My cholesterol has always been low—unjustly low, according to current nutrition recommendations. That is, I was not particularly eating the currently-recommended low-fat, high-fiber diet with lots of grains/fruits/vegetables and no caffeine/alcohol—and yet my cholesterol was always well below 200. I worried that switching to a diet that is basically meat, cheese, eggs, cream, and butter, with low levels of vegetables and no fruits/grains, might change that. Instead, after a year on keto (and no increase in exercise), my cholesterol has dropped still further and is lower than I ever remember it being, by about 50 points. In case you were wondering/worrying about this, as I was.
We have been cramming the rest of summer into the rest of summer, though for poor William that involved knee surgery followed by a wisdom-tooth extraction (which went very similarly to Rob’s experience, except we have different insurance now and it unexpectedly PAID FOR IT). I am looking forward to everyone being back in school—especially Rob, since I will be driving him, and I have a “no keto on road trips” policy that means I will soon be eating pizza and Taco Bell and Sausage McMuffins and a Wendy’s #6 combo and Entenmann’s mini-cakes and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips and Haribo Fruit Salad and frozen mocha coffees and Mike & Ikes.
did you lose a ton of weight? i’ve been doing it pretty lazy for the last six months and lost 30+ pounds. it’s nice. and it is a pretty easy diet for me. i haven’t gotten my cholesterol checked.
Knee surgery and wisdom teeth out? Poor kid. Also, I find it amusing wisdom teeth warranted a 5 day recap with the first kid and now knee surgery is basically an aside. It’s the knee surgery that would freak me out! But, I’m still on the first round of everything.
Has it really been a year already? It feels like you first posted about this a couple of weeks ago.
I love your strategy re: road trips!
I never comment, but am breaking my vow of silence to BEG for a post on how you go off Keto for a few days and then smoothly return? I’m fascinated and would love to understand and try to learn from you. I KNOW that keto/ very low carb, while not for everyone, works very well for my particular physiology – after an initial adjustment period, I loose weight easily, sleep well and even notice a decrease in anxiety and food “cravings.” However I invariably then eat high carbs for a few days, due to vacations, holidays, business events, or other social obligations in which it just feels too extreme to follow the diet. Then months go by, I gain weight back, and it takes Herculean effort to find my groove again. Lather, rinse repeat. If you are willing I’d love to learn about your thought process during the first few days of returning to eating Keto.
I don’t know, I just do! I go off for a certain pre-set amount of time, and then I go back on it feeling refreshed/re-motivated by the days off. I think it’s one of the reasons this particular diet works for my particular self: for whatever reason, probably innate to my particular temperament/physiology, I don’t find it difficult to go off it for a day (or for a few days) and then back on—as long as I know I can have another day off in the near future. (I’m hoping this will continue, and not get more difficult with time, or when I’m in the maintenance stage. We’ll see.) What I found really hard was a diet like Weight Watchers, where I could say, “Well, I’ll just have this ONE THING this ONE TIME”—but then it accumulated/snowballed. As things are, I have a bag of Day Off food in a closet, and I know I CAN have it, I just have to WAIT until LATER. Something about that mindset really works for me. I think part of it is that when I DO have a day off, I enjoy the food—but not as much as I daydreamed I would. Then when I go back on it, I remember that: it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.
I’m really interested in this way of eating. I think the closest I’ve come to it is a Whole 30-which seems a bit more strict, and not really a way to eat for life. I’ve done Weight Watchers more times than I can actually remember, but I totally understand why going back to Keto would be easier than WW. I know WW is getting better, but I’ve never been so fixated by food as when I was doing a points plan, but that was years ago. Oh, it was low fat, high fiber-which meant I was hungry all the time! I also get the “I can have it, but I have to wait to later”. That works well for me!
Hi! Thanks so much for taking the time to reply to my comment. It gave me a lot to think about. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s so great to have another persons experiences/thoughts to learn from, even if my challenges have been slightly different. Thanks again!
Oh William – yikes.
And yay – what an unexpectedly delightful effect of the Keto plan! I hope you have a fabulous few days off during your drive.
That’s awesome news, Swistle! Yay! Less awesome for William, poor kid. What kind of knee surgery?
He had a few pieces of loose cartilage floating around in there and bothering his knee, so the surgeon went in there and took them out. There was some possibility that it would turn out the cartilage had come from a place that would then need to be repaired, making it a much more significant surgery requiring six weeks of crutches and then physical therapy—but happily that was not the case, so he was back on his feet within days.
I have had high cholesterol since I was in my teens and 101 pounds soaking wet, and been on statins because of it since then (heart disease runs in my family), because no matter how non-fat my diet, it remains high without drugs. SO. I got diagnosed last year as being pre-diabetic, so I went low-carb and decided to ignore the fat content of everything. I was chowing down on chopped liver, and eggs every day, and bacon with everything and….my sugar came way down and SO DID MY CHOLESTEROL. According to my endocrinologist, this happens sometimes, that sugar leads to production of cholesterol in the blood.
Still need to be on statins, tho.