ex150ish-4: Week One
A Strange Week. But Roughly As Expected.
05/11/23 93.3 36.86
04/11/23 92.9 37.11
03/11/23 94.2 36.72
02/11/23 94.2 36.44
01/11/23 93.9 36.51
31/10/23 94 36.55
30/10/23 95.1 36.69
29/10/23 95 36.7
28/10/23 95.6 36.72
ex150ish-4 started on the 30th as planned, and seems to be going roughly as normal, despite my eating loads of sour cream as well as double cream. Sour cream is really nice!
Aceeeeeid! As we used to say in my teenage years....
I'll review those of my predictions which are relevant:
> I predict rapid water-weight loss of about 1.5kg over a few days, followed by gentle weight loss at about 0.5kg / week
Dropped a kilo instantly, felt great, then my weight was stable for just long enough for me to start thinking "Is all this sour cream sodding it up? Should I go back to double cream only?", and then I suddenly dropped another kilo for no apparent reason.
I think that's probably as-expected water-weight and downwards trend plus measurement noise.
> followed by entry to ketosis, accompanied by at least one mild headache, followed by the blissful state of endless but thin energy and remarkable mental clarity that is ketosis itself
I think I probably am in ketosis, but I didn't get any sort of entry effect at all, at least through the first few days, neither headaches nor startling clarity. More like the failed heart-attack-keto experiment than other ex150 variants.
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On Friday 3rd everything started to go wrong. I felt sluggish and unmotivated, I had 'the ghost of a headache' and I thought maybe this is 'keto flu' coming a bit late?
And then I started sniffling. My choir was doing its annual concert that night, and I should probably have cried off just from reluctance to spread a cold, but it would have meant letting several people down and cancelling or rejigging a couple of pieces at short notice, so I dressed up, improvised a way to escape from a narrowboat on a river in heavy flood while wearing formal clothes, and went anyway.
Our theme this year was “Drinking Songs Through The Ages”.
By the time of the pre-concert rehearsal I was feeling distinctly iffy. Sore throat, fever, cold sweats and mild delirium. I kept getting things wrong, and I wasn't enjoying it at all, and I was getting worse and worse. I was expecting some sort of public humiliation in the concert itself.
So I went over the road, and bought three cups of coffee, some ibuprofen, some paracetamol, some lemsips (more caffeine and more paracetamol), and a load of strepsils. I know how unwise this was (we had to fiddle the robot till because it thought I was about to commit suicide and wouldn't sell me the lemsips), but bloody hell...
That kicked me into a startlingly bright state, and soothed my broken throat, and by carefully backing off wherever I wasn't really needed I managed to save enough of my voice for the bits where I really was.
Everything went as well as it could have, far better than the rehearsal, and the audience loved us.
Afterwards a nice lady came up to me and called me a 'spectacularly talented singer'. I know she was flattering me, but still...
It may not have been the most socially responsible thing to do. I am not usually in any way short of arrogant overconfidence, and there's no reason to make my head even bigger.
At that point I should have gone home and gone to bed, but I really wasn't in any state to sleep. Buzz...bbuzzzzz.....
So I went to the pub with everyone else and spent the next three hours getting plastered and belting out any random sea shanty, rebel song, mediaeval latin hymn, village carol or pop song that came to anyone's mind, with no thought at all for my poor throat.
I eventually dragged myself out of bed the following afternoon, totally wiped out with a fever and having a certain difficulty in speaking.
I'd pretty much just got round to making myself coffee and perking up a bit, when a friend phoned up and asked if I was coming to the boat club to watch the fireworks like I'd said. Oh God, more drinking.
I don't feel brilliant today, and I'm still croaking. I had a bit of a headache too. I wonder if I got sulphited drinking unwise drinks, or maybe it was keto-related, or it might be cold-related.
Through all that noise, it's kind of hard to tell what effect ex150ish-4 is having on my general feelings of well-being. So I'll stick with the sour cream, for science.