ex150ish Water Weight Loss Period: Mild Headaches
Oh, this is ketogenic? What on earth does that mean?
So this is the first six days of ex150ish
01/06/23 97.4
31/05/23 97.7
30/05/23 98.3
29/05/23 99
28/05/23 99.6
27/05/23 98.8
u/ex150 warns us that this weight loss is expected, and almost entirely illusionary.
One carries a considerable store of glycogen, which is bound to water.
There is rapid weight loss as one burns off all that glycogen without any carbohydrate to replace it from, and pisses out all the water.
It will all come back once one starts to eat carbs again, and glycogen stores replenish.
I got three mild morning headaches during this period, which I would have written off as “having slept funny” if I hadn't been paying attention.
Brief googles revealed that this was a sign I was entering ketosis.
I am so innocent that I had not been expecting this!
Serious googles followed.
Apparently as one pisses out all the water, lots of electrolytes go with it.
So sudden lack of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium.
Turns out drinking salt water fixed the headaches.
Also on 30/05/2023 I noted that I was tired and depressed, which went away on its own.
That was pretty much the extent of the 'keto flu' for me, but I'm glad I was taking multivitaminandmineral pills.
I've no idea what the initial 1kg bounce upward on the 27th was, probably something to do with finishing off all my fruit at once.
Anyway, in retrospect all as expected, and I'm now almost exclusively burning fat for fuel, and making ketones to power my brain.
For the record, I don't think this is a natural state for a man to be in.
Neither do I think our ancestors lived mostly without carbohydrate in their diets.
Proper carnivores don't do ketosis. Either as normal or when short of food. They can sort of do it under carefully controlled conditions, but it's not good for them.
They do gluconeogenesis, where you burn protein to make glucose.
Ketosis looks like a specifically human thing.
Our big brains need more fuel than can reasonably be provided by gluconeogenesis in times of food shortage, so at some point in the last million years we've developed ketosis as a way to keep our brains working when there are no carbs around.
In evolutionary terms, that's a recently evolved mechanism, which usually means dodgy.
I'd imagine that long-term ketosis is not good for people.
On the other hand we clearly have evolved it, so there must have been periods when things quite like us went short of carbs and had to go into ketosis to get through. And that must have been quite common.
It's got to be better than having your brain shut down, or destroying all your muscle mass to make brain fuel. It's probably OK for short periods.
But it looks like the emergency back-up system. Used because the preferred fuel has run out.
Also I guess I already won that 98.2kg bet, unless you meant "not including water weight" ;)
Personally, I think it's the other way around - we evolved into being in ketosis a lot, and we only need carb intake to fuel record athletic pursuits (though even that is being challenged more and more).
Other carnivorous animals eat way more muscle meat and produce glucose via gluconeogenesis. But we didn't evolve from cats. We evolved from apes.
There are no carnivorous apes eating a high-protein diet, they mostly eat fiber which they cannot digest. They then let the bacteria in their guts transform the fiber into short-chained, saturated fatty acids. That's how they get 70%+ of their energy.
We basically hijacked that system by "inventing" ketosis. And we lost our expansive guts in the process, so we can no longer make use of that fiber. That's why we can't munch on leaves and bark like gorillas and chimpanzees do. (Note that apes CAN eat meat, but they typically get less than 5-10% of their caloric intake from it, only eating small animals that are both lean and not a very good return on investment energy wise compared to large ruminant animals.)
Amber O'Hearn has a whole talk about it that I think is pretty great, IIRC it's called Lipovore.