Monthly Archives: March 2016

Day 088 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 72 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 202.9
  • Blood ketones: 0.6 mmol/L

Alright, so I made it to 46.4 hours without eating – let’s analyze how it went!

Mood and how I felt. First off, my lack of sleep yesterday was the biggest detrimental factor in the experience. If that had not happened (thanks a lot brain!) I probably would have gone longer, maybe 48 hours, maybe 72 – dunno. I don’t think I’m going to make not eating for several days something I do often since it was rather extreme (obviously); I’ll likely continue doing intermittent fasting here and there. I think I might have also been low on electrolytes since I was feeling sluggish, then again that could have been the sleep (or lack thereof).

Let’s look at the blood results. Tuesday morning (~8 hours) I was at 0.2 mmol/L of ketones in my blood. That evening (~18 hours) when I tested myself again I was up to 1.1. The next morning (~32 hours), even though the only thing I had “eaten” was two fish oil pills the night before, I had gone down to 0.9. When I came home from work that evening and tested again (46.4 hours) my ketones were all the way up to 3.5 mmol/L. After which I had two Keto Chows (Chocolate Peanut Butter), 4 pickles and a couple spoon fulls of ham soup my awesome wife had made. When I tested my blood again this morning, my levels were all the way down to 0.6. Honestly it makes no sense why it’s down again, it just further re-enforces the notion of “don’t chase ketones, just keep calm and keto on” – or don’t do what I’m doing and test your blood every day, just keep doing keto (no cheating!) and it’ll work out. You also shouldn’t get too anxious about the scale, which brings me to…

2016-03-31 07_44_06-Health Mate

Weight results. Well, I came into this from a rather large (keto friendly) Easter dinner which loaded me up on salt and lots of water weight – all the way up to 208.3 lbs on Monday morning. By Tuesday morning (8 hours fasting while sleeping) I was only down to 207.8. lbs. By Wednesday morning I had dropped to 203.6, a slight up-tick Wednesday evening when I weighed myself again and as of this morning I was down again to 202.9 lbs. Monday – Thursday difference is 5.4lbs. Now it will be interesting to see if I can stick with it and continue going down. On a happy note, yesterday was also the weigh-in day for my city’s weight loss challenge. According to the scale there, I was down 6 lbs from the previous week. Nice.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:41-06:00March 31st, 2016|Weight Loss, Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 088 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 087 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 71 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 203.6
  • Blood ketones: 1.1 mmol/L

Looks like I had inexplicably stored up a bunch of glycogen – the difference between yesterday morning (~8 hours fasting while sleeping) and this morning (~32 hours fasting) is dramatic: 4.2 lbs down and 0.9mmol/L of ketones higher. That’s a lot of water weight! I’m still trying to decide what I’m going to do regarding eating today. I feel fine, pretty good aside from being terribly tired; but that doesn’t have anything to do with fasting, it’s the fault of my brain.

I got an email yesterday evening where a user reported getting a time-out during payment, they recommended I try a different shopping cart. I looked at a few, then went to bed. Then around midnight my brain turned on, sleep was a lost cause so I decided to research a bit since I was awake anyway. After spending a few hours setting up and then decommissioning test shopping carts with various providers here’s what I have gleaned: Shopify is a crowd favorite, until you need to calculate shipping based on dimensions (which I do). Most of the other ones also can’t handle dimensions. WooCommerce handles it just fine, it’s a standard “out of the box” feature that takes the box sizes you provide and “packs” them, then gets a shipping quote with the weight and box. I (wrongfully) assumed this would be standard with other shopping carts. The only one I found that supports it is BigCommerce, which looks fine until you get into the pricing – their highest plan allows for 3000 orders a year after which it’s and additional $80 per 1000, PER MONTH. Based on my order volume over the last year, my monthly costs would be between $500 and $700; assuming no growth. That’s nuts.

Anyway – yesterday the clouds broke for a few hours after I got home and I was able to do some work on the shed, which was a good thing since I didn’t eat dinner (the kids ate Hot Pockets, my wife had a Keto Chow) though I also fell over backwards twice, got a real nice bruise on my rear. I also ran again. I did “mess up” and technically broke my fast when I took two fish pills after brushing my teeth – 15 calories each. CRON-O-Meter says I could eat 2892 more calories to reach my weight goal. Fun Stuff =)

Here’s the first time I fell over, bonus points if you can find the second time in the video.

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DCIM100GOPROG0010693.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:41-06:00March 30th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 087 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 086 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 70 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 207.8
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

Today I’m doing intermittent fasting, but for kicks I’m going to see how long I can go without eating and just running off the copious stored energy I have. I’m planning on possibly eating tomorrow, not sure though. Going off my DEXA scan I have approximately 220,000 calories stored, and going off my Resting Metabolic Rate test that means I have enough for almost 70 days. Yeah, not going to do that =) 24+ hours should be just fine. I am still drinking water (today it happens to have “Blackberry Lemonade” Crystal light in it, I also added “ElectroMix”) as dehydration would stink.

I planned on building the shed yesterday, unfortunately it was snowing pretty much all day. I did have some time to make some test batches of Keto Chow and to play around with the potential packaging. I stopped in at the container place on Friday and picked up some plastic containers to test out, of note I got the half gallon and 1 gallon square bottles. I was able to fit 30 meals of Chocolate Peanut Butter into the 1 gallon and I’m assuming I can fit 15 meals into the half gallon.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:43-06:00March 29th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 086 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Days 084 & 085 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 69 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.3
  • Blood ketones: 0.3 mmol/L
  • Weight: 208.2
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

 

Got the floor/platform for the new shed built on Saturday, even got some of the shed put together before it got too dark:

I was going to finish building the shed today, but it’s snowing. Bah. Guess I’ll do something else, like see Zootopia with the kids (the ones that have their rooms clean). Yesterday we had a fun keto breakfast (pictured above, that’s what happens when the guy doing keto is in charge of breakfast) and a bunch of keto friendly stuff for Easter dinner; like smoked chicken legs, non-glazed ham, mashed cauliflower. The outlier was the funeral potatoes. I can report that I successfully DID NOT eat any of the potatoes, nor did I eat ANY Easter candy. Not even cadbury cream eggs, nor the malt eggs (these were particularly hard since it’s up there with kitkat as my favorite candy of all time. Despite that, still not worth it, I would only be sabotaging myself.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:43-06:00March 28th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Days 084 & 085 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Days 082 & 083 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 68 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.7
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L
  • Weight: 207.4
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

 

Didn’t have a chance to post yesterday, probably because I spent most of the day going to the landfill 3 times with the remnants of our shed, then we went to dinner. It was actually a really nice dinner, especially since 4 1/2 of us are doing keto and another couple that came is doing Atkins. They were really surprised at the wide variety of low carb food that was on the menu. From the low carb cocktail sauce to go with the shrimp, to the bacon wrapped steak bites; the salmon, the chicken, the low carb lobster bisque and the twice baked cauliflower. Yeah, it was pretty epic.

Today (Saturday) we did a mixing party, when that’s done I get to build a floor for the new shed, should be fun.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:43-06:00March 26th, 2016|100 days of keto, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Days 082 & 083 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 081 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 67 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 207.1
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

Well, despite doing pretty well yesterday I was still up in weight for the weekly weigh in for my city thing. I think it may have to do with eating the cheese and meat off some pizza yesterday. I guess today is a new day and so far today I’m doing perfect. I’m probably going to swing by the container people tomorrow and grab some sample containers so I can start experimenting around with the packaging for the new formulation.

By |2016-03-24T12:14:13-06:00March 24th, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 081 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 080 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 66 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.1
  • Blood ketones: 0.3 mmol/L

3 Rich Chocolates yesterday, 3 Chocolate Peanut Butters today. Yesterday I got my web server happy again – I had it kinda working but the load balancer wasn’t handling the requests, the end result was it showed every connection coming from the same address (the load balancer) and that evening I found myself locked out of the admin area because “my address” had tried too many unsuccessful logins. Anyhow it seems to be working properly now. and I no longer have to worry about my server crashing and taking down the site.

By |2016-03-24T12:11:57-06:00March 23rd, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 080 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 65 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.3
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

Yesterday evening I spent some time discussing the possible packaging for “Keto Chow 2.0” with my wife. The company I’ll likely be using can package into “Stick Pack” and tubs/bottles, they aren’t able to handle the stand-up pouches I’m currently using (“yet”) so it’s likely I’ll be using tubs for bulk size and stick packs for the samples. The question now comes to what to do for the days – I don’t have a good solution for that yet. A smaller “day” tub would cost almost as much as the large bulk one, both the cost of the container and the cost of putting it into the container (but x7). I think the solution is going to be to up the volume of the sample size (the “single meal”) enough that the cost of 3 meals is lower than what the “day” used to cost – and just eliminate it entirely because it wouldn’t be necessary.

We’re also hitting some issues with the bulk size container. 7 days/21 meals for most of the flavors is a little too much to fit into a half-gallon size bottle. It fits into a standard 1 gallon (2 lb of protein) size bottle but there’s a bunch of extra space at the top. Since Peanut Butter is the “largest” flavor by volume I used it as my “worst case scenario” trial and found that I could actually get 10 days/30 meals of chocolate peanut butter into a gallon size container. Likely that is what we will do: no more “weeks” – they would be 30 meal/10 day packages. A round gallon size container is an awful waste of space as far as shipping goes so we’re looking into using “square” bottles instead, like these:

Square

This all presents a problem though: Shipping. We currently use a LOT of USPS flat rate boxes; they’re free(ish) and offer low shipping rates where we don’t have to care how much stuff weighs, only how big it is. With these larger, fixed dimension, containers we would be able to fit half as many bottles into the same box as the week bags. A Medium FRB would hold 1 instead of 2-3. A Large FRB would only hold 2 bottles instead of the current 4 weeks (20 days worth compared to 28). It’s likely we’ll have to find our own boxes that fit 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the bottles. It kinda sucks but will be better for FedEx and possibly UPS shipping with all 3 services using the same boxes. Time will tell.

We also hashed out the flavors that will be part of the initial round: Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate Peanut butter, Cookie & Cream and Strawberry.

Flavor Graph

Those first five represent 73% of the total sales of Keto Chow all by themselves, so I think it’s a good starting point; especially with the apparent discontinuation of the different flavors by Dymatize. I found some Chocolate Fudge and some Butter Cream Toffee yesterday but still no joy with Banana and Piña Colada, it may not be long before They go out of stock in the weeks, though we have a nice inventory of days and samples. Cinnamon bun is currently down to just samples remaining, the last day pack sold on Saturday.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 22nd, 2016|Keto Chow, Site or Store Stuff, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Days 077 & 078 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 64 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 206.74
  • Blood ketones: 0.4 mmol/L
  • Weight: 207.9
  • Blood ketones: 0.5 mmol/L

Well, my ketones are up but I also had dinner with the family yesterday (split chicken breasts with ham and swiss inside, wrapped in bacon and then dipped in eggs and Parmesan cheese) and that was enough salt for me to gain a bunch of water weight. That’ll come out eventually but looks real bad on the scale right now.

Found this interesting review of Keto Chow, says he’ll be following up with updates.

By |2016-03-21T15:22:32-06:00March 21st, 2016|Keto Chow, 100 days of keto|Comments Off on Days 077 & 078 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
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Day 076 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 63 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 204.6
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

Some friends took us out to a really nice restaurant last night. Like “valet parking, half of the menu was in french and up a twisting mountain road in a cabin” fancy restaurant. After some extensive study of the menu before hand I ended up getting the “Bacon Wrapped Elk Strip Steak” which as  matter of course comes rare, like purple and cool in the middle. It was really good though. I didn’t eat any of the rolls and I didn’t have any dessert. So two Keto Chows and some elk, not bad for the day! (I also didn’t eat any of the girl scout cookies I got for the kids).

As for today, had a big mixing party and got everything stocked up for the coming week. I’m getting worried about some of the flavors, here’s the list of ones that I still have stock of but haven’t been able to order any more for a while and might be discontinued:

  • Butter Cream Toffee
  • Banana
  • Pina Colada
  • Chocolate Fudge

as for Cinnamon bun, all we have left is samples. It’s a good thing that we’re inching closer to having our own protein powder so we are no longer beholden to the whims of Dymatize.

By |2016-03-22T09:17:51-06:00March 19th, 2016|100 days of keto, Keto Chow|4 Comments
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