Recarbing I know about, first carbs after a couple of weeks of ex150ish usually put me straight to sleep.
But this 'brain not working, body fine' thing I had the first time I tried ex150ish was quite different, and there weren't any carbs involved! I don't remember having it since either...
Very interesting. I have noticed slight differences, but since I don't play chess or anything like it, I haven't noticed it that definitively.
One interesting thing I noticed: I did a bunch of CrossFit while still eating lots of (healthy, paleo) carbs. Then I did CrossFit again for a while years later, having been on keto for 2-3 years at that time.
It felt completely different! The most common "failure mode" of CrossFit is "gassing" where you just can't breathe in enough oxygen any more to fuel the ATP creation process, and thus can't fuel your muscles.
Ketones use less oxygen per unit of ATP when burned (I read somewhere), so you don't actually fail "gassing" - you just fail. You still can't produce enough ATP to keep up with the work demand, but the bottle neck is no longer breathing. So it feels very strange because your mind is like "Ok bud, let's keep going here? We're not even gasping for air!" but the muscles simply don't respond because they're out of fuel. It just felt like being made of spaghetti, lol. My arms and legs would just not comply. A few seconds later, I could go again, but only for a bit before it happened. So in actual performance I was probably very similar to being carb-fueled, but it felt and looked very differently, since I wasn't gasping/gassing around, just standing there doing nothing lol.
I do hear that after 6-18 months, people regain their previous carb-fueled performance on a ketogenic diet. So it might be that you basically have to attain your mitochondrial performance all over again, because it doesn't translate between the 2 substrates. But I haven't ever trained hard/long enough at any sport to find out.
I think the sports science people are all over this, and although they're not usually the brightest of the scientists, they do actually have skin in the game, because if they come to the wrong conclusions their athletes lose. Endless literature, some of which is worth reading.
But it's really cool to feel this sort of thing going on in daily life rather than in insane contexts like ultra-marathon running.
If that brain switch off thing had happened to me, while on keto, it would’ve been because I accidentally ate more carbs than I meant to.
When that happens it’s amazing how tired and low energy and actually inflamed and bloaty I feel until some time has passed back into keto
Recarbing I know about, first carbs after a couple of weeks of ex150ish usually put me straight to sleep.
But this 'brain not working, body fine' thing I had the first time I tried ex150ish was quite different, and there weren't any carbs involved! I don't remember having it since either...
Very interesting. I have noticed slight differences, but since I don't play chess or anything like it, I haven't noticed it that definitively.
One interesting thing I noticed: I did a bunch of CrossFit while still eating lots of (healthy, paleo) carbs. Then I did CrossFit again for a while years later, having been on keto for 2-3 years at that time.
It felt completely different! The most common "failure mode" of CrossFit is "gassing" where you just can't breathe in enough oxygen any more to fuel the ATP creation process, and thus can't fuel your muscles.
Ketones use less oxygen per unit of ATP when burned (I read somewhere), so you don't actually fail "gassing" - you just fail. You still can't produce enough ATP to keep up with the work demand, but the bottle neck is no longer breathing. So it feels very strange because your mind is like "Ok bud, let's keep going here? We're not even gasping for air!" but the muscles simply don't respond because they're out of fuel. It just felt like being made of spaghetti, lol. My arms and legs would just not comply. A few seconds later, I could go again, but only for a bit before it happened. So in actual performance I was probably very similar to being carb-fueled, but it felt and looked very differently, since I wasn't gasping/gassing around, just standing there doing nothing lol.
I do hear that after 6-18 months, people regain their previous carb-fueled performance on a ketogenic diet. So it might be that you basically have to attain your mitochondrial performance all over again, because it doesn't translate between the 2 substrates. But I haven't ever trained hard/long enough at any sport to find out.
I think the sports science people are all over this, and although they're not usually the brightest of the scientists, they do actually have skin in the game, because if they come to the wrong conclusions their athletes lose. Endless literature, some of which is worth reading.
But it's really cool to feel this sort of thing going on in daily life rather than in insane contexts like ultra-marathon running.