Ketogenic Diet - Powerful Dietary Strategy for Certain Conditions

[Scottie]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

This is always what has worked for me, but maybe things will be different in a keto adapted state, and a more "super slow", 1 set per exercise would be a better training program. There is so much conflicting information out there, even in the low carb community, so I pretty much just have to experiment on myself for a long time to see what actually works.

I think this is important to remember: what we are doing is essentially an experiment.

Sure, we have general guidelines to follow, but each person is different. Some may go into ketosis quickly, others may not. Some may tolerate increased amounts of protein without being kicked out of ketosis, and others may find that protein must be kept very low.

This makes sense, because we each have various issues and/or types of long-term damage caused by various events/habits in our past, and even probably differences that result from our particular genetic makeup.

My workouts are usually 20-30 minutes, twice a week. That seems to be ideal for me. More than that, and I do get fatigued. Otherwise, I find my workouts (followed by a nice cold shower!) to be really energizing and even calming.

I also noticed that I still have "weak days" where just walking up the stairs makes my legs ache, so it's pretty clear to me that there is still housecleaning going on internally even at 6 weeks. This is also not surprising, because if there is DNA repair occurring, I reckon it's gonna take months to really see the full benefits.

 

[Gertrudes]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

Reading everyone's experiences inspired me to write a little about my own exercise journey, so here it goes: 14 years ago I began to more seriously exercise when I started a professional dance program. My health had been very compromised until then, although I wasn't aware of it. When I began the program, however, everything changed. Throughout all of my life it had been normal for me to have to do an excruciating effort to wake up after the alarm clock rang. In fact, I got used to set it up for half an hour before I had to get up so as to give me time. After getting up I would be in a foul mood for at least 3 hours, and unable to eat until 1pm. I had brain fog and was unable to concentrate, all of which were normal to me. Now looking back, these were clearly symptoms of adrenal fatigue probably combined with other unbalances, when one thing is off, the entire system will suffer.

Everything changed after I began to exercise. Honestly, it's as if I became a whole new person. One year after entering the program I no longer had problems getting up, much less brain fog and physical fatigue, still having some difficulty eating in the morning although less.
Gradually becoming physically stronger and gaining a better posture by straightening my spine had a direct, profound impact on my mental and emotional wellbeing. I had never realized how much a slouched posture and weak core made me feel so weak at other levels. One thing very likely feeding the other, my previous emotional and mental vulnerability weakening me physically, and my physical weakness further weakening me internally.

Since then I gained much more energy, mental focus, even willpower and a sense of practicality, funnily enough. It's as if becoming more connected with my body by strengthening it helped me "ground" myself and connect with reality better, if that makes sense.

Having changed my diet after having found the forum brought everything into a whole new, never dreamt of, level. It's like living in a different body! (in the positive sense, of course)

The reason for me to be writting this is that if there are any members feeling unsure or procrastinating about exercise (and diet, for that matter), remember how it changed my life and how it is changing the lives of so many other members who have reported their experiences here. You may not get it right at once, you may start by feeling very tired after working out. However, as with everything, including the diet, it may take a lot of testing and trying out until you figure out what works for you, and your body DOES gain endurance and ability to sustain the workouts with much greater ease through continuous practice. So much so that what you have done months, or even weeks ago, can now be done with half the effort. When you reach that state you can up the intensity a little so as to maintain the same amount of effort, only continuously adapted to your physical condition.

 

[mcb]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

I'm wondering what you mean by serious workouts? Phinney and others have brought up the fact, that doing too much exercise, as in more than ca 20min at a time, will mess up your energy levels, heighten cortisol levels and can make you feel fatigued.

I haven't taken away that impression from reading Phinney & Volek. In their latest book they talk about people running 100 mile marathons and other heavy exercise, and how to improve recovery. Obviously, you don't want to do that kind of exercise several times a week, but the human body is an incredible machine under favorable conditions, and it doesn't break easily when it is working right.

Our simplified digestive tract, lack of fur, and ability to sweat (among other things) all contribute to our potential capabilities for sustained physical performance. I would guess that these adaptations are not present merely to support a few minutes of exercise a few times a week, although I don't think they are there to support running 100 mile marathons either. They certainly didn't evolve to support working out in a gym.

One idea Phinney & Volek bring out in their new book is that ROS production during exercise may result in destruction and depletion of HUFAs including AA and DHA, leading to impaired insulin sensitivity and slower recovery. They suggest that a ketogenic diet that includes adequate amounts of specific micronutrients can help mitigate this effect.

Of course an individual with a broken metabolism is going to face a different set of issues with regard to exercise frequency and intensity than a trained athlete following a truly healthy diet. But there is a lot of room here for experimentation, and I don't think we are anywhere near hearing the last word on how much exercise is "enough."

As an individual that has lived with broken metabolism and a profound lack of athletic ability, I find it more productive to focus on the fact that it may be possible to reap major benefits from limited, infrequent exercise of just the right kind. But if I had a different "model," one that worked a lot better, I would want to take it out from time to time and see what it could do.

 

[Ollie]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

...But speaking of under-skin fat, there is this traditional Mediterranean Italian dish called Lardo (lard) di Colonnata:

Lardo di Colonnata, to give it its full name, is a delicacy produced from pork fat in and around the Tuscan mountain town of Colonnata. Happily for fans of cured meat, it's not only a frugal way of preserving pork fat over winter - it's delicious too!

I can confirm that, I've been eating a Spanish variety and then an Italian variety, with my breakfast sausages or bacon, since discovering it in Barcelona last autumn.

 

[Gertrudes]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

I can confirm that, I've been eating a Spanish variety and then an Italian variety, with my breakfast sausages or bacon, since discovering it in Barcelona last autumn.

Where do you get it from Prodigal Son? So far I have found this site: _http://www.nifeislife.com/lardo-colonnata-sold-500g-pieces-p-947.html although they don't specify which spices are used.

 

[aragorn]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

I'm wondering what you mean by serious workouts? Phinney and others have brought up the fact, that doing too much exercise, as in more than ca 20min at a time, will mess up your energy levels, heighten cortisol levels and can make you feel fatigued.

I haven't taken away that impression from reading Phinney & Volek. In their latest book they talk about people running 100 mile marathons and other heavy exercise, and how to improve recovery. Obviously, you don't want to do that kind of exercise several times a week, but the human body is an incredible machine under favorable conditions, and it doesn't break easily when it is working right.

It was just something I picked up from the podcast with Phinney on the 'ask the low carb experts'. There was this email question from a lady who had problems loosing weight despite her well maintained low carb diet. This lady was a zealous exerciser, and that was something that Phinney pointed out; that she would probably benefit from less exercise.

 

[mcb]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

It was just something I picked up from the podcast with Phinney on the 'ask the low carb experts'. There was this email question from a lady who had problems loosing weight despite her well maintained low carb diet. This lady was a zealous exerciser, and that was something that Phinney pointed out; that she would probably benefit from less exercise.

Weight loss and athletic training are different contexts for exercise, although rest & recovery are important either way. A number of sources have cautioned that exercising to lose weight -- part of "standard medical advice" -- can be ineffective and counterproductive, in part because it tends to stimulate appetite. That advice is usually employed in the additional context of high carb intake, however.

I think I remember the exchange you mentioned above, but I don't recall the details. Was she on a ketogenic diet? What kind of exercise? And some people just don't burn fat as well as others.

I would guess that many people here would want to limit exercise and focus on types that are most beneficial, especially when dealing with metabolic disease. But I wouldn't assume that that applies to everyone, and if you are physically active and on a KD then you may need to increase both fat and protein intake, not reduce activity. There could be a need to limit frequency of resistance exercise for maximum effectiveness, but that is something I am just starting to learn about.

 

[aragorn]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

Recently, Gary Taubes and a Dr Peter Attia have launched something called 'The Nutrition Science Initiative'

_http://garytaubes.com/2012/09/the-launch-of-the-nutrition-science-initiative/

This morning, at 9am Eastern Time, we officially launched The Nutrition Science Initiative — NuSI (pronounced “new see”). NuSI is a non-profit organization, technically a 501(c)(3). Its purpose is to facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies — to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet.

Our conventional dietary wisdom, as I’ve described in my books, is based on science that was simply not adequate to the task of establishing reliable knowledge — poorly-controlled human experiments, observational studies incapable of establishing cause and effect, and animal studies that may or may not say anything meaningful about what happens in humans. NuSI was founded to address this issue and by doing so, we hope, reduce the social and economic burden of obesity and its related diseases. NuSi’s co-founder, and my collaborator in this endeavor, is Peter Attia, who will serve as NuSI’s president.

Peter and I started NuSI as a nights and weekends endeavor with the hope of raising the necessary money to keep the organization running and fund the necessary experiments using crowdfunding techniques on the internet. Last November, however, we heard from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation expressing interest in what we were trying to accomplish. After many meetings and their due diligence, LJAF has provided NuSI with a seed grant to get our organization up and running and a verbal commitment to help fund some of the key studies. For the past six months, we’ve been working days, nights, and weekends to make it happen. We’ve opened an office in San Diego (where Peter lives) and, as mentioned in my previous post, we’re hiring staff, a research associates and eventually a research director as well.

The support we’ve received for NuSI has already been remarkable. If you go to the NuSI website, you can see our board of directors, our scientific advisory board and our board of advisors just to get a feel for the researchers and individuals who believe in the mission and are dedicated to making this work.
As to the mission itself, Peter and I have already had meetings with researchers from around the country to discuss and begin the design process of the research that NuSI hopes to fund. These researchers are all excellent scientists, and they’re all skeptical of the hypotheses that we hope to test — the ideal combination. The experiments will be human trials; they’ll all be rigorously well-controlled, and they’ll all be aimed at identifying unambiguously the causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes, elucidating the underlying mechanisms involved. If all goes well, we’ll move later onto studies that look at longterm effectiveness of dietary therapies based on what we’ve learned.

Both Peter and I have our beliefs about what we’re likely to find, as do the researchers we’ve recruited to join the effort. As we say in our founder’s letter on the NuSI site, we’re not invested in particular outcomes, we’re invested in establishing reliable knowledge on the relationship between diet and disease and so scientifically-sound solutions to the health problems that beset us. One of the quotes that we use on the NuSI website and that I’ve taken to using in my lectures is particularly apt. It’s from Robert Burton’s 1893 book, The Anatomy of Melancholy: ”It is in vain to speak of cures, or think of remedies, until such time as we have considered of the causes . . . cures must be imperfect, lame, and to no purpose, wherein the causes have not first been searched.”

NuSI was founded on the premise that the reason we are beset today by epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, and the reason physicians and researchers think these diseases are so recalcitrant to dietary therapies, is because of our flawed understanding of their causes. We believe that with a concerted effort and the best possible science, this problem can be fixed. We hope you’ll give your support to NuSi in anyway you can.

On founder and president Peter Attia:

Peter Attia, M.D. | NuSI President, Director
Peter is the President and co-Founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). Peter is a former McKinsey & Company consultant, where he was a member of both the corporate risk and healthcare practices. Prior to McKinsey, Peter spent five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a general surgery resident, where he was the recipient of several prestigious awards and the author of a comprehensive review of general surgery. Peter also spent two years at the National Institutes of Health as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute under Dr. Steve Rosenberg, where his research focused on the role of regulatory T cells in cancer regression and other immune-based therapies for cancer. Peter is a 2012/2013 recipient of the French-American Foundation Young Leader’s Fellowship, which recognizes the most promising leaders in the United States and France under 40. Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he also taught and helped design the calculus curriculum.

You can find more about their mission and strategies from their website:

_http://nusi.org/

Some of the information on the site is in slide shows, so it's hard to copy any of that here. One nice thing I found, and I haven't yet read everything, was a comprehensive list of studies/literature they are using as a starting point:

_http://nusi.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Summary-of-Diet-Studies-Condensed.pdf

Looks very promising, but let's see what comes of this.

 

[mcb]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

...You can find more about their mission and strategies from their website:

_http://nusi.org/

Some of the information on the site is in slide shows, so it's hard to copy any of that here. One nice thing I found, and I haven't yet read everything, was a comprehensive list of studies/literature they are using as a starting point:

_http://nusi.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Summary-of-Diet-Studies-Condensed.pdf

Looks very promising, but let's see what comes of this.

Stephan Guyenet's comments about the initiative can be found on his blog here:
_http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/09/nutrition-science-initiative-nusi.html

He is in favor, overall, but raises some concerns as would be expected given his relationship with Taubes.

 

[Z...]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

The main reason that has been keeping me from ketogenic diet is the anticipated weight loss.

I have been on very low carb and at first I lost 15 kg then my weight loss stabilized and I was hovering around figure which could be considered my "ideal BW" for quite some time. But then about 6 months ago I ditched buckwheat blinis and most of the fruits which caused me to continue to loose weight and I am now 5 kg under my "ideal weight". There are days when I eat almost zero carbs , on other days its never more then 50-60gr.

I am not really hung up on the ideal body weight but being very tall I certainly don't want to look like skeleton either.
I have already lost a lot of my muscle mass but what bothers me the most is my energy level which has seriously plummeted together with my BP every since I have been on low carb regime. There are days when I have more energy but in general its like being constantly fatigued and sleepy. Perhaps this is due to eating too much protein and spending energy on gluconeogenesis.
Apart from this my health is quite good and my main motive to go ketogenic would be to increase energy levels and perhaps prepare myself for rough times ahead.

So my question is - in general how are you all coping with excessive wight loss and also how are your energy levels comparing to when you were low carb but not in ketosis?

 

[mcb]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

...I have already lost a lot of my muscle mass but what bothers me the most is my energy level which has seriously plummeted together with my BP every since I have been on low carb regime...

You shouldn't be losing muscle mass. If you are, something's not right, and you may be losing more that's important than just muscle. The standard explanation for losing muscle seems to be insufficient protein or overall caloric intake, but it may not be that simple.

 

[LQB]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

The main reason that has been keeping me from ketogenic diet is the anticipated weight loss.

I have been on very low carb and at first I lost 15 kg then my weight loss stabilized and I was hovering around figure which could be considered my "ideal BW" for quite some time. But then about 6 months ago I ditched buckwheat blinis and most of the fruits which caused me to continue to loose weight and I am now 5 kg under my "ideal weight". There are days when I eat almost zero carbs , on other days its never more then 50-60gr.

I am not really hung up on the ideal body weight but being very tall I certainly don't want to look like skeleton either.
I have already lost a lot of my muscle mass but what bothers me the most is my energy level which has seriously plummeted together with my BP every since I have been on low carb regime. There are days when I have more energy but in general its like being constantly fatigued and sleepy. Perhaps this is due to eating too much protein and spending energy on gluconeogenesis.
Apart from this my health is quite good and my main motive to go ketogenic would be to increase energy levels and perhaps prepare myself for rough times ahead.

So my question is - in general how are you all coping with excessive wight loss and also how are your energy levels comparing to when you were low carb but not in ketosis?

H.E. - I had similar symptoms until I started with a teaspoon of salt per day and that was weeks ago now. Sometimes I do 2 teaspoons per day and sometimes I can feel a difference almost immediately. You might give it a shot.

 

[monotonic]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

Potassium is also something you could be deficient in.

 

[Gaby]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

H.E. - I had similar symptoms until I started with a teaspoon of salt per day and that was weeks ago now. Sometimes I do 2 teaspoons per day and sometimes I can feel a difference almost immediately. You might give it a shot.

And this is something that Volek and Phinney emphasized. If you are not having enough minerals AND fat, you will lose muscle mass, period. They recommend salted water within an hour of exercising (before or after).

You can have salted water and add extra salt to the bone broth. Make sure you add extra fat to the bone broth as well.

 

[Z...]

Re: Ketogenic Diet - Path To Transformation?

Thank you Psyche, apart from NaCl do you recommend any other mineral supplementation, I would imagine that bone broth contains all the minerals needed except perhaps Potassium.

What interests me is how much weight have you and other thinner types lost since being in ketosis, if any. Or did this weight loss stabilized at some point, or did someone perhaps managed to gain some weight while in ketosis?