Made some more muffins this morning. Again the kids finished them off. We watched the finale of “My Diet is Better Than Yours” – it was kinda surreal when the Paleo guy started explaining Intermittent Fasting. My kids actually knew what it was before he explained it.
Wow, that’s a LOT of water weight! (3.5lbs) Having food with a lot of salt will do that to you I guess.
There I go, back down =) Yesterday I made jello using keto chow and some sugar free jello. Put it in the fridge overnight and tried it for breakfast. Overall it turned out pretty well. I used vanilla Keto Chow and orange Jello. Not sure how other flavor combinations will turn out. I have some lime jello too.
We are hosting thanksgiving for my family this year and yesterday we hosted my wife’s family for pre-thanksgiving. It was a great opportunity to test out some recipes. All turned out fantastic so I thought I would share. There will be 5 of us doing keto so we wanted some awesome food. On a side note: I found a local grocery store that carries Swerve artificial sweetener. In the past I’ve used truvia but it has some carbs. Swerve hits a 0 glycemic index with 0 net carbs. Awesome! You can find a bunch of other awesome recipes over on /r/ketorecipes – there are currently two pinned posts at the top with holiday recipes.
Appetizer
Cranberry-Jalapeno Cream Cheese Dip Used Swerve instead of sugar and I forgot to make flax crackers so I just pulled out a bag of unflavored pork rinds. Wife says “There is happy in my mouth!”. Also of note from last week: Bacon Ranch CheeseBall.
Side
I didn’t discover this recipe until today so we just did mashed cauliflower with sausage gravy – the gravy was absolutely AMAZING and got eaten by all those carb eating people.
Turkey
I picked up a Masterbuilt gas smoker back in April and I can’t think of anything more keto friendly than smoked turkey! A friend of mine told me that for smoking turkeys you want a fresh (not frozen) one so I grabbed one from Costco and brined it. I was going to spatchcock the turkey but it ended up being too large to fit easily on the racks so I sharpened a cleaver and bisected the bird. Cooked better cut in half anyway. I used a wireless thermometer to track how done it was, I had to leave for several hours and so I pointed a webcam at the thermometer so I could check it remotely. Worked great (the smoker blew out twice necessitating a trip back home).
Ham
This was in case the turkey went wrong. Just a standard spiral ham that didn’t have any sugar in it. We pulled off some of it for us Keto people and then put the glaze on for the normal people.
Desserts
We also had salad, pickles, olives and other assorted goodies. Between the cream cheese used for all the cheesecakes, the potatoes, the dip and the gravy we used up a little over 6.5lbs of cream cheese this weekend.
With the (maybe temporary) demise of Mocha, I decided to bring on a new flavor for Keto Chow so there would still be 12. Introducing SnickerDoodle! It tastes very much like one of the cookies with a much better flavor than cinnamon bun. Personally I’ve never liked cinnamon bun but others do. This one is decidedly good. We’re finishing up the Day packages and have about 2 dozen of the Week packages already done. In a few minutes we’ll be starting on samples too.
I started Keto on October 20, 2014 and started posting my experiences on November 4, 2014. A lot has happened in a year, I’m 77% the man I used to be; so let’s do a retrospective.
I initially started keto without having done the right research and didn’t know what “keto flu” was or how to avoid it; but I did know that I needed to get my weight under control and get healthy. I never got tested but based on how my body was acting, I was pre-diabetic or at least insulin resistant. Keto was exactly what I needed. I feel this burning desire to make little business cards and hand them out to teenagers that… well, look like I did at that age:
The changes go beyond just weight loss. For the first time in years the cells in my body have adequate fuel since it’s not being shoved into fat cells by insulin. I go to a class and don’t fall into a “carb coma” after lunch. My blood tests are awesome and my blood sugar is normalized.
Anyway. I started doing Keto using a recipe of ketogenic “soylent” called KetoFood. Initially with the “induction phase” one and quickly switching over to the “ongoing phase” recipe because the induction one was really, really gross. KetoFood served me well for the time but still wasn’t very pleasant and had a horrible texture since it’s primarily coconut flour, chia seeds and raw cocoa powder (with a bunch or oil). To this day I still gag when I smell chia seeds. In early December after I had been choking down KetoFood for about 6 weeks I was sent a sample of KetoSoy by Ted Tieken. It was far and away so much better than KetoFood I couldn’t believe it – MIND BLOWN. See, most people do a ketogenic diet using “real food” (instead of “fake hippie garbage“) but I have an unhealthy relationship with food and on top of that, doing food replacement shakes is really convenient – and that convenience and the results I was already getting had me resigned to the notion that ketogenic soylent was going to be barely palatable.
Around the same time a new keto soylent recipe was published by Kenneth Swanson. Instead of copious amounts of oils for the calories, Ken’s recipe used heavy cream. It was far smoother than anything else I had tried at that point too which was a nice respite for my “gritted-out” palate. I had enough supplies to make roughly 10 days of this recipe and ordered more of the protein powder too late for it to arrive in time for a second batch before I ran out. So I was forced to go back on KetoFood for a week. It was at that point I decided I was going to kill off my KetoFood and create a new recipe. I was still selling People Chow pre-mixed for people but didn’t have my heart in it. I eventually abandoned all of the other recipes in favor of the new one I was working on. January 1, 2015 I posted for the first time about what would become Keto Chow. I had finally worked out a suitable protein powder and over the next month or so I messed around with the recipe ingredients to further cut down on gritty texture and simplify the ingredient list. I posted the recipe for Keto Chow 0.7 for anyone to use and abuse. Not opening the recipe didn’t even occur to me: we’re all in this together and frankly there’s no way I could mix up enough Keto Chow for all the people that are mixing their own (plus it would be kinda a jerk-move since I was pulling ingredients and concepts from Ken’s Recipe, KetoFood and even People Chow).
Oddly enough, right about the time I was launching Keto Chow, I participated in a community weight loss challenge and to prepare for it I indulged in my very first “cheat” (week). The thing with ketogenic diets is it’s kinda binary: you’re either under your carb goal and in ketosis… or you’re not. If you “cheat” and eat food with sugar or the like (including fruit) then you won’t be in ketosis. Anyhow I ate carbs with reckless abandon, gained a ton of water weight thanks to glycogen and ultimately ended up getting second place. Fortunately that was the last time time I did that and I’m not planning on doing it again. The longer I go without eating carbs, the less appealing to me they become. Nothing tastes as good as I remember it and the few things I have tasted I usually end up spitting out without swallowing and eat some bacon instead.
Speaking of bacon, I don’t exclusively live off keto chow, far from it; but I do stick to keto. With my wife doing keto too now (along with a growing list of family and friends) my kids are even getting less carbs. Nobody ever complains when I make sausage, bacon or eggs and cover everything with liberal amounts of cheese. This Saturday we’re doing a neighborhood Haloween party with a chili cook off and I’ll be bringing a giant batch of Caveman Keto Chili (though I use sausage instead of ground pork). The one thing I do need to cut back on though is sugar alcohol treats – stuff like Quest Bars and the like. You can see on my weight graph from the beginning of this post the plateaus where I’ve stopped losing weight (like the last 2 weeks). If I knuckle down and stick to eating only Keto Chow and ultra low carb foods then it picks back up.
One thing I have noticed over the past month or so is that I’m losing fat in my arms and legs. My quadriceps are getting pretty crazy looking and I’m starting to get veins popping out on my biceps. This is especially interesting because I stopped exercising when I tried to drill a hole in my leg back in June. Before I started keto I was exercising 1-2 times a day, either on the elliptical or running yet I was still gaining weight. The big change was stopping eating carbohydrates. Exercise just makes me hungry (unless I have excess energy).
So here are shirtless before and after pics. You’ve been warned. I’m 258lbs in the one on the left (November 2014), 210 in the middle (April 2015) and just barely under 200 on the right (October 2015)
In the end, I’m 77% the man I used to be but my wife still likes me =)
If you’re interested, here is the body fat percentage graph for the last 11 months or so since I got a withings scale that tracks that.
…and if you’re really interested, here is my weight history going all the way back to October 2006.
The first dip was doing the “Shangri-La diet” The second big dip was when my wife and I did a program where we removed sugar, flour and other foods from our diet. As obvious as it is now I didn’t make the connection then. The second to the last small dip right before keto was the 9 months I was doing People Chow.
With Keto Chow there are several liquid ingredients you have to add to the mixture for it to be complete:
You have the option of doing the fish oil as pills (which is what I personally do). But wouldn’t it be cool to somehow include the MCT oil as well as the heavy cream? Well, I previously explored powdered cream, to put it quickly: turns out it’s powdered sweet cream and has WAY too much sugar, isn’t going to work. How about powdered MCT Oil?
To make an oil into a powder you have to mix it with a carbohydrate. Rosa Labs (Soylent 1.5) powders their oil using maltodextrin (a complex sugar) and you can get MCT oils that have been mixed similarly with starches and other sugars to form a powder. Keto 101 says you need to minimize the amount of carbohydrates that aren’t fiber so using maltodextrin isn’t going to work. I did discover that Quest (makers of Quest Bars) has a powdered MCT oil that uses “Soluble corn fiber” and claims to have 0g of sugars or complex carbohydrates. That might actually work. The problem then is the cost. a 454g (1 lb) container is $30 and for the 300 calories of MCT oil you would need 45g of the powdered MCT (1/10 the container per day) at a cost of $2.97. Regular MCT oil you need 39ml a day and it costs $0.59. Over the course of a week, liquid MCT oil would be $4.13 while the powdered stuff would cost $20.79. That isn’t even including the labor and other expenses if I were to include the MCT oil in the mix, that would probably drive up the price of a week of Keto Chow over $100.
So while it may be viable to include powdered MCT in the mix; economically it makes little sense, especially since you have to add other liquid ingredients anyway.
We started adding the vitamins to the mixture about a month ago. Some of the flavors and sizes are less popular than others and some we had just made a lot the day before the transition started. As of Saturday, all of the packages now have the vitamins included in the mixture so there isn’t a need to have a bag of them and you don’t have to remember to take one a day. We will probably continue putting the “No more vitamin pills, it’s in the mix” labels on the packages for about a month so everyone can be aware of the change.
I did a small number of changes to the recipe for Keto Chow:
I’ve also updated the preparation instructions accordingly. Nothing ground breaking or really super notable but hey, it’s changes so now the recipe is 1.0.4
Today marks beginning of an end: all of the Keto Chow I mix from here on out (and actually going back a few days) has the vitamins included in the mixture. No more emailing me because I forgot to put them in the bag. No more questions about if people can use vitamin Y instead of the Kirkland ones =). And less hassle for everyone. For a few people that have special dietary needs (such as an allergy to Niacin or need to limit iron), this will unfortunately cause problems since the vitamins can’t be removed. Sorry about that =( My recommendation if you fall into that category is to follow the recipe and mix your own version of Keto Chow. Speaking of the recipe, for now it’s not going to change since the only modification was grinding up the vitamins with a blender (yes it does blend, but you need to put in a few weeks worth at a time and no more than half a bottle).
For everyone else: the first few orders with integrated vitamins shipped out this morning and within a week or so almost all of the week packs and many of the day packs will be moved over to the new formulation. You’ll be able to tell by the different label, no longer does it say to take one pill per day; rather it says the pudding is in the mix the vitamins are in the mix. And to make it easier for everyone during the transition, I’m sticking a little yellow sticker on them with the same info. It’s kinda hard to miss =)
In other news, I had to abandon my tests on adding additional Magnesium to the mix. The magnesium I tried was adding an unpleasant metallic taste to the mix. Many of the testers couldn’t taste it but I certainly could and didn’t like it at all. Pro tip: when experimenting, don’t change more than one variable at a time (adding vitamin powder plus magnesium) because you won’t be able to tell which one is causing an unwanted result. The end result of all of this is I’m going to keep the magnesium level where it’s at. It’s sufficient for most people and for the weirdos out there (like me) that get occasional muscle cramps because they need more magnesium I’d recommend using a magnesium supplement. Personally I’m using this one. Currently it’s $17.46 for 360 tablets, I’m taking 2 of them which adds 850mg of magnesium. In a few weeks I’ll probably try cutting back to 1 and see if that’s sufficient for me.
There is one more possible change: I just bought 1000g of Vitamin K7 powder. It works out to be 1g = 10 pills of the NOW stuff that I’m currently using (1,000 μg/g). I’m pretty stoked with the prospect of NOT having to open up 100 bottles of 100 pills and getting the powder out. If this does work out there’s going to be a departure in the DIY recipe vs the recipe I mix up since it’s pretty hard to get a hold of this powder unless you’re willing to spend really a lot of money (let’s put it this way, I’m not saving very much by doing it this way, it’s mostly convenience). So the DIY recipe will remain with the NOW capsules and I’ll be using the stuff from aidp.com
I finally got around to grinding up the multi-vitamin into a powder and seeing if it affected the taste of Keto Chow – it doesn’t. As soon as I can switch over my production pipeline I’m going to start incorporating it into the mix. There will likely be a transition period for a few weeks where the more popular flavors (I’m looking at you: Rich Chocolate) get swapped over almost immediately and the more exotic flavors are switched slower. I’m planning on putting a sticker on the updated ones, something along the lines of “No more vitamin pill, it’s in the mix!”. This will make things easier for everyone and I’ll stop forgetting to include the vitamins when I ship out a week. It will also null the questions about using a different vitamin which really wasn’t a good idea anyway.
I’m investigating adding Magnesium Glycinate (2g/day) to the mixture to raise the levels of magnesium. I recently got a really fun muscle cramp in my leg and while researching the cause and remedy I discovered that I probably need more magnesium. Keto Chow already has 555mg of magnesium (132% RDI) per day but some digging shows that on a ketogenic diet you probably need 300mg over the RDI. This change brings the total in Keto Chow above 900mg a day. I did a fair amount of research into the different forms of Magnesium. I could have added more magnesium citrate but the citric acid can act as a laxative. I ended up with wanting to go with either Magnesium Malate or Glycinate – both are highly bio-available and without the issues of some of the other forms of magnesium. I would have preferred the Malate but it was difficult to get in bulk powder form, whereas I can get the Glycinate in big bulk packages (and it also comes in smaller packages too).
So I’m currently testing both changes together: powdered vitamin and additional magnesium. I’m also testing a third change, this time to the fish oil. The stuff I usually take requires 5 fish oil pills, There’s a slightly more expensive one that I only need 2 per day. It also has an “enteric coating” that makes you not burp up fish taste. Taking the two is a bit easier. If all goes well in the test I’ll switch over the fish oil pills I sell from 35 for a week to 14 for a week. I’ll have to take new product pictures.
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