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100 Kg (down 17 total in 4 months)

This entry is part 40 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

This morning I finally hit 220.5 lbs. This is kinda a big deal for a variety of reasons:

It’s within rounding distance of being exactly 100 kg (220.46 lbs). I’m almost as excited about being 100kg as I am about being 37 (“I’m 37, I’m not old.” “Well I couldn’t just call you ‘man’.”).
It’s how much I weighed 15 years ago when I got married.
It’s less than I weighed yesterday.
“220, 221, whatever it takes“
Brings my total weight lost since I started a Ketogenic diet 4 months ago (tomorrow) to 37.3 lbs. That’s 3 short of being 2 “stone”. I guess I should see if I can lose another 2.7 by tomorrow so it’ll be a nice, even 40 in 4 months =)

The spike a month ago was when I went off my diet and ate carbs with reckless abandon in preparation for a weight loss contest. Good times, not going to do that again =)

By chris|2016-10-13T07:28:18-06:00February 19th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|2 Comments

Discovered a superpower

This entry is part 39 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Yesterday for kicks I did a little experiment and didn’t eat anything from 21:00 the night before until 18:00, so 21 hours without eating just to see what would happen. I had read that doing a ketogenic diet my body would cope with fasting extremely well, and it did. I still drank water and some zero calorie flavored things, but I didn’t get hungry at all for the entire day. Then I chowed down on some Keto chow, a bunch of cheese and some beef jerky. I’m trying it again today and so far it’s worked extremely well. The next 3 days I’m working at a trade show/conference all day and I’m not going to have ready access to refrigeration for bringing keto chow. In the past I’ve just brought an insulated lunch bag with a cold pack which has worked very well but frankly I don’t want to be bothered with transporting food and all that. Anyhow, my plan is for the next 3 days (bringing the total to 5 days): I’m going to eat when I get home and fast the rest of the day. On Saturday that will probably take me beyond 24 hours since that’s the pack-it-up day. It feels a little weird having not eaten for so long, especially since I’m still not hungry. I didn’t have any problem at all doing the elliptical this morning either. Anyhow, it’ll be an interesting experiment.

For my own reference, I started the day yesterday at 224.7 and this morning I was 222.8.

By chris|2015-02-11T14:41:02-07:00February 11th, 2015|Weight Loss, Soylent, Keto Chow, Ketogenic|4 Comments

Much better

This entry is part 37 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Trace amounts of ketones are showing up now and everything is returned to normal (thankfully). It also seems that keeping up on electrolytes spared me the Keto Flu this time, which is AWESOME! I still am anxious for my weight trend to head down steadily, that should be this week. I didn’t loose nearly as much water weight burning off glycogen as I would have liked. Eating carbs was probably a bad idea in the long run but it did give me some very valuable perspective. If I don’t get enough sleep lately, my legs hurt off and on; that didn’t change when I was back on carbs so I do not think that’s the cause – it’s likely the sleep (or lack thereof). Eating carbs also gave me the perspective that I really don’t need to cheat at all, it just doesn’t hold the appeal it once did. I also ordered a 12 pack of Quest Cookies and Cream bars today because they’re yummy.

By chris|2015-01-26T15:18:55-07:00January 26th, 2015|Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|Comments Off

Leveling the playing field

This entry is part 34 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

On Wednesday I have my initial weigh in for a local weight loss contest. It’s based on % of body weight lost. In the past the winners have lost anywhere from 15 to 21%. I figure that no one else doing it is going to be starting out without glycogen in their system so I’ve been building back up my reserve. Glycogen comes with a lot of water weight, this is the major 5-10 pounds that most people lose in the first week of Keto (and it stays off so long as you don’t eat carbs).

In other words: I just ate some biscuits and gravy, yesterday was Mexican food and on Wednesday I’ll have pizza and soda.

It’s been interesting having carbohydrates again (if only for a few days). Yeah I do feel sluggish and rather crappy. And thirsty, I keep making myself feel ill from drinking so much water but I’m still thirsty. I’m really not looking forward to carb cravings on Thurdsay (or the keto flu). I had completely overcome that and intentionally putting myself back into that is actually kinda stupid.

I guess one good thing is it’s given me some perspective: Carbs aren’t as delicious and I thought they were. Eating a Kit-Kat or strawberry oreo was anti-climactic. Yeah, it’s good but not good enough to cheat on next week. Frankly melted cheese, bacon and other 0 carb foods are good enough there really isn’t a reason to cheat.

Now excuse me as I go eat the last tortilla chips I’ll eat for at least 6 months.

By chris|2015-01-18T09:44:42-07:00January 18th, 2015|Ketogenic, Soylent, Weight Loss|3 Comments

The apps and tools I’m using to track my progress

This entry is part 29 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

A coworker asked me a while ago about all the stuff I’m using, I figure I might as well document it. Here are the Apps, monitors and other things I’m using to track stuff about my health.

Activity Monitor

I grabbed a used Fitbit Flex off eBay about a month ago to see if I would like it better than the Jawbone Up I had. Ultimately the Fitbit won and the Jawbone is in my backpack in case anybody on craigslist decides they want to buy it for $40. The Jawbone app was actually far better than the Fitbit one and gave me better information but I like the bluetooth sync function of the Fitbit and couldn’t find an Up24 for cheap. Neither do automatic sleep tracking, you had to tell the device it was nap time and again tell it when you woke up. The more expensive trackers do more stuff automatically. Both Up and Fitbit talk quite nicely to all the other apps mentioned here, sending activity data over automatically.

Fitbit Web UI

Fitbit Android UI

Weight Tracking

The Withings app/website does a great job of tracking weight, blood pressure and a number of other metrics. It’s also free to use and will send the weight data to a large number of applications. By having it send that data I don’t have to go into 5 different apps to update my weight all the time, it just does it automagically for me. You can use the Withings app and site with the Withings Wi-Fi scale or one of their fitness trackers, but you don’t need to. I did eventually end up buying a Withings scale but I used the app for about a month and a half before that. You can also import and export all the measurements very easily. I imported my weight logs from all the way back to October 2006.

Withings Web UI

Withings Android UI

Nutrition Tracking

I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for 2 or 3 years to (occasionally, up until 4 months ago) track my nutrition. Currently I’m on a 87 day streak of putting in my food, weight and activity. I use MFP as a sort of “central hub” for everything else. All my activity monitoring, weight and workouts head here. On a Ketogenic Diet I also need to track how many carbs I’m eating and it does a good job of that. There’s some settings and a userscript that enhance MFP for keto diets. It’s particularly nice to be able to scan a barcode to add food and with how I’m eating mostly the same stuff every day it’s a cinch. I used to use My Net Diary but MFP is way more useful.

MyFitnessPal Web UI

MyFitnessPal Android UI

Workout tracking

I’m using Digifit on my phone to track exercise (via a heart rate monitor, see below). On an ideal day I’m doing 30 minutes of elliptical in the morning and 30 minutes of running/walking in the evening. They have Android and iOS apps that have limited functionality unless you pay the $1.99 or whatever to upgrade it – it was worth it and I used an account that is shared on all my family’s phones and devices to pay so my wife gets the upgrade too. It can be used indoors on exercise equipment (which is what I mostly do) but it really likes going outside to fire up your GPS and correlate actual distance and speed with heart rate. It gets weight data automatically from Withings to use in calorie calculations.

Digifit Web UI

Digifit Android UI

Heart Rate Monitoring

I bought a Jarv Bluetooth 4.0 Chest Heart Rate Monitor for myself and then another one for my wife about 3 days later since it works so well (then we can work out together!). It works exceptionally well and communicates to Digifit just fine, although occasionally it takes a bit of prodding or wetting the chest contacts to wake it up. Coupled with Digifit, it does a much better job at calculating the actual calories you are burning. This morning with the heart rate monitor, Digifit calculated that I burned 439 calories in 30 minutes on the elliptical. That’s a far cry from the machine’s solely weight based calculation of 870.

Ketone Level Monitoring

After a few weeks in Ketosis you get accustomed to what it feels like and can mostly just Keep Calm & Keto On. I do still occasionally check my ketone levels. When I first started I bought a 200 pack of 2 Parameter Glucose & Ketone Test (URS) Urinalysis Reagent Strip (C 200 Strips). I also picked up a very, very cheap blood alcohol breathalyzer about 2 months ago for fun because the super cheap ones can’t distinguish the difference between alcohol on your breath and acetone. Actual breathalyzers that cost more than $5-10 can tell the difference just fine. I’m very proud to report that this morning I blew 0.05% even though I have no alcohol in my system at all.

Cheap Breathalyzer

Ketone Test Strip looks great!

Fun with Graphs

This entry is part 20 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

While it’s not as fun as “Fun with Flags” here are some fun graphs. Here’s my weight since I started doing keto. High spot is 257.8, this morning I was 238.0 (Thursday I was 235 but I ate a LOT of shrimp and prime rib on Friday):

Weight graph

I got myself and my wife each a Jarv Premium Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Heart Rate Monitor and have been using https://my.digifit.com to track workouts (mostly treadmill and elliptical). They do a really good job and were half or less the cost of comparable ones. They work great with our phones and appear to be very accurate. Digifit tracks time, heart rates and the like and has some cool dashboards. The graph above is calories burned while wearing the heart rate monitor. Did pretty well last week, we’ll see how well this week goes.

There was a reddit thread last night that caused a lot of interest in official and DIY soylent – and a pretty massive surge in visits to my site. It was pretty funny to see the stats going a little crazy. Below is site traffic according to WordPress:

Here is site traffic according to Google Analytics:

You can see in increased database queries on the backend:

mysql_commands-week

But it’s not nearly enough to significantly impact the load on the processors:

load-month

Name	1/6/2015	3/20/2014	target
Sodium	141	142	135-145 mmol/L
Potassium	4.7	4.4	3.5-5.1 mmol/L
Chloride	103	106	99-111 mmol/L
ECO2	28.2	29.6	21.0-32.0 mmol/L
Glucose	87	79	74-106 mg/dL
BUN	21	19	7-18 mg/dL
Creatinine	1.11	1.1	0.6-1.3 mg/dL
BUN/Creatinine Ratio	18.9	17.3	8.0-27.0 Ratio
Calcium	9.5	9.2	6.5-11.8 mg/dL
Alkaline Phosphatase	79.2	83	50-136 U/L
Cholesterol	135	142	0-200 mg/dL
Triglycerides	96	160	0-200 mg/dL
HDL, Cholesterol	45	43	40-60 mg/dL
LDL (calculated)	71	67	0-160 mg/dL

results

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Activity Monitor

Weight Tracking

Nutrition Tracking

Workout tracking

Heart Rate Monitoring

Ketone Level Monitoring

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