ex150ish-9
Worked Roughly as Expected, I Guess. Details Chaotic.
16/11/24 94 36.68 0 131/79/48
15/11/24 94.3 36.89 0.11 0.11 128/77/57
14/11/24 93.4 36.62 0.114 0.114 127/76/49
13/11/24 93.4 36.68 0.124 0.124 134/77/51
12/11/24 93.4 36.68 0.1 0.1 127/77/51
11/11/24 94.3 36.56 0.18 0.18 137/83/54
10/11/24 93.8 36.67 0.074 0.074 127/79/44
09/11/24 93.4 36.75 0.114 0.114 145/90/61
08/11/24 94.4 36.44 0.108 0.108 132/85/58
07/11/24 94.2 36.65 0.134 0.134 133/75/53
06/11/24 93.3 0.116 0.116 128/71/47
05/11/24 92.9 36.62 0.134 0.134 137/83/63
04/11/24 93.5 36.51 0.11 0.11
03/11/24 93.3 36.86 0.12 0.12 126/76/52
02/11/24 93.2 36.78 0.054 0.054 131/70/48
01/11/24 93.6 36.75 0.108 0.108 122/74/49
31/10/24 94.2 36.53 0.11 0.11 135/78/50
30/10/24 94.4 36.6 0.106 0.106 124/77/48
29/10/24 95.5 36.66 0.114 0.114 129/76/47
28/10/24 96 36.98 0.1 0.1 132/77/57
So I started ex150ish-9 on Monday 28th, the usual plan apart from I've decided that I really like coffee and cream for breakfast in the morning, so instead of drinking cream out of the pot, I'm making strong coffee and then mixing it half and half with double cream to make a strange brown energy drink that provides all my caffeine and calorie needs in one convenient mug.
No keto-entry issues at all, I'm taking electrolyte pills and also a multivitamin, and I just felt a sort of icy mental clarity descend, with a couple of short bouts of listlessness the first couple of days.
I've just got a new consulting gig, and am feeling a certain pressure to hit the ground running, as it were, even though I am as usual attempting something no-one's ever done before, in a field I've never worked in before, in a computer language I've never used before.
The mental clarity of ketosis is really helping. I feel like I used to do. Sharp, and capable of brushing aside technical difficulties and stumbling blocks without breaking stride.
I also heard recently that ribose is supposed to do something mysteriously positive for fatigue, and it seems cheap and harmless, so I bought a bucket and am taking three teaspoons of ribose spread out over the day, every day. That's actually 15g (60kcal) of carbs every day added to my usual ex150ish plan, but it does seem to have an energising effect and didn't seem to disrupt ketosis. My weight fell off its usual cliff as I discarded all my carb reserves.
For the first week I was getting up to speed remotely, so I could do stuff in my own time and in my own office while my client sorted my out a desk in their place.
For tactical reasons I took to eating beef burgers and steaks out for lunch (with some sort of salad instead of chips, and throwing the buns away), and taking them out of the beef-added-to-stew budget to compensate.
I wondered if sulphite preservatives in the burgers might be an issue, but I haven't noticed any bad effects so I wonder if they cook out somehow? Neither the burgers in Wetherspoons nor the home-made ones in the White Horse seem to cause any problem.
For the entire first week I felt really enthusiastic and capable and cheerful, it was great.
On Saturday 2nd November I'd gone from 96kg to 93.2kg in one week. But I woke up feeling a bit tired and listless. I went into town to watch a film, and on the way to the cinema at about 1300 I walked past a little Sainsbury's and felt a very very powerful craving for crossants. Feeling slightly guilty (but willpower must be resisted at all costs!) I bought a couple, and ate one of them on the spot, and smuggled the other one into the cinema to eat in front of the film. After the second one I suddenly felt all sluggish and that feeling stayed until around 1900 when I suddenly perked up again and stayed lively until 2245 when I finally went to bed.
On the Sunday I woke up feeling tired and listless again, but a teaspoon of ribose and a coffee-and-cream sorted that out and I spent the rest of the day being active and energetic and doing chores.
The morning of Monday 4th was the low point weight-wise at 92.81kg, you can see a small croissant-related bounce in the graph, and then it went back down again. All according to plan so far, except for the croissants.
The second week was a bit chaotic. My client had sorted me out a desk so I started going into their office rather than keeping my own hours.
For the first time in my entire life I'm having to work strict nine to five. For mad reasons, but it's part of the deal.
Normally I'm one of those stereotypical programmers who gets up around lunch, heads into the office to chat for the afternoon, and then gets the actual work done in the evening when it's quiet and I can get a long uninterrupted hack in. That's been my pattern since the invention of the open-plan anti-productivity hellhole made my job impossible to do during the day, and it suits me anyway, I always feel cleverest and most alert in the evening. I charge by the hour so nobody ever really cares when I do the work as long as I'm available for meetings.
But not this time, so I'm taking melatonin regularly at 1800 every day, which has shifted my sleep cycle five full hours earlier, and results in me suddenly becoming shatteringly tired around 2200, sleeping like I'm dead until around 0700, having a bit of a lie-in, and then bouncing out of bed singing at around 0800 to cycle to my client's office which is a thirty minute bike ride from civilization.
To my amazement this really suits! I'm rising with the sun pretty much, which has an agreeable daylight-maximising effect now the clocks have gone back, and I've managed to wangle myself a nice desk in my client's office next to a window and bought myself some excellent comfy earplugs so I can think in spite of the chaos going on all around me.
After my bike ride I'm getting an amazing five-hour period of productivity and cleverness and then my brain suddenly turns to cheese around 1400, so I knock off for a late lunch and a walk and then spend the last couple of hours of the working day tidying up and talking to people. Just as my brain recovers and I'm ready for my evening hacking session they throw me out and I cycle home again.
A rum sort of a life, if you ask me. But the project is fun and I am producing results.
I'm sure that the extra hour of moderate intensity exercise every day will be having an effect on “calories out”. If I cycle into town and back for lunch it's actually two hours, which is about as much exercise as I used to do every day when I was a rower.
I'm equally sure that that won't make any actual difference fat-loss wise because I'll just eat more to make up. It might cause a bit of muscle gain though so if anything I'd expect my weight to go up as a result.
I want to keep my keto-clarity, so I'm taking vast amounts of double cream into work with me and living on coffee-and-cream during the day.
But I now have female colleagues in close proximity, and they've all independently decided to make me welcome by offering home-made baked goods. Which is very nice of them, and no way am I going to turn them down (don't be a psycho!), but every small slice of parkin or sugary thing causes an hour long crash where I feel like a zombie for an hour or so. Also there was a gift of some amazingly nice organic vegetables which I cooked up in a cheese and flour sauce in the evening because they deserved it.
Anyway I think what happened over that second week was that I basically carried on doing ex150ish but with just enough carbs to fully replenish my glycogen stores over a few days. At any rate my weight rose slowly over the week back to 94kg.
On Saturday I decided that was enough ex150ishing for a bit, and met some friends for a lunch of jacket potatoes, and after that went to Sainsbury's and bought a great stack of croissants and pains-au-raisins and a big loaf of olive bread and scoffed the lot.
And it seemed to make no difference at all, no recarbing shock, no noticeable weight regain.
But on Sunday morning I felt really weird. I was getting irritated by everything that moved, including my own beard, and the poor fit of my clothes. I went into the picturehouse for a pizza and I was getting irritated by all the other customers. It was very strange. At one point I got annoyed with my own scalp. After lunch I calmed down quite a lot though and it was a nice afternoon. But my brain wasn't working as well as it had been.
The next week I decided I wanted my keto-mind back for work, so I carried on the plan of just drinking coffee and cream for all my energy needs during the day. And that seems to work. I'm waking up bouncy and staying bouncy until mid afternoon, when I flag from six hours of staring at screens and am a zombie for a bit. At that point a long bike ride seems to revive me and I come back all enthusiastic and am just getting productive when they throw me out of the damned building.....
On Thursday 14th I had arranged to meet some friends in town for lunch, and I risked a pizza. Weirdly it had the opposite of the expected effect. I went all hyper and energetic, talking ten to the dozen and cycling back to the office at high speed, where I settled down for one of the most productive afternoon's programming I've ever done.
On Friday I tried the same "bike-ride for lunch" strategy but without the pizza, and it had the same effect, and then I had a pizza in the evening and it had exactly the opposite effect. Instant sleepiness and I went to bed at half-past eight and stayed there.
I've no idea what's going on there. Carbs are weird.
My weight has been stable all week, no bounce from resuming carbs, so I seem to now be around 94kg with all possible water-weight already regained.
What be this new language?