I’m struggling right now. My ghosts are haunting me back into old habits. My past is filled with lots of ugly, and the main reason I self-medicate with food. If you ask most overweight people, my guess is that they would talk about using food to make themselves feel better. I fit that mold perfectly. My self-medication started in childhood when I found that a candy bar made me feel better about my life. I have a dark past and food was always my constant. I never really got into any other self-medicating things, I didn’t like how alcohol made me sick and illicit drugs weren’t an option. Food is universally accepted and socially tolerated.
Yesterday, my son and I got into a heated argument. Due to my past, I suffer from PTSD and loud noises will trigger me, even the sound of yelling. After the argument calmed down I was a wreck. My heart rate was high and I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin. Eventually I calmed down enough to feel the exhaustion that comes with a visit from my PTSD. That’s when the old ghost came in. The voices in my head were telling me to go eat something sweet. I fought for two hours before I finally gave in. One bowl of cereal later, my craving was gone but I was so disappointed in myself for breaking Keto. I have to admit, the cravings are less than in the past, before I started this journey I would devour an entire box of chocolates after a PTSD event.
I write this to remind you that we are all human. We will have days that suck. We will have days that we thrive. Finding some sort of balance is what is necessary for survival. Even if it’s messy, or shameful.
One of the biggest issues I have had in this journey of mine is consistency. You see, I live in a home with two other people. They do not practice IF or Keto, but I cook for them both. I quit trying to keep up with them by using “safe” foods to mimic what they were eating so I didn’t feel left out. Sometimes that means I fall. Hard. Painfully.
Friday is pizza night at my house. I usually make myself my “safe” pizza crust with almond flour, cheese and egg. Toppings are Keto friendly anyway so I go with my cheese, pepperoni and mushroom. Well, I neglected to check on my supply of mozzarella. I didn’t have enough to make my crust and my child loves Pan Pizza, so I picked up my phone and ordered in. I wanted to just get the pizza “fix” without the crust. When the pizza arrived, I looked at the beautiful thin crust pizza with cheese, pepperoni and mushroom and sighed. While my kiddo was happily munching his pizza, I carefully peeled off the cheese and topping and ate. All of a sudden everything became surreal. It was like the pizza was taunting me. “Have a bite of the crust” the pizza said. “One bite won’t hurt you”. Oh yeah, I was justifying like crazy but I took a bite. I don’t know how time stood still, but in a flash half the pizza was gone. Mind you, I have a wheat allergy so I was not going to fare well through this splurge.
When I came to and realized what just transpired, I felt so ashamed. I felt like I failed. I spent the weekend beating myself up in between numerous trips to the bathroom. Yeah, wheat makes me really sick. After a long pity party and really painful intestinal cramping I decided to blog about it for the first time.
People who are overweight really do try to lose it. I have not met many overweight people who haven’t spent huge amounts of money trying to fix this problem. We rise, and we fall. We pick ourselves up again and do it from square one again and again while listening to the world that we’re not trying hard enough.
Walk a mile in our shoes and you will find that we want what’s best for our bodies. We have goals and dreams just like anyone else. Sometimes we have our demons we must battle in order to thrive, and that fight is exhausting. It just takes the perfect moment between the battles to fall.
Tomorrow I will pick myself up and go again. I will do another 72 hour fast to reset. During this fast I will feel amazing and help repair the damage from Friday. I will remember how I feel and now after journaling it, I will succeed. One little baby step at a time.
I included intermittent fasting to my diet to see if it could help since I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted from Keto. Turns out fasting is the absolute best thing I could have ever added to my Keto regimen. There are lots of ways to start fasting, it’s something we all do overnight. Breakfast was named to “break the fast” we have every night when we sleep. Look at it like this, you’re already a faster!
I started with getting rid of my morning meal. It turns out that if you are overweight, skipping breakfast is an easy way to extend your fasting time and to help extend the benefits of your overnight fast. For my needs, I usually eat nothing before 11 am. I do hydrate however, and have a cup or two of black coffee or plain/herbal tea with nothing added. The caffeine in the coffee acts as an appetite suppressant and helps you get over the hump when fasting becomes difficult.
There are different ways to fast. The most common is the 16:8 which means if you start eating at 11 am you can continue to eat until 7 pm. Now, calories in/calories out is still critical. You don’t want to shock your body by trying to eat every minute of your 8 hour feeding window. Start with a high protein food to get started, I usually eat a cheese stick to break my fast, then wait about an hour for a main meal. If you dive in right away after fasting with a big meal, you will set yourself up for a binge that most of us wouldn’t be strong enough to stop. So, be kind to your body and take it slow. If I were eating during my 8 hours it would look like this:
11 am: Cheesestick and coffee with heavy cream
12 noon: Green salad with homemade ranch dressing, protein like tuna or chicken, olives, pickled vegetables. Herbal iced tea.
2 pm: Almonds, Cheese
4 pm: Celery, raw broccoli, etc.
6 pm: Dinner, focused on protein and vegetables that are grown above the ground.
8 pm: Cottage cheese with Strawberries (plain, no sweetener)
As you can see, an 8 hour food window gives you plenty of options to eat. This way of life is not about deprivation, it’s about respecting your body and what goes into it. Now the greatest thing about Keto is involved. Eat the butter. Have the Ghee with stirfry vegetables. Add coconut oil to recipes. Don’t be afraid of fat. Your body will thank you.
Now, a word of warning. If you consume too much protein (BACON!) your body has a sneaky little way of converting the protein to carbohydrate and messing up your blood sugar, knocking you out of ketosis. It’s called gluconeogenesis. Gluco (sugar) neo (new) genesis (make). That’s right my friends, your sneaky little self can make sugar out of protein! So keep your protein grams around 110-120 grams and you’ll do fine.
If you’re following the Keto diet, you already know about macros, your guideposts to staying in ketosis. My personal macros are 23 grams of carbs, 145 grams of fat, and 116 grams of protein. I average about 1800 calories in, but doing Keto with intermittent fasting means that most of my calories come from the fats I eat. This is where it’s important to buy quality food, because your outcome will reflect what you are putting in your body. With Keto + Intermittent Fasting, you truly are what you eat!
Apps I found helpful through this journey:
LIFE Intermittent Fasting Tracker
Carb Manager Diet Log
Thanks for reading so far, and I will add more soon. Stay tuned!
So, I started Keto about three years ago because the ketogenic diet was a treatment option for my child’s epilepsy. I wanted to find out more and when I started looking at the numbers, I realized that Keto could be an efective option for me to control my Type 2 Diabetes. Back in the early stages of medicine, the ketogenic diet was the only way to control Diabetes, no matter the type, based on the body’s innate ability to burn fat instead of sugar and bypass the pancreas and insulin usage. Well, this diet wasn’t very appealing because of the severe dietary restriction needed to achieve ketosis led most of the people using it to be inpatient at the hospital under close medical supervision due to the stress on the kidneys. Fast forward to today, the current popularity of the Keto diet is a far cry from what the first doctors to put their patients on the ketogenic diet experienced.
Most people on today’s Keto diet keep their carbohydrate levels low enough to reach ketosis, but not so low as to experience the problems experienced by those first pioneers to the diet. It’s a balancing act, and one that takes more attention to detail than the standard American diet. I’ve found that it is achievable with the proper mindset and careful monitoring of food.
These are the resources I’ve found through my years that were so helpful in my journey. They are:
The Obesity Code by Jason Fung, MD
The Metabolism Reset Diet by Alan Christianson, NMD
Simply Keto and Beyond Simply Keto by Susanne Ryan
Now for a personal note. My breaking point was my weight. At my heaviest, I tipped the scales at nearly 400 pounds. Whew. That’s a lot of emotion in that statement. As of today, I am down to 330. Keto is not a quick fix for me, but in upcoming messages I will let you know what it took for me to lose the weight. You lose a lot of water weight on Keto. If you start, you must hydrate with water spiked with pink salt for essential minerals. The only vitamins I add are a daily multi, potassium and magnesium. Hydration is not a joke, you must drink lots of water to keep from getting muscle cramps and otheer dehydration issues. Plus you will have to get rid of those artificial sweeteners. They elicit the same insulin response that sugar does and since insulin is a fat storage hormone you will not see weight loss happening.
Sending my love and blessings. Chat with you next time, and leave questions for me and I will answer them in my next post!
Most of you here are wondering why I walked away from most Social Media. Without getting into anything too political and/or ugly, I felt like it had consumed too much of my time and energy worrying about what others think. So, I decided to “blog it” and see if I can regain control of my situation. Here’s hoping!
So, in the past four months, I had restarted the Keto lifestyle. This time around I combined it with Intermittent Fasting, and I have to say that I’ve found my personal holy grail. Each one of us is a beautiful, unique creature (some of us more creature than others) and we deserve to live our lives loving our bodies however they look. Accepting yourself and any perceived flaws now will help you on your journey.
I’m opening this blog to chat with you, whether in live video or by messages, just to let you know someone out here is listening and wanting to connect. I look forward to our journey together.
I’ve started this blog because I’ve found the online world has become a scary place and people who are usually nice in person change to a different creature once they are hidden by the anonymity of the internet. So, I decided to get rid of that toxicity and start this blog as a safe place for people to come chat, ask questions, and feel safe in an online community.
Why do this?
Basically put, Facebook and Twitter are scary places to be but most of us put up with it because we want to stay connected to friends and family from all over.
So, grab a cuppa of your favorite beverage, sit back and enjoy a judgement-free zone to increase your knowledge, laugh with friends and cry together. This is a safe place, and I will take it to the next level if anyone acts unsafely here.
Coffee Talk with Charlene 