example. I think the diet that tries to brute force you into eating nothing at all of that kind of food is too extreme.
I can't eat a lot of whole nuts though, only the cream works. Which is just mechanically different, there are zero add-ons in my (organic) nut cream purchases.
Oh and I get plenty of sleep too, I don't use an alarm clock. Advantage of working from home.
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About the link, this is just statistics. These days "machine learning" has replaced the word "statistics", and now everything is called that, it seems.
That sounds reasonable and all, but it isn't actually a scientific justification. If the nutritional theories behind a low carb diet are sound, then it would make no sense to introduce high-carb sources to mix in just to "be less extreme." Science shouldn't care about our superficial perceptions.
Cheese is the only way I can stay on Keto. Nuts are good but in small amounts. It's way too easy to over eat nuts in calories and carbs. Especially since the better they taste, to me, the more sugar they have. I'm looking at you cashews.
One should be careful extrapolating this type of data to other individuals. For example, sleep on its own may not actually be the primary factor in weight-loss --- the weight gain during periods of lack of sleep may occur simply because you have a habit of snacking while staying up late.
Very true. The nice thing about some of this is that it's harmless if wrong. Extra sleep won't hurt me, but it'll make me feel better about sleeping rather than feeling that it's wasted time I could have been spending trying to get healthier or smarter.
Of course you're going to gain weight when you eat carbs. Glycogen contains mostly water and carbs, so if you store glycogen you gain weight, up to 20 lbs from completely depleted.
So let's say you eat low carb and train very hard for a week. Your muscles will be depleted, your liver will be depleted. You see that you lost 10 lbs! Great! But is it? Maybe you lost one pound of fat and 9 pounds of water. Then you eat NOTHING BUT carbs for three days and you gain 20 lbs. Oh no! But actually it's your muscles expanding their capacity to store glycogen (since you trained hard and depleted yourself they will regain even more glycogen than before). You may have not gained ANY FAT AT ALL!
I have had great success dieting with medium fat medium carb diets. I try to keep between 180lbs and 220lbs (I'm 6'4"). I'm saying that this kind of tracking is oversimplifying the issue of fat loss - you need to see that you're losing fat tissue which involves at least caliper measurements.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention this. I can add about 11-12 pounds of body-weight by scale reading in a single day simply by eating food rich in carbs the day prior. Cutting the Carbs out of my diet see's that weight disappear (thought it takes 4-5 days). Adding Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium supplements to meals reduces the water loss somewhat.
Agreed - that the real question isn't weight, per se, but Lean Body Mass. DexaScan is also a good approach to nailing down that number.
Yeah, I had a DEXA scan T 191lbs and I was 16% BF. It's not practical to do this every day, though.
But what I've found is that calipers actually do a good job at showing body fat changes. They're horrible for absolute values (if they say 12%, they might be off by 4%), even at multiple measurement sites. But if calipers measure more or less, you can still be fairly sure that you have gained or lost fat mass.
Measuring like that I found that nothing beats lots of caffeine and plain low calorie diet.
I don't have a weight problem, I learned about ketosis researching natural ways for improving focus and concentration, and somehow came across "bulletproof coffee". (I'm only using BP for lack of a better name and I don't endorse the stuff they sell online).
To my utter surprise, something as stupidly simple as coffee blended with butter with coconut oil (or MCT) first thing in the morning did unbelievable things for mental productivity. After much googling I learned that this is not a fluke, and that there is real science behind it - beta-oxidation, etc, all that good stuff.
What's most incredible to me is that (1) I didn't know about it, I always thought glucose is the only fuel (and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable as far as basic physiology is concerned) and (2) that sugar, especially the industrially produced kind, is about as close to being the root of all evil as it gets and there is nothing wrong with fat at all.
I would say he did...there is no substitute for personal experience but that doesn't mean turning you back on common knowledge (as evidenced by his continued research after making the changes).
> you thought that cells only metabolize glucose, and dietary fats & proteins are converted to glucose
Pretty much. I don't know where that may have come from, but I suspect I'm not the only one who naively thinks that this is the case. Somehow "ketone bodies" aren't mentioned in dietary conversations nearly as frequently as glucose.
During very low carbohydrate intake, the regulated and controlled production of ketone bodies causes a harmless physiological state known as dietary ketosis. Ketone bodies flow from the liver to extra-hepatic tissues (e.g., brain) for use as a fuel; this spares glucose metabolism via a mechanism similar to the sparing of glucose by oxidation of fatty acids as an alternative fuel. In comparison with glucose, the ketone bodies are actually a very good respiratory fuel. Indeed, there is no clear requirement for dietary carbohydrates for human adults. [...] Contrary to popular belief, insulin is not needed for glucose uptake and utilization in man.
LOL yeah, I just spoke to a dietician the other day who swore that glucose is the only thing your brain can use for fuel.
It's easy to be ignorant about a situation you never experience. Every single person they deal with is going to be in a carb-adapted state and never miss a meal, so their body will run entirely off of glucose.
I vaguely remember reading about this in "The Ketogenic Diet". There are some functions that do require glucose. However, your body can convert enough fat and protein into glucose to satisfy that.
Yeah, that was a TIL moment for me when I found out the body can make glucose without carbohydrate. There were others, like how mitochondria burn fat more efficiently than glucose.
As a counter point, I did keto for several months last year and found that my concentration and mental clarity were significantly worse while on the diet. My mind operated at about the capacity as it would have, had I slept only 5 hours the night before.
Most people find that their alertness and focus improve significantly on keto.
The trick is that
a) it takes quite a while for your body to get adjusted to ketosis. 6 months to fully adjust, but the primary adjustment will take at 2-4 weeks for most people
b) during this adjustment period, you'll usually feel like shit. since you're running empty on the fuel your body is used to. but many people cheat, or accidentally ingest too many carbohydrates, persistently keeping their body out of ketosis and ensuring they feel terrible endlessly and blame keto for it.
100%. i take pills for the sodium and magnesium (they usually have potassium too but usually not enough). and avocados are a staple when it comes to potassium
I've never found potassium in sufficient quantities in pill supplements - but low-sodium salt gives you 500 mg per 5g teaspoon (and another 1000 mg of Sodium, Ironically)
Thanks! Really appreciate the recommendation - I'm going to hit up all our local stores for some. Went jogging this evening, and for the first time in about 2+ months didn't get any cramping in the legs (which happens to me 100% of the time for any run longer than about 8-10 minutes), and the only change I've made is supplementing potassium, calcium, and magnesium.
In keeping with this thread - I guess I could vary different dozens of variables, one or more at a time, apply the same Ketosis machine learning algorithm, and see what really makes the difference.
I'm finding mixed info online but always assumed it had too much sugar. I think it has 25g but some sites are saying 6g. 25g would be more than you are allowed in a day on most keto programs.
I typically take ZMA and potassium then drink something like Propel while at the gym. Then I have chicken broth when I get home to get some salt back.
I wonder if anybody on Ketosis has ever done an endurance event and not ended up feeling absolutely miserable/exhausted. I was on a fairly low carb regime (< 15 grams/day) for about 6 weeks, and something as simple as climbing fifty stories would always end up with me breathing heavy, and sweating. A simple 500 gram carb-load the day before, and I could that same climb 4x over without being anywhere near as exhausted.
The research that I've read says that the ideal training regime is to work-out in a carb-exhausted state, so as to encourage your body to develop the low-carb metabolic pathway, but for actual endurance events, definitely carb load as your primary fuel.
I've been training for triathlons while adhering to a ketogenic diet since October 2015. Initially I struggled. It definitely felt like a step back. Over time my body adapted and 3-4 months later I was performing on the same level without consuming copious amounts of carbs as prior to going keto.
These days I can wake up from a 12-18 hour fast and run a marathon at an easy pace while ingesting zero carbs in the process.
I ingest some carbs during actual races when glucose utilization is higher due to higher intensity. You will always need some glucose and the ratio of fat/glucose metabolism depends on intensity. Basically if you push the pedal to the metal your body will utilize what it has got. With that said, I feel like keto adaptation definitely broadened my options for how to pace myself and how to use my energy reserves during training and races.
50 stories? Or 50 steps? Because 50 stories sounds like a lot, not something you should be able to do without a lot of endurance training beforehand. At my best I could climb maybe 15 stories without running out of breath.
This probably had to do with too little salt consumption. I had to increase my salt intake from 2 to ~5 grams per day. If I don't, I have a mental fog (and cramps and stuff).
> To my utter surprise, something as stupidly simple as coffee blended with butter with coconut oil (or MCT) first thing in the morning did unbelievable things for mental productivity.
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. If that doesn't work for you, talk to a doctor.
Not helpful. Michael Pollen's pithy advice is a rather trite and even he will say it's misleading adage. For example, if one ate mostly starchy or sugary plants, they'd probably be a lot less healthy than someone who ate mostly wild game and greens. Nutrition is incredibly complicated and variable.
"Bulletproof Coffee"(TM) is snake oil stuff. It's based on the assumption that all other coffee on the market has mycotoxins, yet literally none of the brands in first world countries have them anyway. This was confirmed by tests.
He started off by selling high-fat coffee creamer and sugar-free hot chocolate, which are reasonable. It's only later he's gone on to try to convince everyone coffee and wine are full of secret mold toxins.
Semi-related. For those who want to track their weight daily, efficiently, try Fitbit Aria (or one of the cheaper no-brand WiFi scales). Hook it up to Fitbit app, connect that to TrendWeight (https://trendweight.com/), then throw away the Fitbit app.
Whatever your goals are, however serious you are, I find it a great way to keep track. I just stand on this thing once a morning, and forget about it. And now I have a near-daily record, smoothed out with a weekly moving average.
Cosign. I have one of the Withings scales and weigh in multiple times a day. I don't fret over fluctuations -- and I might fluctuate 5lbs in a day -- it's the long term trend line that matters and I can see it on the Withings site. Adding more data just helps.
Have you considered tracking skinfold measurements too? I know my weight can fluctuate a lot just from inflammation response after a hard training run. Weight seems to have too many factors that vary at different rates for different reasons.
This is awesome. I'd love to see something similar from someone who (intentionally) gained muscle mass. Is it really about high-protein + high-carbs + workout + sleep, or is there a more optimum diet for this.
I might have missed it, but doesn't look like ketone levels was one of the factors being measured. You can actually buy ketone pee strips at any drugstore for cheap. Would have been an interesting thing to track, since conventional wisdom says that ketosis is binary, you're in it or your not, and the actual ketone level doesn't affect the weight loss. I'm sure this has been put to the test in some experiments already, but maybe applying learning could teach us more and validate/invalidate this hypothesis
On a related note; NuSI (Gary Taubes's Nutrition Science Initiative for better nutritional testing) has not published their first results for the carbohydrate/insulin link to obesity, but Dr. Kevin Hall discusses the upcoming results in this video and some people may be surprised (including Gary).
This situation has been highly debated among the keto science community. I call it a situation and not a study because they're publishing preliminary results for a pilot study. Hardly conclusive.
I wish I had data to back this up, but there is no chance I was in caloric deficit on the keto diet. I lost lots of weight at the time. Not claiming my body violated energy conservation, but clearly this is more complex than "you don't get weight loss for free so you have to exercise more". So many folks doing the keto diet are sucking down ungodly amounts of bacon, heavy cream, etc and losing weight
They are replacing even more ungodly amounts of calories in the form of carbohydrates with that bacon/cream. Honestly, you can only eat so much bacon before you get sick of it, and your body just screams "Yuck. Stop eating. I'm full".
That's not true of things like rice, noodles, bread, etc.. where for many people eat some, and your body is like, "Awesome. Bring it on" in a never ending cycle.
Put another way - Satiation happens a lot faster, and lasts longer, when you are eating protein/fats, than it does when you are eating refined carbohydrates.
I think that what made it clear to me, is that there are no metabolic chamber studies (where people's activity and diet are perfectly controlled) that have ever demonstrated significant variation from the calories in/calories out model. Carbs, Protein, Fats - doesn't seem to make a difference, your weight is simply a reflection of your metabolic output and caloric-intake.
Stephan Guyenet also has an interesting perspective here:
I don't doubt for many that reduction in carbs amounts to reduction in calories. For others though, eating a lot, and not worrying about consequences, is a coping mechanism for how shitty the diet is. I'm super biased from my own past experience, but I was having 3000+ calorie days with minimal exercise and losing weight on keto. Open to the idea that I'm somehow wrong though :-)
They've tried all sorts of diets in metabolic chambers - and it's really quite amazing how closely the observed results track the predicted results. Determine a person's BMR, and then feed them a variety of diets higher, or lower, than that BMR, and watch their body mass (exc. water) increase, or decrease as expected.
Possibly the case that when you were eating carbs, you were putting away 3500 calories a day, and that dropped to 3000 calories a day when it was just meat? I know that just a casual stroll through the mall on a refeed day for me, I have zero difficulty putting away 6000+ calories - refined carbs are shockingly calorically dense.
Also - for some time on a Keto Diet, you are going to be dropping a ton of water - so the scale will be dropping like a rock, regardless of what your actual body weight is doing. Getting a DexaScan, or whatever lean/fat body mass assessment you prefer to see what's really going on.
The water loss is one thing I like about a low carb diet--you get positive feedback right away. It isn't real weight loss, but that doesn't matter. The point is to get started and feel like you have made progress in the right direction. Then the real, much slower, weight loss can begin.
Completely agree with you. And, even though I realize exactly what's happening, I also like it. You can even make the up/down swings work for you. The 4-hour body slow-carb approach has you "refeed/binge" once a week, where you usually put on 8-10 pounds in a single day. But because you know it's going to happen, it's not particularly worrisome, and then you get the bonus the next week of dropping 2-3 pounds on the scale every day.
But, I think it's also a good idea, in addition to enjoying that little bit of gamification on your scale numbers, to also have a good sense of what's actually happening in the body mechanics.
I don't contest that ketone level affects weightloss, but just to be clear, ketone pee strips don't tell you anything about your "ketone levels". They tell you the concentration of ketones expelled in your urine, which varies by a lot of things, like time of day and hydration levels.
Precision Xtra test strips will give you a far more precise and accurate measure of ketones in your blood and if you wanted to do anything quantitative like in this case study, you'd want to use those.
Hmm I don't think you're right. I'm looking at an old bottle of ketostix brand, and it specifies Acetoacetic Acid, which seems to be some kind of ketone. Or maybe it's another byproduct?
Edit - Also, presumably the other factors like hydration and time of day could be tracked as well used to apply learning
Just for what it's worth, there are several Soylent-like meal replacement products that are explicitly formulated for ketogenesis. This could be an aid for a person who wants to try a keto diet without having to research a lot of new recipes.
Also remember, his diet is a function of not taking carbs at all (or very little) for a short time.
For someone who eats lots of carbs already, a plum/orange isn't going to cause an increase in weight. It is primarily just calories. It is of course easier to eat more calories in carbs than in protein, but overall, carbs aren't "bad".
Moreover, such Atkins diets tend to work only temporarily, until atkins-diet homeostasis is achieved, unless calorie restriction is practiced as well [1,2].
Atkins is not a keto diet. Atkins starts keto, then reintroduces carbs.
Weight loss is simple: calorie deficit. However, switching from carbs to fats and taking advantage of some of the metabolic processes your body has to offer makes the process easier for many people. Calorie deficit with less hunger and decent energy. It helps a lot.
Not that simple. People touting this are usually genetically endowed with great metabolism. I've tried this many times and reach a plateau pretty quickly and have to keep decreasing calories until it's not practical anymore.
On the other hand, watching the glycemic index/load does the magic for me.
I guess I meant it as an umbrella term for all the things that I think matters for weight loss. Insulin resistance and the propensity to store more fat than to keep it as glycogen in the blood ready for burning.
Quite a few people do keto long term for overall health or maintenance after weight loss (or without weight loss in the first place). I have never used it for weight loss but those who do often talk about the rebound in weight you mention with short term diets. This is sometimes one reason they end up making this more a lifestyle change than a short term diet for them. As you get adapted keto becomes very manageable, and the higher intake of fat can make it easier to consistently consume fewer calories than they used to eating carbs.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadThe data in this post was cool. I found Dr. Peter Addia's analysis to be one of my favorite resources. He's a medical doctor who was an overweight endurance athlete, then began doing ketosis. I appreciated an honest scientific analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of ketosis.
His blog:
http://eatingacademy.com/
As an aside, I think that our attitude toward insulin from a public health perspective is going to change a lot in the next few years.
Whereas if you look at the old FDA food pyramid and the new food plate, carbs/sugars/fruits take up a significant percentage of the recommended daily diet. Take fruit for example, prevailing norm would be fruit is healthy (especially in its natural state where it is accompanied by fiber), fruit aside most people would believe carbs (especially in whole grain form) are perfectly fine in moderation. My big guess is that an M.D. recognizes any amount of carb (fruit or whole grain being no different that high fructose corn syrup) triggers the bodies production of insulin. More and more, I think M.D.'s will have negative perspective on any/all insulin production if it can be avoided. I have more thoughts on the impacts of insulin on the body, but I hope OP will chime in with a response to see if my instincts are on point.
On a side note, I reached a similar conclusion on the role of "carbs at night", sleeping, and fats, and I read this interesting article https://aeon.co/essays/hunger-is-psychological-and-dieting-o... on the importance, for effective weight loss, of feeling satisfied (I believe there is also a reference to the relationship between eating fats and feeling satisfied).
To fix this, you more or less have to keep intensity lower. I think that's why it works well for bicyclists who can change gears.
Good news is that, after endurance exercise, you can replenish glycogen stores - meaning you can have more sugar than normal without leaving ketosis.
TL;DR A ketogenic diet is net-positive for aerobic exercise activities.
As a result, high level athletes tend to spend the majority of their time consuming a carb-rich diet, then switch to a ketogenic diet for 2-3 weeks prior to competition. During this low carb period, they just focus on a very high volume of low/moderate intensity work. Finally, 2-3 days before competition, they will carb-load to glycogen super-compensate, getting the best of both worlds.
If anything, I would question how healthy ketosis is, long term... But I'm pretty sure it's way healthier than any processed-food diet typical in the west...
About 3 years ago I began experiments with paleo, I am 5'6-5'7 started over 190lbs and in about 4 months was down to 152lbs. Weekends I would have cheat meals usually a pizza day and burger/fry day.
Around then I began running for the first time in my life. I started out the first 3 months at 1 mile everyday, which I thought was a lot until a high school buddy laughed when I told him.
I stopped eating paleo and increased to 3 miles about 5 times a week. This went on for about a month, when I decided to register for a half marathon and started a basic 12 week training. I tried to restart paleo, but about a month in my legs began to hurt which I attributed to lack of carbs so I again got off. During Summer in Miami I decreased the mileage due to the heat and would get back on paleo still weekend cheat days.
During any of that time I didn't know about Ketosis or I never experienced anything I would call Ketosis.
Fast forward to this year, I completed the Disney Goofy (half day1, full day2), then another 2 halfs during the spring. I was back to about 170, and despite running more mileage than I ever had, I was not pleased with my physique, feeling I looked better even at the same weight while on paleo. So I decided after my last half of the season, I would try to go full paleo without any cheat meals on the weekend with the goal of 5 mile runs 4-5 times per week. I just completed a half the weekend before and Tuesday I did my 5 mile on paleo and felt fine/normal.
Wednesday/Thursday during my runs I got light head and basically though I might blackout, never experienced that before, but I stuck with it. Then by the 3rd week, I honestly felt I was tapping into a different energy source, not that I was running faster but it was just a different feeling and it was amazing.
Despite having combined paleo and running before, my body had never responded like this before. Having read up on high endurance athletes who do paleo after the fact, I believe what was happening is my body was tapping into and burning fat as its main source of energy and I also learned about Ketosis at that time (I believe/understand these to be one in the same, but they may not be). I will note, even my mind seemed different as I began to really think/feel that sugars were a poison and I was disgusted by the thought of breads/sugars, meaning I didn't even want cheat days on the weekend. This lasted for about 2 months without a cheat day and eventually there was a craving for carbs and I had no hesitation about giving in, so I am back off the paleo, and basically the very next run my body was not performing the same as it was. I look forward to implementing a strict paleo diet again without cheat days when the weather cools and I will try to build my mileage up in that state for the next running season.
You can argue about what is paleo and what not, but carbs are considered totaly fine as long as they come from a good source.
So if you did paleo and ended up in ketosis you probably did something wrong in regards to the paleo idea.
This last time around, where I experienced the change (I believe ketosis) I can basically say my diet consisted of: eggs, chicken (mostly dark meat), red meat, green leafy vegetables, and sometimes pork. Honestly before this thread I thought of ketosis as a state, and not a diet, so I will look into it a little more and see if this last diet I was on was more consistent with ketosis than paleo.
What I also wanted to say is that you can find sources for carbs in the paleo diet... especially if you do sports (and you did it actually as you mentioned)
I've eaten LCHF for 10 years and regularly exercise with CrossFit (arguably the highest intensity workout most people will do) and yoga intermixed with athletic activities like hiking, skiing, and surfing.
My suggestion is to properly keto-adapt over 3 to 6 weeks before concluding that you can't exercise without eating carbs.
If you only do crossfit every 2-3 days, and rotate the exercises you do somewhat (as is typical at most boxes) you might not notice a big difference between a low carb and higher carb diet. If you train daily and you're doing similar movements every day, you will definitely notice a difference. Since that is pretty much the modus operandi of serious athletes, that is where the whole "athletes don't do well on keto" idea comes from; it definitely doesn't apply to your garden variety recreational athlete though.
Last year I was introduced to books like Finding Ultra, Whole and Proteinaholic, and went on a high carb diet.
Today my diet is based on beans, lentils, potatoes and fruits and I'm performing 15-20% better than my previous peak from 15 years ago (I'm 37 now). As a bonus, with the amount of fibber I consume, I never had digestive issues again.
I would say most of the benefit from Ketosis while training is the recovery. I had plenty of energy for my long rides, but the lower inflammation was making recovery quicker.
My race was cancelled (Tahoe) and I went to Spain two weeks later and did Barcelona instead.. 10h and 3 minutes. Pretty happy with sub-5h for the bike leg!
Dal Bhat is one of my favorites after living in Colorado.
The author uses vowpal-wabbit to train his regression model. Anybody know what learning algorithm it uses (eg random forest?) Here's the link: https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki
As I say in the README.md: please ignore the noise, the scales I used had 0.2 pound resolution, and my data-set was too small (and as one snarky commenter noticed, some words were misspelled). What is important is the big picture. There are actually numerous contradictions and irregularities in the data. In particular, any food item that appears only once or twice in the data-set, and is randomly coinciding with other features that make it biased the wrong way contributes to the error of the model.
So as I say in the README, I would ignore anything that's not near the top or bottom, and even those should be taken with a healthy dose of (noise/modeling) skepticism.
Anyway, the code is free for everyone to use so people are encouraged to run the experiment on themselves using more accurate methods and contributing more data. It only requires R+ggplot2 and vowpal wabbit. Cheers.
Three things I'm really curious about:
- How significant are the estimates of lifestyle factors? Do you have p-values? If you bootstrap resample, how much do the rankings change at the extremes?
- How much cognitive overhead did it impose to collect the data for this? Did you put a lot of effort into designing the tags beforehand or making sure you weighed yourself at a consistent time?
- It looks like the predicted delta from going from a "nosleep" day to a "sleep" days is about 1.4 pounds (sleep coef minus nosleep coef). That seems fishy, or at least like it will stop working fairly soon because you can't actually lose 1.4 pounds/day sustainably. Is it possible there's something weird going on with the data or those variables don't have the obvious meanings?
His VW script does do bootstrapping ('--bootstrap 16') but he doesn't report it anywhere I see. https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki/using-vw-... seems to not report any sort of p-value or confidence interval which might be derived from the bootstrapping. (The 'relevance' is 'the relative distance of each variable from the best constant prediction', not sure what that means.)
So if you want to know, it looks like you'll have to run it yourself and visualize the output. I would guess that the uncertainties are huge and none of them reach even p<0.05 - it simply should not be possible to get mean loss of like 0.2 and reliable estimates of hundreds of variables like 'melon' out of less than 4 months of data when the random measurement error of the scale itself is on the order of half a pound (I have an Omron body fat scale, and even taking 2-3 measurements daily, there's a lot of error) unless his VW regression is grossly overfitting.
Basically I'd love to see some actual diagnostics I guess :)
PS I believe the "relevance" is just the coefficient divided by the biggest coefficient (the `RelScore` column in the printout in the README file).
I tried to run the makefile, but apparently the version of Vowpal Rabbit that ships on my Ubuntu (7.3) is so outdated that it doesn't support the bootstrap option.
No more. I've updated the Makefile to run only one pass, changed the options so it runs with older-version vw, Fixed misspellings of 'gioza', removed 'mayo' which found itself on the wrong side because it appeared only twice and always alongside the bun and regenerated the chart.
All the main conclusions remain intact.
In the end, I urge everyone to use their own data, that was the main purpose of sharing this code. My data-set is small, awfully noisy and insufficient. There are no p-values and no rigorous statistics, so please don't read too much into the minute details. It is the discovery journey into the top factors that is the important part, in my view. The ML was just one aid in this discovery process. The proof for me was my actual, and sustainable, weight loss that came after (very slowly) realizing the top factors that eventually worked for me. Thanks again.
I realized early on that the data is hopelessly noisy, due to the small daily changes and the scales resolution so rather than trying to build a perfect model to gauge the variable importance of each and every kind of food, I focused on the few days when weight change was more significant hoping I could detect some signal in those, and extrapolate and further explore from that. That's why I sorted the data-set by abs(delta) and that's what consistently pointed me towards sleep/fasting as the #1 factor. I do agree that the full list/model is garbage in the sense that probably 80% or so of it is woefully inaccurate/flipped, noisy, overfitted etc. The main point was to lead me in the right direction by looking at the big picture and what stood out.
And what stood out were 2 things 1) sleep (fasting duration), and 2) fat vs carbs. I think everything else should be ignored. I think we're in total agreement on this point.
Does this sound more sensible to you?
That weight loss doesn't add up in the long term. You lose a lot of weight during your sleep both due to evaporation of water and by burning glucose/fat which you exhale. Obviously longer sleep translates into more water lost and more glucose/fat burned, but it will quickly be compensated by the body taking that water back up again and a larger appetite. You can't consistently lose water weight.
After a night of drinking, I can lose up to 3 kilos due to dehydration. But of course, I've probably gained weight due to the calories in the booze.
The article was very impressive. I liked the graphs and presentation.
http://eatingacademy.com/personal/actually-eat-part-iii-circ...
http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/what-i-actually-eat
http://eatingacademy.com/personal/what-i-actually-eat-part-i...
Is it? As far as I know you could sustain yourself in perfect condition (and weight) on nothing but butter & eggs (to satiation) for decades --- which most vegetarian regimens seem to allow.
I'm wrapping up week 5 tomorrow and I'm down 25lbs (~14% of my body weight)! They promise 2-5lbs of fat loss a week. I generally drop around a pound a day, but I'll get stuck a few days here and there. This method really works for me.
The best part is how fast you lose it. When I did South Beach years ago, it took me months to hit my goal. I have 14lbs left now and I should be able to hit my goal by Labor Day.
Give it a try.
I hit a loss plateau around 180 lbs that I couldn't break through until I began eating on an 8-16 fasting schedule like Ariel mentions in his "Further progress" section.
I gave up on the diet during 2015 and have since regained a significant amount of weight, but I suppose that's just an opportunity to apply some of the tracking techniques in this article to my next foray.
http://i.imgur.com/J4Ls2bQ.png
I thought I might be over-doing it with 2 DXA scans :)
I should dig mine up, I got down to 10% body fat a few weeks before completing my first Ironman. I'm normally around 17-19% from memory.
Would be great if you could put this on github as well, and add some explanations to all the details in README.md.
Is it helpful info on evidence based science or mostly zealotry and soapboxing?
That said, it's been known for a while among critical docs that statins should really only be rolled out to high-risk patients. There's been some shady business in the big sponsored trials re. low-risk patient groups that suggests there's insufficient benefit there.
As long as her book doesn't venture far past that territory, it's probably kosher.
Sorry, I've never read that book so rest assured, I'm not promoting it. Please note that the link is not to the book, it is a just a google search for the term "the truth about statins". Perhaps some sponsored ad for the book was added by google? If so, my sincere apologies for the unintended consequences.
Here's my personal experience with statins, I may be wrong here, but I'm following my compass and am open to be proven otherwise:
Doctor: "Your 'bad cholesterol' is borderline, I want you to take these statins". Side observation: when the 'Lipitor' patent expired and it became a cheap generic drug, the suggestion turned into 'Crestor' which I learned has a bit longer effective half-life, and way higher price. Me, researching the subject while adopting a different diet: "Hmm statins would have taken me _maybe_ 3% lower and here I am 20% lower after a year of a simple, self-studied, diet change. Maybe there are better ways to lower the so called 'bad cholesterol'? Further study: there's always a new statin the moment patent expires: check out: Compactin -> Simvastatin -> Fluvastatin -> Cerivastatin -> Atorvastatin -> Rosuvastatin on wikipedia (these are chemical names, not brand names, the last two are the brands: "Lipitor" and "Crestor")
So I don't know. I'm 100% sure all my doctors are well meaning and caring and I have nothing against them, but my confidence in these health suggestions, and in all the research that is funded by big-pharma, and in the new great statin of the era while america keeps getting obese and less healthy, is, how can I put it? a bit shaken.
No zealotry at all. Just prove me wrong, and I'll change my view.
I read that 4 years ago, spent another 4 months reading the listed studies, convinced myself it was a good plan, and lost 40 pounds with no exercises. I still do LCHF after all these years, and likely will never go back to a traditional diet, it feels great.
But after trying it and reading a lot of the research, I was pretty amazing. I went from close to 70kg down to 58kg over the course of the next year (although I've come up to around 62 ~ 63kg stable).
I like how this person mentions in the Github readme that it's not for everyone and "listen to your body." Some people have bodies that do well with high carb intakes. Every body type is different. With all that being said though, a huge issue with being overweight is education. The food industry wants you to buy fast food, pizzas and things that are cheap to create with easy base ingredients (sugar, starch, corn, wheat, etc.)
Sadly, the only way for me to realize this was to experiment on myself, as did this person (although with totally insane amounts of metrics). Kudos!
Listening to your body is very underrated skill. You can learn it (helps to have been an athlete at some point in your life) but you also have to do something about it :)
Is it?
First, whatever method you use should already take into account that sleep happens together with stayathome. Even basic regressions take into account that.
Second, staying at home means your eating binges are constrained by what's around you. If it is healthy stuff it might mean weight loss, if it is bread and chips the opposite
I switched to a strict-but-not-religious "no food between 7 pm and 11 am" system (with exceptions for weekends and social occasions).
Within a few months I was down 15 pounds (~182 to around ~167) and had shed 4 inches off my waist (~34 to ~30). I'm about 5'10" and 41 years old.
It's definitely helped with physical activity (mostly parkour/free running) and I look better. It's also more convenient than what I was doing before, since I don't have to cook breakfast.
The only negative side effect (possibly unrelated) has been that I need a much cooler sleeping environment to be comfortable.
The only thing I would add is that I'm starting to (upside-down) plateau at around 165 and (what my scale says is) 20% body fat. I would love to lose another 5-10 pounds but it'll probably be a slow process.
Should that be warmer instead of cooler? I find that my body temperature goes down when I'm fasting, so I need the room to be warmer to compensate.
Ironically, in that scenario, it might be worth occasional days of increased caloric input, to attempt to trigger your body into believing that it isn't starving, and really can continue to run a high BMR.
At the very least, having the data in hand is pretty cool - and it only takes about 40 minutes, inclusive of the time they need to set up the gear (just an face mask) and get you into a calm/resting state.
they just have to measure how much oxygen you use and how much co2 is exhaled.
> When a triglyceride is oxidized (or "burned up"), the process consumes many molecules of oxygen while producing carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) as waste products [0]
[0] http://www.livescience.com/49157-how-fat-is-lost-body.html
Your BMR drops as you lose weight, it might simply be that this hasn't been taken into account.
Or they're not tracking their calories.
Here's a really good article discussing caloric-reduction, impact on Leptin (key hormone involved in regulating the body metabolism): http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/calorie-partiti...
Though, careful reading suggests that the author believes that a day of refeeding (ala 4-hour body), is unlikely sufficient to trigger Leptin such that the body's BMR kicks back into high gear.
1. Watch your protein. Most people when first going keto will eat too much protein and not enough fat. Protein has an insulinogenic effect when eaten in quantity. Keep protein below 8 oz per meal. Don't be afraid to eat more fat.
2. Avoid cheese. Yes, it's technically low carb, but it repeatedly throws me and my girlfriend off (also a low carber).
3. Avoid nuts. Yes, like cheese, nuts are delicious. But they're a slippery slope. Life will be easier if you avoid them.
I hear your points about protein, cheese, and nuts, but then what do you eat? Can you list out a few complete days of your meals?
Lunch: salad and leftover protein (with oil, vinegar, and mustard dressing)
Dinner: meat, fish, or poultry (simply prepared) with roasted vegetables and salad
Snacks: coffee with butter and coconut oil, raw veggies, leftover meat
I wonder if the "this tastes awful" response will change as I move away from carbs?
http://www.food.com/recipe/kale-salad-with-avocado-for-two-4...
The avocado makes it really creamy and rich.
Wat? Your protein intake depends strictly on your body's requirements.
I've never been really overweight, but still, even the slight problem I had is gone with the change of some eating habits. Mostly, a lot less carbs - I really don't need a bakery and I have to tell the Thai or Chinese waiter that I need only 10% of that huge load of rice (they always pack more rice than the rest - which already is a large amount).
Next to zero extra sugar (outside food items like fruit), no cake, no cookies. I don't need to, zero appetite for any of it. I don't even touch that honey jar in the corner any more. This is great for my teeth! (also according to the dentist, no sugar - no cavities, general rule). Always had trouble, now non, zero, with much less brushing.
I eat very high amounts of nut cream, which is just nuts but crushed to cream, expensive stuff but soooo tasty. A slice of toast, than add almost 1/3 jar of nut cream (mixed and/or cashew and/or almond white/brown and/or hazelnut) - so, really a lot - add quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_%28dairy_product%29) and some (not too much) fresh fruit and some non-crushed nuts from varieties that I don't have as cream, like walnuts.
No problem at all with my weight, unlike years ago when I really had to watch myself and did a lot of sports and running, so it's not like I can eat anything I want.
Same with cheese, but it's very little hard cheese, and all of it is high quality. A lot of my cheese is from sheep and goats.
Lots of veggies - but always with some meat. Can't eat as much as I used to any more though, my body has settled on wanting only a little bit of it.
Also, I found it important to NOT cut the (easy) carbs completely! Some white bread or rice etc. is absolutely necessary. It's just not very much, not even a full slice of white bread for the nut breakfast, for example. I think the diet that tries to brute force you into eating nothing at all of that kind of food is too extreme.
I can't eat a lot of whole nuts though, only the cream works. Which is just mechanically different, there are zero add-ons in my (organic) nut cream purchases.
Oh and I get plenty of sleep too, I don't use an alarm clock. Advantage of working from home.
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About the link, this is just statistics. These days "machine learning" has replaced the word "statistics", and now everything is called that, it seems.
That sounds reasonable and all, but it isn't actually a scientific justification. If the nutritional theories behind a low carb diet are sound, then it would make no sense to introduce high-carb sources to mix in just to "be less extreme." Science shouldn't care about our superficial perceptions.
That said, awesome work.
So let's say you eat low carb and train very hard for a week. Your muscles will be depleted, your liver will be depleted. You see that you lost 10 lbs! Great! But is it? Maybe you lost one pound of fat and 9 pounds of water. Then you eat NOTHING BUT carbs for three days and you gain 20 lbs. Oh no! But actually it's your muscles expanding their capacity to store glycogen (since you trained hard and depleted yourself they will regain even more glycogen than before). You may have not gained ANY FAT AT ALL!
I have had great success dieting with medium fat medium carb diets. I try to keep between 180lbs and 220lbs (I'm 6'4"). I'm saying that this kind of tracking is oversimplifying the issue of fat loss - you need to see that you're losing fat tissue which involves at least caliper measurements.
Agreed - that the real question isn't weight, per se, but Lean Body Mass. DexaScan is also a good approach to nailing down that number.
But what I've found is that calipers actually do a good job at showing body fat changes. They're horrible for absolute values (if they say 12%, they might be off by 4%), even at multiple measurement sites. But if calipers measure more or less, you can still be fairly sure that you have gained or lost fat mass.
Measuring like that I found that nothing beats lots of caffeine and plain low calorie diet.
To my utter surprise, something as stupidly simple as coffee blended with butter with coconut oil (or MCT) first thing in the morning did unbelievable things for mental productivity. After much googling I learned that this is not a fluke, and that there is real science behind it - beta-oxidation, etc, all that good stuff.
What's most incredible to me is that (1) I didn't know about it, I always thought glucose is the only fuel (and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable as far as basic physiology is concerned) and (2) that sugar, especially the industrially produced kind, is about as close to being the root of all evil as it gets and there is nothing wrong with fat at all.
No offense, but after learning you were dead wrong about a pretty fundamental concept, have you reevaluated this belief?
But even weirder is that it really doesn't taste bad, and it did didn't do terrible things to my innards.
The sound of it is really counter-intuitive:
But then you realize that these flavors have been mixed together for years, whenever you have buttered toast and coffee. (now, minus the toast)It floats on the top, in beads, like a soup broth.
Can you expand? Like, you thought that cells only metabolize glucose, and dietary fats & proteins are converted to glucose? Or...?
Pretty much. I don't know where that may have come from, but I suspect I'm not the only one who naively thinks that this is the case. Somehow "ketone bodies" aren't mentioned in dietary conversations nearly as frequently as glucose.
From the abstract:
During very low carbohydrate intake, the regulated and controlled production of ketone bodies causes a harmless physiological state known as dietary ketosis. Ketone bodies flow from the liver to extra-hepatic tissues (e.g., brain) for use as a fuel; this spares glucose metabolism via a mechanism similar to the sparing of glucose by oxidation of fatty acids as an alternative fuel. In comparison with glucose, the ketone bodies are actually a very good respiratory fuel. Indeed, there is no clear requirement for dietary carbohydrates for human adults. [...] Contrary to popular belief, insulin is not needed for glucose uptake and utilization in man.
It's easy to be ignorant about a situation you never experience. Every single person they deal with is going to be in a carb-adapted state and never miss a meal, so their body will run entirely off of glucose.
The trick is that
a) it takes quite a while for your body to get adjusted to ketosis. 6 months to fully adjust, but the primary adjustment will take at 2-4 weeks for most people
b) during this adjustment period, you'll usually feel like shit. since you're running empty on the fuel your body is used to. but many people cheat, or accidentally ingest too many carbohydrates, persistently keeping their body out of ketosis and ensuring they feel terrible endlessly and blame keto for it.
In keeping with this thread - I guess I could vary different dozens of variables, one or more at a time, apply the same Ketosis machine learning algorithm, and see what really makes the difference.
I typically take ZMA and potassium then drink something like Propel while at the gym. Then I have chicken broth when I get home to get some salt back.
1. Its available online
The research that I've read says that the ideal training regime is to work-out in a carb-exhausted state, so as to encourage your body to develop the low-carb metabolic pathway, but for actual endurance events, definitely carb load as your primary fuel.
These days I can wake up from a 12-18 hour fast and run a marathon at an easy pace while ingesting zero carbs in the process.
I ingest some carbs during actual races when glucose utilization is higher due to higher intensity. You will always need some glucose and the ratio of fat/glucose metabolism depends on intensity. Basically if you push the pedal to the metal your body will utilize what it has got. With that said, I feel like keto adaptation definitely broadened my options for how to pace myself and how to use my energy reserves during training and races.
This talk digs into it a little bit:
http://quantifiedself.com/2015/12/effects-year-ketosis-jim-m...
Your symptoms is very common during the ketosis adaptation phase which shouldn't last more than two weeks at most.
If they persist any longer than that you are probably not in ketosis.
The best way to measure ketone levels are through blood ketones (beta-hydroxybutyrate) with a blood tester such as the precision extra or similar.
There are some breath analyzers such as the ketonix that measures acetone levels in your breath - and they are alos pretty good.
Urine sticks don't generally don't work very well after the first month.
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. If that doesn't work for you, talk to a doctor.
The ketosis and positive effects on the brain thereof is backed by a lot of solid science.
Whatever your goals are, however serious you are, I find it a great way to keep track. I just stand on this thing once a morning, and forget about it. And now I have a near-daily record, smoothed out with a weekly moving average.
_No Metabolic Advantage for Ketosis Found_
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUyjMjuLl0
https://proteinpower.com/drmike/2016/05/06/contradictions-an...
That's not true of things like rice, noodles, bread, etc.. where for many people eat some, and your body is like, "Awesome. Bring it on" in a never ending cycle.
Put another way - Satiation happens a lot faster, and lasts longer, when you are eating protein/fats, than it does when you are eating refined carbohydrates.
I think that what made it clear to me, is that there are no metabolic chamber studies (where people's activity and diet are perfectly controlled) that have ever demonstrated significant variation from the calories in/calories out model. Carbs, Protein, Fats - doesn't seem to make a difference, your weight is simply a reflection of your metabolic output and caloric-intake.
Stephan Guyenet also has an interesting perspective here:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.sg/2011/08/carbohydrate-hy...
Possibly the case that when you were eating carbs, you were putting away 3500 calories a day, and that dropped to 3000 calories a day when it was just meat? I know that just a casual stroll through the mall on a refeed day for me, I have zero difficulty putting away 6000+ calories - refined carbs are shockingly calorically dense.
Also - for some time on a Keto Diet, you are going to be dropping a ton of water - so the scale will be dropping like a rock, regardless of what your actual body weight is doing. Getting a DexaScan, or whatever lean/fat body mass assessment you prefer to see what's really going on.
But, I think it's also a good idea, in addition to enjoying that little bit of gamification on your scale numbers, to also have a good sense of what's actually happening in the body mechanics.
That way, you get the best of both worlds.
I use a glucose monitor with beta-hydroxy-butyrate (ketone body) test strips for accurate measurement.
Precision Xtra test strips will give you a far more precise and accurate measure of ketones in your blood and if you wanted to do anything quantitative like in this case study, you'd want to use those.
Edit - Also, presumably the other factors like hydration and time of day could be tracked as well used to apply learning
Biolent has a keto variant: http://biolent.ca/
Keto Chow: https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/
Keto Fuel: http://superbodyfuel.com/shop/keto-fuel/
KetoSoy: https://www.ketosoy.com/
PrimalKind is "paleo": http://primalkind.com/
Edit: added Keto Chow, which I forgot on first pass!
For someone who eats lots of carbs already, a plum/orange isn't going to cause an increase in weight. It is primarily just calories. It is of course easier to eat more calories in carbs than in protein, but overall, carbs aren't "bad".
Moreover, such Atkins diets tend to work only temporarily, until atkins-diet homeostasis is achieved, unless calorie restriction is practiced as well [1,2].
[1] Many studies show that long-term weight rebounds if you forgo carbs and overall weight loss depends only on calories. One article: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/1/23.long
[2] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=200094
Weight loss is simple: calorie deficit. However, switching from carbs to fats and taking advantage of some of the metabolic processes your body has to offer makes the process easier for many people. Calorie deficit with less hunger and decent energy. It helps a lot.
Not that simple. People touting this are usually genetically endowed with great metabolism. I've tried this many times and reach a plateau pretty quickly and have to keep decreasing calories until it's not practical anymore.
On the other hand, watching the glycemic index/load does the magic for me.
Metabolic rate does not vary that much: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15534426
And to be clear, you can't not lose weight with a calorie deficit.
That's true, but in a useless way.
You can't die of cancer if you get rid of all the cancer cells in your body -- that doesn't help us treat cancer.
The problem isn't whether caloric deficit works. The problem is why some people are unable to maintain caloric deficit.
This appears to be complex, and includes stuff like gut flora, medication, strong cognitive biases, among others.