Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (24 page)

If you’ve ever gone to the gym to work out and experienced dizziness, hunger, nausea, fatigue, and even blackouts, that’s hypoglycemia. Going through these sorts of side effects just a couple of times will completely turn you off from the idea of working out ever again. Add to that the fact that it would take me seven to ten days to recover from the muscle soreness from lifting weights, and exercise for me was disastrous. Some people told me I needed to eat high-sugar fruits or starchy carbohydrates pre- and post-workout, but that never fully resolved the problems I was having.

So when I started exercising while in a ketogenic state, I committed to doing a full-body twenty-minute weight lifting session every three days. Yes, I was skeptical, but I wanted to see if all the hoopla about ketones and exercise performance detailed in
The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance
was actually true or not. And to really put this concept to the ultimate test, I decided that I’d precede every workout with an eighteen- to twenty-four-hour fast to see how I’d do. Am I crazy? Yeah, maybe a little bit.

I can go twelve hours without food and still power through a three-hour workout with energy to spare. My strength improved 50 percent in ketosis while my muscles became toned. One of the most amazing physical responses to ketosis is the 10 percent body fat I am able to maintain without any effort at all. My low body fat is consistent, and I suffer no ill health effects from eating a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet.

– Stephanie Person

Here’s what happened for me: no dizziness, no blackouts, no fatigue or weakness, robust energy, no hunger or cravings, surprisingly full strength, feeling of invigoration post-workout, quick muscle recovery, and amazing strength gains. This took me totally by surprise. My strength increased nearly threefold, and I saw noticeable increases in muscle definition. I never would have expected this from a diet so low in carbohydrate and protein.

Make sure you don’t test your blood sugar or blood ketone levels immediately after a workout. Wait a few hours so that you don’t get discouraged by the results. Your blood sugar will very likely be elevated because the liver releases glucose into the bloodstream during exercise. Additionally, with the rise in blood sugar levels, you’ll likely see a temporary drop in blood ketones. This may lead you to believe the exercise made your pursuit of ketosis worse, not better. But be patient and wait a few hours after exercising, and you’ll see normalized blood sugar levels and a rise in blood ketone levels.

I think a healthy diet and lifestyle tends to produce ketones (not necessarily the other way around). When a person eats seasonally, fasts intermittently, and exercises with intensity, there will be periods when they are producing higher levels of ketones, and this produces many beneficial and protective properties in the body.

– Bryan Barksdale

What about weight loss? My results were pretty stunning—seventy-eight pounds lost in that single year of being in a constant state of nutritional ketosis. People love to look at weight loss as the grand be-all, end-all signifier of a diet’s efficacy, thanks in part to television shows like
The Biggest Loser
that glorify the number on the scale. But to me, it was probably the least interesting statistic from my n=1 experiment. When you are eating and living healthy (as you are while in ketosis), weight loss is merely a side effect, and one that’s less important than the other health benefits. While so many people emphasize losing weight, it’s much more important to be consistent in doing what makes you healthy. If you do that, then the weight loss will quickly follow.

But I did measure weight and fat loss, along with muscle growth, during this experiment. I had a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan, which measures body fat and lean muscle mass. It’s also used to track bone density in people with osteoporosis, but it can be a powerful tool in tracking your progress toward your fat-loss goals. My first DXA scan done at Dr. Jeffrey Galvin’s Vitality Medical Wellness Institute (VitalityMWI.com) in Concord, North Carolina, on September 13, 2012, and another was done two months later on November 12, 2012. This noninvasive test takes about ten to twenty minutes to conduct, and all you do is lie down and stay as still as possible.

The results of the tests showed that in just two months, I’d lost 9.7 pounds and 5 percent of my total body fat (a mindboggling 16 pounds of body fat shed—this was huge), and I’d gained a whopping 6 pounds of lean muscle mass. Remember, my protein intake at the time came in at just 12 percent of my total caloric intake, about 80 to 100 grams daily. I didn’t consume any pre- or post-workout carbohydrates to help aid muscle growth, but I added muscle anyway pretty much across the board in every part of my body. The idea that low-carb, ketogenic diets cause muscle wasting is completely unfounded. In fact, it’s best for preserving and increasing lean muscle, as Phinney and Volek have shown in their published research on this topic.

Nutritional ketosis allows my brain to be fueled with ketones and protects me from the symptoms of the occasional hypoglycemic episode. This neuroprotection allows me to enjoy scuba diving, swimming, and other sports without fear of hypoglycemia. Since starting my ketogenic lifestyle, I have enjoyed a reduction in my average blood sugar from 140 to 83 mg/dl, HbA1c from 6.5 percent to 5.0 percent, and hsCRP from 3.2 to 0.7 mg/L, while HDL-C increased from 61 to 91 mg/dL—all with half the insulin dose.

– Dr. Keith Runyan

As for the changes that are less quantifiable: I quickly went from struggling to get four to five hours of sleep each night to enjoying seven to nine hours of restful slumber. My mental acuity improved dramatically (no more foggy brain!). Acne breakouts were greatly reduced. Skin tags I had had for years began shriveling up and disappearing. And I realize this is TMI, but even my pooping pattern normalized after getting into ketosis. These are just a few of the many benefits I saw on a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet.

As you can see, I think my one-year n=1 experiment of nutritional ketosis could be very easily described as a resounding success. If you want to dig a little deeper into the month-to-month details of my personal testing of NK, I updated my blog every thirty days to track my progress: livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/n1.

The amazing health improvements I saw in nutritional ketosis would have been difficult to believe if I hadn’t seen them for myself. Coming up in the next chapter, I’ll share about the five major mistakes I had been making in my low-carb diet that were remedied when I began tracking my ketones.

The best ways to manipulate macronutrients to induce a state of ketosis, the role that ketone bodies play, and their potential side effects are all unknown. Individuals are doing the experiments that will provide us with valuable information. They will be criticized as anecdotal, but anecdotal data is valuable as long as it pertains to the question asked.

– Dr. Richard Feinman

Key Keto Clarity Concepts

• I tested nutritional ketosis for one year on myself to see what would happen.
  
• Testing for blood ketones was popularized by Dr. Jeff Volek and Dr. Stephen Phinney.
  
• I tracked my blood ketones, blood sugar, and weight twice daily during my n=1 test.
  
• When I began testing my blood ketones, I was not in a state of nutritional ketosis.
  
• Just because you’re eating low-carb doesn’t mean you are ketogenic.
  
• Blood ketones rise as you become keto-adapted within two to six weeks.
  
• The composition of my diet was customized to help me create ketones.
  
• My wife consumed a far different diet than I did while in nutritional ketosis.
  
• I saw stunning results in hunger control, ability to fast, and blood sugar stabilization.
  
• All the relevant cholesterol and inflammation markers got better while in ketosis.
  
• Exercise improvements happened even while working out in a fasted state.
  
• Don’t test blood sugar or blood ketones right after a workout—wait a few hours.
  
• Weight loss is perhaps the least significant statistic from my n=1 experiment.
  
• Health, not weight loss, should be the focus of any diet change you make.
  
• A DXA scan revealed both body fat loss and lean muscle mass gain during my n=1 experiment.