ketoandme

[ketoandme]

At an academic conference on Jeckyll Island, Georgia. Spectacular weather - not humid, mid 60s, crystal clear blue skies.

Really a pity we will spend the next couple of days indoors, being all academic and intellectual and stuff lol.

[ketoandme]

Reblogging this. It's hard to overstate how important this is.

If you are eating a carb-centric diet, hunger will always finally win out over self-control. And during the time it takes for hunger to win (and setting off, so often, a binge eating episode) you tend to be relentlessly focused on food. It gets hard to concentrate on anything else. (Been there, done that, many times, yep!)

But it's the effect of carbs leading to elevated blood insulin, and the cascade of biochemical reactions triggered, that sets off hunger signals. And you really are hungry, because typically the insulin has swept the glucose out of the blood, and now you really are "hungry" in the sense of wanting energy.

Your body should respond by releasing fat from your cells to be burned for energy - but the presence of elevated insulin means that the fat that should be released for energy remains locked up by the insulin signal in your cells.

The only way out of this is to reduce the insulin signal, and that means (drastically) reducing carb intake.

Dr. Ben Bikman explains in 1 ½ minutes why hunger beats out willpower in losing weight if the food you’re eating is carb-centric.

It’s not your lack of self discipline. The hunger is real and physiological … and it will always win, eventually, until you address the root biochemical and hormonal cause, by eating mostly fats and proteins and fiber, and reduce carbohydrate intake.

[ketoandme]

So … keto dinner tonight (Saturday, 22 February 2025):

Salad of lettuce and avocado, with bacon and bacon fat, hard boiled eggs, and shrimp broiled in the bacon fat. Olive oil and apple cider vinegar. Also drank half a cup of fermented pickle juice. Very, very yummy.

[ketoandme]

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”

😹

[ketoandme]

Dinner:

Boneless pork loin, cooked in the air fryer - and for once I didn’t overcook it. Salad of lettuce, homemade. Caesar dressing, 4 hard boiled eggs, olive oil and apple cider vinegar, sour cream.

[ketoandme]

Breakfast (Wednesday, 19 February 2025):

I mostly don’t eat breakfast. But I was up (not happily!) at 5:00 a.m. this morning, with a very long day ahead, including walking a couple of miles in 20 degree F weather, barbell work out at gym, and 30 min on the Peloton bike in our basement at home.

So breakfast at 9:30 consisted of 3 fried eggs (in butter) and air fryer fried pork belly bits.

The pork belly bits was drawing on a recipe from Carnivore Mom Laura Spath’s YouTube channel - cutting the pork belly into small chunks and leaving it much longer than usual in the air fryer in order to render off more fat and make them into crispy bits.

I did that, and then doused them with Allulose syrup, citric acid, and spices like chili powder. They turned out okay, but next time I won’t chop the bits quite so small.

[ketoandme]

My wife made this rather beautiful salad to go with the meatloaf tonight. The cheese is this great soft French cheese (available at Trader Joe’s). The bacon in this case is sugar-free, nitrate, nitrite - free. The meatloaf is classic keto recipe - ground beef, ground pork, ground lamb (but I forgot to take a pic).

[ketoandme]

Keto dinner (Sunday, 16 February 2025):

Chicken breast in homemade Caesar dressing, salad of lettuce, avocado, pickles.

I also drank some of the fermented pickle juice. It is a good source of short term fatty acids that are good for the gut biome. And anyway I’ve always liked pickle juice.

[ketoandme]

Dinner tonight, Saturday, 15 February 2025:

My wife made a delicious meat loaf for dinner.

Kind of classic meat loaf— ground beef, ground pork, ground lamb, onion powder and garlic powder, some unsweetened catsup (not too much; tomato has carbs), chili powder, a little Allulose and citric acid.

Salad of chopped romaine lettuce, avocado, apple cider vinegar, olive oil. Plus a little left-over goat cheese.

Fermented pickle and juice.

I did half an hour on the peloton exercise bike, plus some abs and core exercises. Then I did some barbell deadlifts.

A couple of warmup sets, and then three work sets at an embarrassingly low weight - 75 lbs lower than what I was deadlifting 2 or 3 years ago. Ouch.

It has frankly been hard to get a regular, consistent program going - I try my best to follow the Starting Strength method. But I’m trying to get consistent again.

[ketoandme]

The pan-scrambled eggs from last night as a gif. Pancetta bits crisping away, lol.

[ketoandme]

Dinner last night, Thursday 13 February 2025:

Pan scrambled eggs with crisped up pancetta bits, sour cream, olive oil, goat cheese, apple cider vinegar, and fermented pickles (and I drank the pickle juice, lol. Salad of green lettuce leaves and sliced pickles. (I wanted something sweet for dessert, so I mixed some hulled hemp seed with heavy cream and Allulose sugar.)

[ketoandme]

I didn’t set out the cheese, above, as part of dinner last night (Thursday); my wife and I thought it would be too much, given the Parmesan in my wife’s homemade Caesar dressing.

We won’t dig into it tonight, either, because we’re having eggs - omelette of some kind, with cheddar cheese and some of Trader Joe’s spreadable goat cheese.

However, it’s available at Trader Joe’s and it’s called “Delice de Bourgogne.” If you like soft, super-creamy ripened cheeses, this stuff is a “wow.”

[ketoandme]

Our keto dinner tonight - Thursday, February 6, 2025.

2 10 oz steaks, one ribeye and one strip steak. Cooked in the air fryer, without oil, then put into a rub of chili powder with Allulose and citric acid, plus apple cider vinegar, olive oil, and butter.

Salad of lettuce, fermented pickles, avocado, Caesar dressing with avocado oil mayonnaise and Parmesan cheese, olive oil and apple cider vinegar.

I ate about 12-14 ounces of steak. A whole head of lettuce.

I hadn’t had anything to eat during the day, just black coffee. I did half an hour on the Peloton bike, and then barbell squats and stretching plus body weight exercises.

[ketoandme]

Dinner last night, 4 Feb 2025.

Sirloin steak cooked in air fryer. Then sprayed with avocado oil and powdered with Allulose sweetened (and citric acid) chili powder.

Salad of romaine lettuce, avocado, aged Gouda cheese, hard boiled eggs, fermented picked, Caesar dressing homemade with Parmesan cheese, olive oil, apple cider vinegar.

I also had a ¼ cup of hulled hemp seeds plus Allulose and heavy cream.

[ketoandme]

For most of my life I assumed that the post fasting (calorie restriction) tendency to binge (which, yes, was my pattern of eating long before it was given a clinical name) was essentially psychological. In my head = my inability to exercise self control, no self discipline, etc.

Over the years - as I got fatter and fatter, despite a lot of physical activity, and developed Type 2 diabetes - I decided it couldn't simply be psychological. Whatever was driving my weight gain, it no longer seemed plausible to me that this was just lack of willpower or that I just needed to eat less and move more. Above all, I needed to find an answer - get away from binging and from the years of yo-yo dieting.

My psychiatrist brother explained that it was not just lack of discipline - I had conditioned myself to crave food, especially sweet things, and that the conditioning made the cravings that much worse. And he also explained all about how I was emotionally dependent on food as comfort, etc. And suggested I try various cognitive tricks on which whole books had been written - like smaller size dinner plates to make me think less was more, and all that stuff that just embarrasses me now. (Especially since I had been urging this on my daughter, who wasn't fat, but a trend was starting of weight gain when she was around 9 or 10. No worse than what was going on with her friends, though, so I figured it was "normal.")

Trying to find a new approach to weight loss for myself, I spent a number of years trying to understand the physical, not psychological or emotional, processes why, following a short daylong fast by a man (me) with 50+ lbs of fat to lose, I could possibly be hungry.

I went back to the beginning, and recovered my college chem classes, and then took a biochemistry class and a class focused on the chemistry of food metabolism - how stuff that goes in the mouth is converted into nutrients in the body - the liver, primarily. I felt like I had at least some minimal tools to understand the science underlying the debates over obesity, weight loss, T2 diabetes, and what is now termed "metabolic syndrome."

This led me gradually to understanding that a calorie is not just a calorie, but that it depends in the first place on the kind of calorie and the biochemistry of how different nutrients - carbohydrates, protein, or fat - are broken down and utilized by the body.

[I’ve posted a couple of links here in the past (Gary Taubes’ YouTube lecture in 2014 on why weight loss, avoiding binging, all of that, starts with restricting carbohydrate intake, or the 2 minute video by Ben Bikman posted earlier aptly titled, Why Hunger Always Wins) that give a basic overview of the role of the hormone insulin in these processes.]

The essential point is that carbs (and especially table sugar) elevate and spike blood sugars, which in simplified terms is extraordinarily dangerous to the body when those levels get too high (or, for that matter, too low). The need to address the blood sugars in turn elicits an increase in blood insulin (a hugely important hormone in the body) to get that sugar out of the blood and safely stored as fat.

Insulin drives the conversion and storage of the excess blood sugars into fat, which is good and necessary. But the corollary to this is that the insulin - if it doesn't fall back to lower levels - also prevents your body from accessing those stored sugars (I.e., the sugars stored as fat) for necessary body energy. (This is a simplification and conflation of several different insulin driven processes.) Your body - especially the brain - starts sending out hunger signals. But you are hungry not for some psychological reason - you genuinely are hungry, because the sugars that would be burned for energy have been swept out of your system and locked up by insulin where you can’t access it. You really, truly are hungry in the sense that your body needs energy that it can’t get.

If you had been eating, before and after your fast, proteins or fats, not carbs, your blood sugars would not have spiked very much, so insulin would not have spiked in response, and your body, even during or concluding a fast, would have been able to access the energy it needs, by releasing fat from your cells, to be burned as energy. You wouldn’t be as hungry and the desire to binge would likely be at least somewhat less. (I spent many years trapped in this cycle; I know it well. It’s not just teen girls who struggle with this, believe me.)

Add to this that eating protein and fat eventually triggers satiety signals - hormonal signals that regulate hunger and satiety - carbohydrates and especially sugary things do not trigger satiety ("Hey, I’m full stop eating") signals. Your body can almost always eat another bit of a sugary dessert - no matter how much you ate earlier as the main dinner course.

This doesn't happen with fats and proteins, such as meat: There have been famous experiments trying to get volunteers to keep eating pork chops or ribeye steak, and volunteers reach a point where they cannot contemplate a single bite more (provided the next bite is not drenched in sugar, which can confound the satiety signal).

In my own case, I found that my binging became increasingly self-stopping, provided there were no sweets or carbs to munch on. I simply said to myself, "Hungry? Here, have another pork chop. Have as many as you like." And that tended to stop the binge in its tracks.

Yet it wasn't calorie restriction and absolutely not caloric self discipline that did it. On the contrary, this was an invitation to gorge myself on ... ribeye steak. It's self limiting. Whereas ... peanut M&Ms? Sees chocolates? Lol. There is no limit, pretty much, in the case of sugar, or potato chips or ...

What I also used to do (and still do) if faced with cravings that, before becoming a fat burner rather than a carb burner, would have resulted in binging, is to eat fried pork rinds, as many as I want; they are carb free and induce satiety the way pork chops would.

It’s not a matter of willpower or some psychological trigger - sure those exist - but they are minor factors, for most people, compared to the effect of cabs on blood sugars and insulin.

Hunger almost always wins out, as Dr Bikman says, because the hunger is physically real.

(I'll talk separately about Allulose as a sugar-sweetness substitute that has actual metabolic benefits.)

[I hope @sweetbunnidreams, from whom I reblogged the original post, will forgive me for using her frustration about binging to make these points. And if she'd like me to take it down, of course I will.]

i hate myself why do i binge after every fucking fast i cant escape the cycle

[ketoandme]

this was under an “what my keto kid eats in a day!” Pinterest post…

[ketoandme]

My keto dinner:

Pan fried boneless pork loin. Finished with Allulose (non nutritive sugar), citric acid, chili powder (sugar free), apple cider vinegar, avocado oil.

Boneless pulled pork (already cooked) pan fried as shreds to crisp up, same chili powder plus Allulose/citric acid, avocado oil, apple cider vinegar.

(Happy to report that for once I didn’t overcook it.)

Salad of romaine and green leaf lettuce, Caesar dressing, Parmesan cheese, bacon, a few roasted pecan halves, whole avocado.