Coffee Space – Coffee Space

Months In #keto

This is a continuation of the keto journey. Previous articles:

Diet progress update:

As you can see, my weight has been steadily declining at approximately 0.5 kg per day. Whilst this is excellent progress, I’m likely to miss my 40kg goal unless something changes rapidly. Luckily for me, my meetings soon come to a close and I can start planning my days to be more focussed around energy levels and exercise.

Recap

In the last post I discussed two key points:

Tingling – I believe this problem is now resolved through the use of an electrolytes drink powder I occasionally drink. I highly suspect I simply was not getting enough potassium in my diet for how much fluid I was going though.
Exercise – I have slightly increased the amount of exercise I have been doing, but really I want to be burning approximately 2000 kcal in exercise every few days by Christmas. This can be achieved quite easily through longer walks.

Energy

Generally each day that goes by, the more energy I have. I am starting to remember the feeling of thinking and moving fast. Sometimes I find myself slipping back into a mind state of a younger self - the feeling is good.

I gave a presentation some weeks ago where I would normally feel blustered and struggle to think further than my words. This time, I was not at all blustered and could easily think about the entire presentation, tailor specific parts of the presentation to specific people and predict questions people would ask. Other than getting a dry mouth via dehydration and nervousness, the presentation went surprisingly well.

Just the other day I was out walking with a friend to the shops and back, a trip that easily talks 90 minutes. On the way back, I would normally be exhausted, but I was actually full of energy. At one point I even jokingly went to run and almost winded myself when I pushed forward so fast. I think the person I was with was surprised I could even begin sprinting so fast, given I still weigh 23 stone or so.

Every day that goes by, the system runs better, I feel better, I can push harder. Really I don’t really understand how I let myself get here. I guess it’s easy to justify small incremental negative changes to your health to yourself - even those around you.

Temptation

A few times I have been offered sugary drinks, sugary foods or even vegetables I can’t eat. I have been able to far to fully resist any temptation to have these things. It’s much easier to resist them given in my mind I can think “this will be X number of days to reverse”. Being knocked out of ketosis due a carb binge means a week getting back on, up to a week of keto flu, not to speak of the other work that would be needed. No thanks.

The craving for carbohydrates never really went away, but it did get easier to manage. Sometimes I’m waking up with the largest possible cravings for anything with carbohydrates in it, but just eating something and drinking something coffee makes those cravings go away.

Foods

I also have a few more updates on foods I can or can’t have:

Sausages – Apparently they put flour and stuff into sausages to bulk them out, which unfortunately takes them off the table for me. I do only buy the fresh sausages made locally, but I guess it is still the case I can’t have these any more.
Ice cream – A specific brand called “ISO Cream” is keto friendly and uses some protein based ingredients to bulk out what is essentially just water. They are absolutely amazing, but they cost between $10 and $15 (consider a massive tub of ice cream can be less than $5).
Noodles – They do a type of noodles called “zero noodles” (or as I called them, ‘zoodles’). I’ve got no idea what they are really made of, but the ingredients are essentially nothing.

One of the foods I plan to try are shrimps - but I really hate cooking fish… So we’ll see how I get on with this.

Christmas

As I’m staying in New Zealand over Christmas (due to this little unheard thing called the “global pandemic”), I have been thinking about what I will do Christmas day. Quite a few people have expressed their interest in doing a few activities that day - and I should really have a response for that:

Beer – I have been looking at the idea of buying some low carbohydrate beers. They are quite easy to find, but one thing that concerns me is the strange interactions of alcohol and carbohydrates. If my memory serves, alcohol makes the processing of carbohydrates in the body significantly more harmful.
BBQ – One idea that is being floated around is a BBQ. Meat isn’t so much of a problem, but the bread will be. Fortunately they seem to do some keto buns in the local shop, so I can look to use those.

Lockdown V2

Another thing I have considered is a second (or third) lockdown here in New Zealand could really affect my ability to buy basic foods. I do have some rice stored away encase of an emergency, but breaking ketosis will put me through a rough time.

I have some frozen foods that could buy me time, but ultimately I’m still pretty screwed if a new lockdown occurred.