A watched pot never boils.
Lately I feel a watched scale never goes down. I had some success at the
end of last year and hit my 20 lb. loss, but it’s only gone down 1 lb. in
2014. I am watching and tracking every day. I’m wearing the Body
Media Band and analyzing my activity, eating, and sleep patterns.
Although my activity level has not been where I want it to be, I’m still
showing a significant calorie deficit every day. I’ve also been in solid
ketosis, so I know I’m burning fat as fuel. I know that the ketogenic
diet is known for stalls for long period of times, but it’s getting a bit
old. I’ve been doing some research and decided I’m going to do a bit of
experimenting with carb cycling.
Week 4 looks a lot like Week 3, but this is 6 days’ worth of
data, not just 4. I did manage to get
my physical activity up to an hour a day, but my calories in and out seem low
to me.
My macros have been slowly moving in the right direction,
but I have a bit of a carb creep going on. I’ve managed to bring my protein consumption
up to around 80 grams, but still need to work on this aspect. No problem with the fat, maybe because it’s
so tasty!
Sleep has been consistent with about 7 and a quarter hours
per night. I’m OK with this
metric. I usually have one bad night a
week where I wake up early and can’t get back asleep, but for the most part it
is under control. It’s been fun
measuring my ketones, especially because it is just validating that I am in
Nutritional Ketosis. I’ve got this part
down which makes me think I am ready to try an experiment that some people following
a ketogenic diet do, which is carb cycling.
More specifically Carb Nite.
I’ve been reading the book Carb Nite by
John Kiefer, which suggests doing keto for 9 days and on the 10th
day have a Carb Nite – 6hrs of eating high carb foods to spike your insulin.
The next 5 days are back to keto, and then you can have another Carb Nite. Repeat cycle for up to 6 months. Elevated insulin levels often mean little fat
burning, which is why we low carbies like to control insulin, but an insulin
spike triggers fat burning hormones that can last several days. One of the most important is the hormone leptin.
When fat cells are full and the right
amount of food is coming in, leptin levels are high and will stimulate fat
loss. According to Kiefer, research
shows stripping carbs from a diet also causes leptin levels to plunge, no matter
how much fat and protein you eat. The low leptin levels signal fat cells to
stay full and eventually store as much incoming fat as possible. Fat loss is impossible to maintain without
periodic insulin spikes. Maybe this is
why my pot is not boiling!
Graph from Carb Nite
Reading how you could eat anything on your Carb Nite
concerns be a bit. Kiefer talks about
eating pasta, bread, cookies, pastries, ice cream, and whatever you want on
this night. I’ve been binge free for
almost 8 months. I don’t want to risk
anything by going out of control and binging on a bunch of junk. But with this, I need to have a spike in
insulin over a 6 hour period. So I need
to eat sugar and maybe even some grains to accomplish this spike. Giving up sugar on June 8, 2013 was what got
me into this binge free lifestyle. Will this
throw me off track? Will it trigger a binge that will last for days? Will it cause me to gain the 20lbs I lost
since last summer? (Can you tell I’ve been a bit anxious about this technique?) Or will it trigger an accelerated fat loss
like the gurus indicate? It’s not just
Kiefer that suggests this high carb time.
Chris Powell mentions a ‘cheat day’ in his book, Choose to Lose and so does Maria Emmerich in Keto Adapted, as an over feeding day. So maybe this is what it is all about…
learning to have splurges once in a while.
Managing it and getting back on track the very next day. I just have to figure out how I plan to do
this insulin spike with my new way of eating and not in a way that resembled my
past binges.
The date is set for this experiment to start – Jan 30th. This is my birthday, so I will be having my all-time
favorite dessert in the world, Cheesecake Factory Vanilla Bean cheese
cake. No I did not plan this only because
I wanted cheesecake on my birthday. Just
a fortunate tasty coincidence! This is
one item I plan to eat in the 6hrs, so now I’m researching other items that are
more whole food related, but affect insulin.
For instance, I plan to start at 3:30pm with a banana. My goal is simple to spike my insulin over
6hrs and not to eat until I am stuffed and sick. This is not going to be a free for all! It is a controlled experiment! Stay tuned!
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