Half-Hearted Heart Attack Keto

And About Half The Benefits

11/06/24 92.5 36.69 0.5 0.5

10/06/24 92.8 36.66 0 0.5

09/06/24 93.7 36.51 0.5 0.5

08/06/24 92.7 36.62 0 0.5

07/06/24 93 36.69 0.5 0.5

06/06/24 92.7 36.64 0 0.5

05/06/24 92.5 36.43 0.5 0.5

04/06/24 92.3 36.77 0 0.5

03/06/24 93.2 36.49 0.5 0.5

02/06/24 93.7 36.6 0.5 0.5

01/06/24 93.7 36.67 0.5 0.5

31/05/24 93.6 36.68 0 0.5

I ended ex150ish-6 with a gentle recarb with rhubarb and sugar and biscuits on the 30th and 31st of May.

There was probably about 500kcal of carbs in total, maybe one third of the usual total amount of stored glycogen, so I'd anticipate that being worth about 0.5kg of water-weight.

No sudden crash, but I could feel my mind slowing down and becoming foggy.

So I bounced off my gentle recarb pretty hard. I didn't like the mental effects, and on the basis of 'glycolysis is blocked', I figured I knew what was causing them.

A wise commenter said: "So why don't you just stay in ketosis?", managing somehow to read my blurry mind across a vast distance.

And I kind of did, although in a very half-arsed way. I tried to stick to the spirit of ex150ish without being fascist about it, still using double cream as a principal fuel source, still eating my everlasting stew, and avoiding carbs pretty much.

The clarity and bounce came back almost immediately.

Exactly as anticipated, 0.5kg of scale weight came and went on schedule.

Another thing I've noticed is that I feel less irritable in ketosis. I thought my increasing cantankerousness was just a consequence of being a middle-aged man, but in ketosis I'm noticeably less annoyed by minor annoyances. I suppose irritability is a mental disorder just like brain fog is! Tired and irritable is a classic combination, after all.

I allowed myself to buy a couple of blocks of cheddar cheese instead of the usual beef, on the basis that it's got around the same macros as beef. And also some eggs and some black pudding.

I tried an experiment with boiling up some malt vinegar and then leaving it open to the air, to try and get the sulphites out, and woke up the following morning with a headache. So that's a fail.

I broke the no-carbs rule a couple of times.

Once deliberately by eating four digestive biscuits at choir on Thursday night (6th June). It was kind of weird how quickly I slowed down and then sped up again, I felt quite sluggish in the pub afterwards, and then the next morning I was fine again, bounce, bounce.

On the Saturday I went to the pub for lunch and ended up staying all day. Eventually I broke and had a couple of lagers. I had a new bottle of hydrogen peroxide I wanted to try, five drops per pint to get rid of the sulphites. I totally forgot that lager had carbs in it, so that was about 400kcal of carbs, again about a third of my normal glucose store. I felt tired pretty much immediately and headed for bed.

The next morning I felt slightly sulphity, or maybe I had a mild hangover, not at all the apocalypse I'd normally expect from two beers, but I also felt like my stomach was upset and tasted of hydrogen peroxide. Sigh...

That seemed to cause a weight spike of 1kg, which then went away again immediately. Probably just noise of some sort on top of the expected effect.

Seven-day average weight appears to have continued to track down a bit, but that now seems to have stopped, and I'm stabilizing at about 92.8kg.

Thyroid dose is continuing a steady slow decline, I'm dropping T4 doses whenever I get too hot. I'm trying to keep my waking temperature between 36.6 and 36.7C and adjusting the dose appropriately.

I think my thyroid dose is probably a direct but laggy measure of how borked my metabolism currently is, so generally according to my new theory (glycolysis is blocked!) a measure of how much PUFA is in my system, but in ketosis I switch over to fat burning, am not relying so much on my broken carbohydrate metabolism, and so need less overdrive.

It's currently about one-third of what it used to be. I’ve been off the PUFAs for a year.

I had a thyroid test a month or so ago, the results came back and my TSH is 1.5 and my blood T4 is in the middle half of the normal range.

That’s new! For years my TSH was suppressed, and my T4 was right at the top of the normal range. Which is what you’d expect if you were deliberately over-stimulating your system and your body was trying to dial it down.

The new results imply that my body’s not trying to get the thyroid levels down. I may not actually need exogenous thyroid at all any more. I might just be tapering the dose as my own thyroid recovers and takes up the strain.

That’s after almost exactly one year of no-PUFAs. That seems far too fast, but u/loveofworkerbees on r/saturatedfat seems largely fixed after one year. Hi Bees!

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But I'm not feeling the same as I was on ex150ish-6. My mind seems fine, sometimes as sharp as it was, sometimes a bit slow, but somehow I feel a bit overheated and a bit sluggish. It's not the bright clarity of ex150ish. And somehow I also feel a bit uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to describe. Like my skin is a bit sticky all the time?

I suspect that I've been overdoing it on the protein, the extra protein has got turned into glucose, and that's causing me to slow down a bit.

Or it may just be coming from the various bits of sulphite poisoning and carb intake.

That seems a bit pointless somehow, if I'm going to most of the effort to eat a restricted diet then I might as well eat the one that makes me feel great.

I'm probably going to keep ketosis for another couple of days and then gently recarb and eat ad-lib for a bit to see what happens. But I'm not looking forward to the brain fog.

These last few weeks really have been stellar fun. Biochemistry is absolutely fascinating, I'm learning at a terrific rate, it's like being me again, and I hate the thought of suddenly losing interest and not being able to understand it any more.