Ketogenic diet - fad or phenom?

[Pedaldog.]

Y'know, the very concept of Bullet-proof Coffee sounds revolting:

1. Strong black coffee
+
2. 25g Organic grass-fed unsalted butter
+
3. 2 Tsps Coconut oil
+
4. A blender

But it's actually quite yummy - and makes a great substitute for breakfast.

I amd I like the sound of this and may well experimenticaterise!

[Chris S]

I had to give the coconut oil a miss. It's a natural laxative  .

I just had a hankering for something indulgent. So I knocked up a Chocolate Minute Muffin. Mmm...mmmm. With a huge dollop of whipped cream, and a few strawberries. Just 5g of carbs, and deeeeelicious.

I love comfort food this time of year, especially when the Black Dog is prowling. Stews, heavy puddings... y'know, stodge. A Keto diet lends itself to this, as fatty food is quite comforting in its texture and the way it fills you up for ages.

[Otto]

Interesting Thread... as an aside my wife is head teacher of a special school, and several of the students are on the Ketogenic diet , to control their epilepsy they have much fewer seizures whilst on the diet

[Ningishzidda]

Still chewing the fat over this?

[Julian]

Have any of you HFLC dieters had a blood cholesterol test done since starting this diet? I try to follow a Paleo lifestyle and my total cholesterol was recently measured to be 7.7 mmol (NHS recomend <5). My HDL (good cholesterol) had also gone up so the ratio of total/hdl had gone down since my cholesterol was last checked in '09 when I ate a pescatarian (fish and veg) diet. So although this ratio of total/hdl has gone down and I am less risk of a heart attack my GP still wants to see my total cholesterol figure lower. I wondered what your experiences were?

What is - or was - a Paleo lifestyle? Presumably most of it can only be conjecture.

It means he lives in a cave and accesses YACF via a crude painting on the wall.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I'm definitely Neo in that case. My cave has moving pictures - I paint a new one on the wall everyday.

[Julian]

I have experimented with a high-protein diet but my lifestyle remains thoroughly modern.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Maybe I shouldn't worry about my cholesterol. See this Aus programme.

Much of the info there is misrepresented; people hear what they want to hear.

Quoting Eades "arteriosclerosis is both an inflammatory disease and caused by cholesterol"

You want to avoid clogged-up arteries?  Watch the balance of fat types that you intake, get total cholesterol down to a sensible level and get the balance correct.

[Chris S]

Quoting Eades "arteriosclerosis is both an inflammatory disease and caused by cholesterol"

Specifically, small-dense LDL which is highly inflammatory, and causes plaque deposition at the inflammation site. Large particulate LDL is mostly benign, and HDL is fundamentally helpful in keeping arteries healthy. HDL:LDL ratio is improved by exercise; concentrations of LDL and its particulate size is governed by diet. Overall cholesterol level is mostly determined by genetics.

[Chris S]

Oh, and - it's moments like this that one really really hopes the Keto thing is right  .

Teatime!


din dins by Pelotonhound, on Flickr

Butter sautéed mushrooms , red meat, veg with MOAR butter.

(I won't mention the pudding which features double cream).

Carbs? Erm... hardly any.

Audax tomorrow. Carbing Fatting up!

[Chris S]

BTW - I've lost 1.5Kg this week. Fat doesn't make you fat, it would seem.

[mattc]

BTW - I've lost 1.5Kg this week. Fat doesn't make you fat, it would seem.

Sounds like you're just eating less fat than you were.


 

[Glover Fan]

That's an extremely small portion. I hit the other end of the "Hungry Horse" megasaurus spectrum when I have a steak meal. But obviously it is the chips that are the problem.

[simonp]

That's a 3ft wide plate.

[Adam]

On a ketogenic diet I do find that I have to eat more than I really feel like eating, in order to avoid losing yet more weight. 

It's a real effort sometimes to force yet more cream/butter/yummy stuff down.   

[geraldc]

Switched back to this diet, to shrink my stomach before going on holiday.

I just went to the bathroom, and thought why does the toilet seem to smell of lilt? Hello ketosis!

[Julian]

Best article I've read on the Paleo Diet.

[Chris S]

Interesting stuff.

As for the comments...  Blimey, there are some angry people about. Ah... the bottom half of the internet, how we love it!

[Jakob]

Best article I've read on the Paleo Diet.

Summing up what many considered to be the main point of the entire conference, she told reporters:

“Look, the diet itself is sound; it’s the philosophy that’s bullshit. Eat what you want. Just leave the damn cavemen out of it.”

I know a lot of crossfitters, many of them often following a paleo-diet, none of them think 'that this is what their ancestors ate'.

[Chris S]

There's obviously a lot of overlap between Paleo and LCHF; it's a sliding scale of carbs from virtually nil (<50g a day) for the Nutritional Ketosis promoted by Phinney & Volek et al (and indirectly, Atkins Induction), to a lowish level (100-150g a day) for the likes of Mark Sissons (Paleo Blueprint).

I originally came at this from the extreme low-carb end. After a brief attempt to get back into keto ways after the end of the audax season, my diet has become a disaster zone - victim of a seasonal visit from The Black Dog (Chocolate anyone? No? How about a couple of packets of Chocolate Hobnobs? You can wash it down with this nice bottle of red... you get the idea). I quite like the idea that eating real food panders to our gene expression, but nobody really knows what we used to eat, back in the day. Probably stuff I'd never dream of  eating; organs of kill, insects, roots, berries. I'll do berries, and roots if they're potatoes or carrots. Oh and lets not forget, we're actually really good at going without. Sure - we'll be hungry and miserable but nobody said it was our god-given right to be happy all the time.

I think it's a very reasonable thing to say "Our diet has to be good enough to get us to breeding age, and no better." And in that, we are pretty adaptable. We can eat pretty much anything it would seem, and subsist in some way. We're really really good at putting on fat when carbohydrates are in abundance (don't I know it) and can live off that really effectively for bloody ages, which is why it's so damn hard to lose the fat again.

But surely the modern take on this is not just to get to breeding age, bang out a few rug-rats and then peg it? We're looking for a diet/way of life that can (a) co-exist with our modern "busy" lives, and (b) allow us (within the limitations of our genes, damn them) to live as long and healthful life as possible. Do I think Ancel Keys had it right? Hell no - and I think that's where Paleo and other low/moderate carb diets will lead us. I can't decide if I want to succumb to the whole conspiracy theory that we're all victims of a HUGE crime perpetrated on us by Big Food and Big Pharma, ever since Lyndon B Johnson bowed to his farming buddies and backed Ancel Keys' completely bogus "Seven Countries" study that (wrongly, because he left out most of the data that disproved what he was wanting to prove) apparently linked cholesterol with heart disease, and that saturated fat was to blame, thereby opening the doors for forty years of Sugar and Wheat based dominion over us serfs. I'm not quite that paranoid. But then again, I have learned that if I want to lose body fat, cutting carbs, not calories, is what works.

[mattc]

I think it's a very reasonable thing to say "Our diet has to be good enough to get us to breeding age, and no better." And in that, we are pretty adaptable. We can eat pretty much anything it would seem, and subsist in some way. [...]

But surely the modern take on this is not just to get to breeding age, bang out a few rug-rats and then peg it? We're looking for a diet/way of life that can (a) co-exist with our modern "busy" lives, and (b) allow us (within the limitations of our genes, damn them) to live as long and healthful life as possible.

Yes, that's the part of the article that grated with me. He (they?) seemed so obsessed with getting the evolution facts right, they'd lost sight of the bigger picture!

[Cudzoziemiec]

But they specifically don't say a low-carb diet is unhealthy. They say its successful existence in pre-history is no proof of its health, because all a diet has to do to be successful in evolutionary terms is get sprogs, not get healthy adults. Thus the 15-year-old girl who existed on a diet of mc-chicken nuggets - palaeolithic people could have lived well off that, had kids at 16 then died at 20 (or 40 or 80 or whenever) it would have been a successful diet in ensuring the continuation of palaeo-bods. Had there only been a mammoth mac donalds.

[PloddinPedro]

..................... I have learned that if I want to lose body fat, cutting carbs, not calories, is what works.

Yeah but.... that seems to work for you, as you appear to be lucky insofar as you are a 'responder' perhaps - for others among us (i.e. specifically me!) it seems there has to be more to it. (And besides, are you really sure that as well as cutting carbs, you were not also running on a reduced calorie intake as well and it was THIS factor that caused your weight loss?)

I found going low carb (admittedly, not properly, into ketosis and that) I was more able to control my appetite and could ride longer on less food intake BUT I couldn't lose any weight. For me, the holy grail continues to be the answer to the question: how, once I've established a calorie deficit, do I get my body to burn its accumulated body fat (and NOT muscle as well) rather than simply just shut down with fatigue?

Strength building exercise is probably the way to skew weight loss towards fat reduction and not muscle loss but I can't find an answer to the fatigue thing. The depressing thought is that it's taken [30] years slowly to build the surplus body fat and the only effective way to reverse this is to do another 30 years of calorie deficit and there just isn't time if I'm ever gonna do another PBP!

[L CC]

Running at a calorie deficit is unsustainable, if you're hungry all the time. Sooner or later you're going to cave, willpower being a finite reserve. We don't have to live with being hungry, even the poorest of the UK have ready access to cheap food, so just because we can survive being hungry doesn't mean we do- we don't have to.
Fat and protein take longer to digest so leave you feeling fuller, longer. Even if 'carbs kill you' isn't true, eating less of them makes me less hungry, all the time.

I've lost 10kg this year, and most of that is not when I'm doing lots of fat burning exercising, but when I'm eating HFLC and regularly lifting weights.

PP, I really don't think it is being a responder or not. It's actually doing it or not. You've said yourself 'not properly into ketosis'. You already burn fat well- you have to, to be a successful audaxer. The fatigue you mention, is that the well documented 'carb flu' of the newly carb deprived? That goes, within a couple of weeks. Also- weight training will assist with fatigue, the stronger you are, the greater the muscle-fat ratio, the more energy you'll have (all other things being equal).

[PloddinPedro]

fboab - first I must say that I accept that (a) I didn’t really try the LCHF properly - I acknowledged that in my post and I’m not knocking the idea; and (b) I do know that most of my problem is probably just failing to knuckle down and DO THE WORK!

Forgive me if I misunderstood our conversations in the Fox & Roman but I thought that you’d been doing the weights etc. for some time but it is only since you’ve been running that you’ve seen the major weight loss success?

My point about the fatigue - not very well expressed on reflection - was made more from past experience rather than my half-assed attempts at LCHF, said experience being that if I manage to create a “weight-losing calorie deficit” for more than a day or two, I just get very tired and slow down rather than eat my bloody body fat stores. Of course, were I in a life-or-death situation, no doubt my body would respond, but that’s really a step too far!

Oh well, perhaps I’ll just give up and go ride my bike!