Bcoulal's Journal, 30 Dec 15

I made a bet with my sister in September 2015 to see who can reach their goal bodyfat by September of 2016. Her bodyfat goal was 18% and mine was to be 5% bodyfat. Since I was already low in bodyfat, I began to purposely gain weight during the last quarter of the 2015 season so she would have a fair chance. We measured our bodyfat in September and hers was in excess of 35% and mine was around 18%. I'm now around 26% bodyfat and 245 lbs. Not quite my old weight of 280 lbs and 35% bodyfat despite all efforts to even the odds in favor of my sister, but it'll do.

Basically she got a head start and had already lost 30 pounds and brags of such weightloss to my other sister, which later on was relayed to me voluntarily. She misunderstands that the point is to lose bodyfat, not weight, and that misunderstanding can cost her the challenge. This is no time to act arrogant, especially if you're jumping into a diet knowing incomplete bits and pieces of information about it.

I myself had to go read scholarly articles on the effects of the ketogenic diet. It was even used to naturally treat epilepsy in children. Where a high carb diet can causes disorders of attention span, a high fat diet can cure that attention deficit. A high fat diet clears your mind and enhances cognitive focus as well as memory. Swedish Memory Champion, Mattias Ribbing, eats a ketogenic diet.

It isn't easy following my diet, I'll tell you that now. It took 6 months of the ketogenic diet to forge and temper my mind. It is almost impossible to stay in ketosis if you eat too much carbs or too much protein. For one, eating too much carbs causes your brain to crave more carbs. It's basically a cycle of carb addiction mirroring cigarettes. The lack of cigarettes will have you not desiring more cigarettes, but once you've broken that cigarette fasting and have just one, it will snowball into something worse than your old weight.

Keeping your carbs below 30g a day will make you temporarily miserable as your body changes its metabolism to support burning fat instead of glucose. This is normal during the keto-transition phase and can last anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks.

The whole point of ketosis is to live off of fat in place of glucose. This is what happens when grizzly bears fatten up for the winter. 75% of their diet is vegetation, which they gorge on right before winter, then they hibernate during the winter and their bodies live entirely off of bodyfat. During the spring, the bears emerge "skinny" and starts hunting for food.

For humans, your body can't go entirely without glucose, hence the 30g a day, but it requires miniscule amounts of glucose to function. In the event that there is absolutely no carbs available, your body will take protein and fat and synthesize its own glucose. That's how much of an evolutionary marvel your body is.

The purpose of glucose is to power skeletal muscles. That's why weight training requires glucose, however, your heart and brain loves ketones. So it's incorrect to assume long distance runners need to consume glucose for fuel, when fat is the more preferred fuel by the body for aerobic exercises. Why do you think aerobic exercise is the preferred exercise to burn bodyfat?

Think of your body as a hybrid engine. Your body can live on a 75% fat / 20% protein / 5% carb diet. There's a study about a man who was over 400lbs and lived for an entire year on his bodyfat alone, under the supervision of scientists of course.

There's also a myth and misconception of the keto diet. Most people think to imply "keto" is to imply lack of calorie consumption and/or starvation. That is also incorrect. You can actually eat less amount of food and consume the same amount of calories, while losing bodyfat.

Both carbs and protein have the same caloric value at 4 calories per gram, but fat contains more than twice the caloric value at 9 calories per gram. If you were used to eating 2,500 calories per day at a macro ratio of 75% carbs / 20% protein / 5% fat.

High Carb Diet based on 2,500 calories.
Macro ratio: 75% fat / 20% protein / 5% fat
470 grams of carbs / 125 grams of protein / 14 grams of fat.
Total food weight: 609 grams.

High Fat Diet base on 2,500 calories.
Macro ratio: 75% fat / 20% protein / 5% carb
207 grams of fat / 125 grams of protein / 31 grams of carbs
Total food weight: 363 grams

As you can see, on a keto diet, you can eat the same amount of calories in lighter food. The High Fat Ketogenic Diet is 60% the weight of a normal carb diet. Not only is the keto diet lighter, but it's more efficient.

Another point I'd like to make is that carbs causes you to retain excess water weight as it is hydrophilic in nature, whereas protein and fat are hydrophobic. Ever noticed how you fast you've gained weight after gorging on a diet full of carbs or feel puffy?

If you ever want to temporarily lose just "weight," go without carbs for a week and all that water weight will drain out of your body and you can step on the scale and have a false representation of your health based on your body weight.

For those of use who aren't seeking to lose just weight, but want to appear more lean and lose bodyfat, the keto diet will help you get there. Here are some facts about glucose for all you die-hard nutrition fanatics.

Your body can only hold 500 grams of glycogen max. 400 grams goes to the muscles and doesn't ever leave, so no, your skeletal muscles are stingy and doesn't share its glycogen stores. 100 grams of glycogen stays in the liver and is only release for vital organs. 500 grams of glycogen is only 24 hours worth of energy. If the human body never evolved into using bodyfat as long term fuel, we'd all already be extinct.

The entire point of the ketogenic diet is to optimize body fat oxidation through consuming a high fat diet. If you consume a high fat diet and do long distance running, that will put your body into an extreme fat burning mode. Doing HIIT burns glucose, so don't mistake it for aerobic exercise.

A sprinter as well as a bodybuilder requires glycogen to operate in "short" and "intense" bursts, but if you want long distance pacing fuel, fat is the ultimate fuel. Understand that fitness isn't the point of this post, it's diet. It's diet that got you fat, so it should be diet that made you skinny again. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”~Hippocrates.

Exercise is also an inefficient way of losing body fat. If fitness were the entire point of losing body fat, then you're doing it wrongly. If exercise burned 500 calories, it only accounts for 20% of the 2500 caloric expenditure. So is it efficient to count on 1/4th of your metabolism to lose bodyfat when you can do it more efficiently with less effort by actually paying attention to what you eat every day? Fitness is a temporary fix for a long-term eating problem, always remember that.

Every year I see the same promises to lose weight and live healthier, and, thinking that exercise is the solution, they blindly stumble into a gym thinking it will solve their gluttony. It doesn't. Once you stop temporarily exercising, all that weight comes back with a vengeance. Anyhow, this post is already way too long.

My sister thinks just because she's following my diet that she knows what she's doing. She has no idea how hard it is to stay in ketosis. Eat too much protein and you get knocked out of ketosis and have to start all over. Eat too much carbs and you have to start all over. Ketogenic transitions take 3-6 weeks depending on how meticulously vigilant you are on your diet. There's no room for error on the ketogenic diet or you'll have to start all over. There are no cheat days on the ketogenic diet or you'll have to start all over.

We'll see if she learned anything by next September. She's a stubborn type, but teachable. I've gained weight between our September bet and now and my diet begins on January 1st, 2016. I've gone to even holding an excel spread sheet exporting diagrams and charts to see my progress. I'll be using fatsecret to record my diet, but an excel spreadsheet to record my bodyfat and weight. Keep in mind that 1 gram of bodyfat is 14% water by weight, and water is heavier than fat and fat is less dense than water, that's why fat floats in water, but the irony is that fat contain 9 calories per gram whereas water contains 0 calories per gram. If you're happy that you lost 30 pounds, and 99% of all that weight was intestinal food and water, then you've been deceived by the scale. The only true way to know you're progressing in losing bodyfat is to measure your bodyfat with calipers. Losing weight means nothing, because weight isn't equivalent to fat since fat is lighter than water by volume.

Losing water weight is easy. I lost 40 pounds of water weight during my first month, I didn't start to get ripped (lose significant amounts of bodyfat) until month 4. By month 6, even all the people who didn't support me began asking me rhetorical questions on how I lost my weight and bodyfat while they stuff their face with carbs. They even accused me of taking synthetic hormones/steroids. The irony is real. People in denial refuse to accept anything other than what they assumed to be truth. The self-deception is real. People who are addicted to carbs will always make excuses to eat carbs.

According to math, losing 30 pounds means she lost 13,620 grams since 454 grams is equal to 1 pound. But it's ambiguous as to what this weight consisted of. You can have up to 45 pounds of food and water in your digestive system. She didn't indicate if she weighed herself before or after her body was emptied of food and water so that remains to be seen. I, however, have more integrity, and will weigh myself after my 5-day fast.

I'd suggest a 3-day fast for beginners to make sure everything you've consumed leaves your digestive system to find your true body weight. I plan on going on a 120hr (5-day) fast on January 1st, which I've done before, so this is just a walk in the park. The remaining 9-months, I will do a 5-day fast every other month, and in between, 24 hour intermittent daily fasting combined with nutritional ketosis diet.

It's really nothing to it. The proof is all in the science. This isn't a blind experiment, I've done my due diligence before considering nutritional ketosis. It's so simple, people automatically confuse themselves on purpose in order to attempt to understand it because truth is stranger than fiction.

I'm a veteran of intermittent fasting, long-term intermittent fasting, and nutritional ketosis. You'll know you're in ketosis because your body will be full of energy, no emotional roller coasters from fluctuating hormone levels from consuming carbs. Nothing but steady fat releases in the blood stream.

Sleep is no longer an issue, because free radical damage from glucose-metabolism has been minimized. You can sleep 6 hours and wake up refreshed and don't even need to drink coffee to get your day going. That's why the ketogenic diet is also the anti-aging diet.

Your cells aren't damaged as often by dumping of free radicals from glucose metabolism and/or existence of toxic levels of blood glucose itself, so the body doesn't need to sleep that long to repair damaged cells. Also, the ketogenic diet lowers metabolism, but lengthens lifespan, spares protein, and lowers the concentration of free radicals in the blood stream. A high or low metabolism is irrelevant when it comes to the ketogenic diet, because fitness isn't the point.

Do you know why giant tortoises can live longer than humans? They move slowly, they eat slowly, grow slowly, and have a slow metabolism. The purpose of slowing your metabolism is to lengthen lifespan (live longer) because you aren't in a rush to split those valuable telomeres. Even the metabolism of bears slows down significantly during the winter hibernation so it doesn't consume all its bodyfat before the winter season is over. Again, the purpose of the lowering of metabolism and converting your body to burning bodyfat is to live long enough to survive a famine. In short, fat keeps you alive and glucose is a privilege. Always remember that the next time you eat a whole pizza (my favorite is thincrust meat-lovers).

Exercise is one way to an early grave. Don't believe me? How many "fit" Olympic athletes have all of a sudden up and died, and young for that matter, for no reason? You have people with high cholesterol and diabetes who can live longer than some Olympic athletes.

So beware, everytime you step on that treadmill, you accelerate the splitting of your telomeres because you destroy cells when you exercise, so the body has to repair the intentional damage by splitting into new cells, which the splitting, in and of its own, shortens telomeres.

If you choose to exercise anyway, at least do low intensity aerobic exercises. Not only does this exercise burn fat, but it doesn't kill as many cells as you would during a sprint or UFC fight.

You'll find that your long distance runs will be easier because you're dependent on fat for fuel instead of glucose. You won't even need to eat anything during a marathon because all of the fuel will be supplied by bodyfat. Your heart and brain will light up from from burning ketones.

Your mind will become sharper and clearer. No more cloudy minds. Nutritional ketosis isn't for everyone. Despite the myths about ketosis, you won't be starving because eating fat actually makes you feel full. Your life no longer revolves around carbs. Leptin is no longer being blocked, which only carbs can do, so you feel less hungry and eat less often. Nutritional Ketosis causes you to lose bodyfat and be less hungry? Yes, it's a scientific fact. Look up ghrelin and leptin, those are the hormones that signals your brain to "stop eating."

Nutritional Ketosis = Starvation mode? Nonsense. Misinformation. Disinformation. Under Nutritional Ketosis you eat less, are less hungry, and lose bodyfat. You can eat the same amount of calories in a high fat diet as you would a high carb diet, but with less food. Fitness isn't needed, but can be used as a supplement instead of a primary point of fat loss.

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620 kcal

Fat: 67.00g | Prot: 0.00g | Carbs: 0.00g.   Breakfast: Spring Valley Omega-3 Fish Oil 1000Mg, Nutiva Organic Extra Virgin Coconut Oil, Land O'Lakes Unsalted Sweet Butter. more...