AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Fair enough.

Great progress! Keep it up.

So, today is Day 17 of the keto diet. I’ve been able to keep the carb count down below 10 grams most of the time, and haven’t exceeded the 20 gram limit; 16 has been the max.

I didn’t get the “keto flu” as described by some people; what I got on Days 3 and 4 was everything smelled like a cross between drain cleaner and rotting meat. It was disgusting enough I was ready to quit, but it went away on Day 5.

So far I’ve eaten mostly bacon and a lot of hamburger. Normally even a fraction of that much beef would cause me to break out in a rash, but memento’s suggestion that it might be caused be a zinc deficiency seems to have been correct; I added zinc to my supplement stack before going on the diet, and I’ve had no problems at all with beef.

The zinc thing is a bit strange; I got to where I was feeling nauseous after taking the supplements (in no particular order, spaced out over a couple of hours to keep my kidneys from working so hard). I dropped each supplement for a couple of days, and found out it was the zinc that was causing the nausea. They’re ordinary 50mg caplets. I cut them in half and one 25mg dose didn’t do anything noticeable, so I take half a caplet in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, which seems to be working fine. The zinc is “zinc gluconate”; next time I buy some, I’ll see if it’s available in another form. It could be the “gluconate” part that’s the problem.

08/10: 346#
11/04: 341#
————————-diet started
11/29: 337#
12/01: 340#
12/06: 334#
12/08: 336#
12/12: 334#

No weight loss yet; not unexpected. I’ll give it another couple of weeks for “lifestyle adjustment” and then start reducing portion sizes.

It is not that much meat, you should feed on, but rather ‘fats’. Taking in too much protein will make weight loss impossible.

Also not that much animal products, but plant based fats. Peanut butter is my friend, also other raw nuts as almonds, coconut, walnut and kernels and seeds, that contain fats, olives.

It’s true, to get into keto it’s easiest to go for bacon and eggs, but that should be avoided over a longer period. Fibers will also help to keep you fed. Non carb/high fibre veggies are all vegetables from the cabbage family.

My favorite cuisine for keto is Thai food - without rice as side dish of course. Contains mainly chicken, fish, sea food, vegetables, coconut and peanut - all perfect for keto, healthy and delicious.

Also many Mediterranean dishes, rich in olive oil, vegetables, fish and meat.

What I like about keto is, that it is not such a limiting diet. Of course there are a lot of things you shouldn’t eat. But at least you are not starving and there is still a huge variety of foods available. And it can be quite enjoyable actually.

You can PM for recipes…

Andy,

Zinc pairs with copper in the body for most of it’s functions. You might find that taking a zinc and copper supplement will help. Of course the best source would be liver :) But if you hate the thought of liver, you can buy it in capsule form from somewhere like heart and soil or ancestral supplements . I haven’t tried either of those options because I eat liver.

You might find things just get better the longer you’re on the diet. Sounds like a pretty carnivore version of keto. I find that I need a break from burgers once or twice a week, so I buy a rib joint of beef but if you were slow cooking you could get the cheapest joint possible (normally the low fat ones) and add a little tallow/dripping (saved from the fat your burgers expel maybe) for it to cook in.

It’s really hard to stick to a diet if it doesn’t lend itself to sustainability. Strangely meat never gets old. But if you are used to viewing food as entertainment rather than sustenance it can be a hard shift.

Bangel77,

Burgers are normally at least 20% fat (by weight), which in calorie terms is a lot higher than the protein. In Andy’s case he has a lot of fat built in (as it were), so a protein sparing modified fast wouldn’t be too bad.

Almonds are very high in oxalates, so watch out for signs that you might be developing kidney stones.

Try a chelated form of zinc, and make sure is derived from natural sources, not synthetic form.

My former eating habits were pretty boring. If food can be entertaining, I’m getting a lot more of it from keto.

I’m keeping an eye on it. I’ve been building charts for oxalates and phytoestrogens. Of course, there’s plenty of jitter in the numbers I get off the web, but it’s better than nothing.

I’m hoping I can substitute lupin or coconut flour in some recipes.

I have some on the way.

…and some of that too. Thanks!

I’m glad it’s going so well for you. I hope that continues but as you see, you have people to help you squash bugs and provide recipes.

If you’re pretty much eating just meat, watch out for the carnivore shits (unless that’s what you were referring to earlier). Can hit for about 2 weeks. Don’t trust a fart to be a fart. If it goes on for longer, it might be too much rendered fat, so try to make sure that your fat intake is solid fat.

One thing I notice with oxalates is that the body tries to eject them or store them somewhere and a good ejection site it the eyes, so when I removed oxalates from my diet I found that my eyes stopped having sandlike gunk building up overnight. If I have gunk it’s soft now. There’s something else to mention that wasn’t a problem for me but has been a problem for some. When you go from a high oxalate diet to a low one the body can suddenly think it’s a good time to start ejecting all the oxalates stored in muscles, fat and other tissue around the body. This can be a little much for the body to deal with, so if you notice something like more sandy eyes or kidney pain, consider ramping up the oxalates and then slowly reducing them over time.

I had to look up lupin flour. From a bean, eh. I distrust beans because of the large number of phytotoxins in them. Normally these can be cooked out (kidney beans are an obvious example) but people still die :)

I’m not going to respond to the phytoestrogens prompt. I’d probably end up writing a page of text and it sounds like you are already working through that.

Not exclusively meat, but biased toward it.

No problem so far. The lettuce thing I already knew, and have tracked since midsummer. It wouldn’t give me the shits, but definitely softer stool. Between food allergies and supplements/meds with “gastric distress” warnings, I’ve been logging bowel movements by the Bristol Stool Chart so if I started getting the shits I’d have a chance of identifying the culprit.

Since going keto I’m much more sensitive to lettuce; more than a couple of days in a row and it goes from “soft stool” to “gurgle, run, why don’t they put seat belts on toilets?” I’m hoping that improves as my body adjusts to the new diet; if not, at least I know how often I can eat salads before having trouble.

Adjusting my diet is preferable to getting a prescription for imodium or lomotil, which is how my previous doctor treated the squirts.

Some gunk lately, but no more than normal - it’s fall, and it’s a regular thing as the plant world tries to make my life miserable. I’ll keep an eye out for anything unusual.

Fall and spring are usually a bitch as far as joint pain as seasonal allergies aggravate the arthritis. But I’m doing better than usual at the moment. I don’t know whether it’s the diet or things just aren’t that bad this year. One of the claims for keto is that it’s supposed to help inflammation. That alone would be worth the hassle.

I’d never even heard of phytoestrogens or xenoestrogens until you mentioned them upthread. Expound as you wish, memento sensei.

Jumping back to the Vitamin D thing, my wife chose not to deal with the Stabby From Hell (she hates needles) and waited until she went to see the doctor for something else. Since he was drawing blood for labs anyway, she asked if he would run a check on her D level. A few days later she got a call that resolved to, “Holy shit, your D is tanked!” and a prescription for a D supplement.

Oddly, the prescription is for a 5,000 IU gelcap once a week. Which sounds wonky to me, but she refuses to call the doc and ask. She knows to ask for a D test next time the doc runs labs, so I guess it will have to wait until then.

I’m taking 2,000 IU twice a day. In a couple of weeks I’ll open the unused test kit and mail the sample to the lab that did the first test. That’ll let me know if my dose is even in the ballpark.

Try to get your wife on your regimen. Vitamin D is not a vitamin, as you know, and the body deals with it differently to vitamins which are quickly excreted if in excess but I’ve not come across research showing exactly how it’s dealt with and I’m not sure I understand the mechanisms as well as I should. It’s much better to get vitamin D in a natural form if possible, food and sunlight. Sunlight particularly makes many more things beyond vitamin D.

The best summary I’ve read of phytotoxins is in Paul Saladino’s book The Carnivore Code , if you can handle quite heavy text with lots of references. An alternative is just to listen through his podcasts from the start but the same caveat applies. The great thing about his work is he always references, so you can read the research yourself and see if your interpretation is close to his. In the last month I’ve got through all his podcasts. He comes across as a bit full of himself but once you get used to that, the information is there.

Simplifying his message, he thinks of plants on a toxicity spectrum, where the things most important to the plants are most heavily guarded with toxic chemicals to prevent their destruction. So fruits (inc. avocado and squashes) are the least defended (once ripe) because the plants are actually trying to get animals to eat them. Leaves have a medium level of protection, plants can lose a few but not to many. Seeds are the most heavily protected part because plants really don’t want you to eat their babies. There’s lots of research backing up this view of things, it’s estimated that approx. 99% of the toxins you get from eating plants are inherent to the plant and about 1% are due to the stuff they spray the plants with.

I’m totally with you on using the diet to modify the body’s response. Meat is digested higher up the intestinal tract and some vegetables aren’t digested much (look for sweetcorn in poop). So there’s a lot to play with. I have a feeling you are doing this much more methodically than I did (I tend to just do lots of A B testing) and so I’m looking forward to reading about your results as time goes on.

I managed to stay out of the clutches of the medical industry until just a few years ago. Mostly because I was a hypochondriac. Mention any problem or disease and I’d develop the symptoms for it. In fact, there’s a good example of how I used to be: there’s an old Jerry Lewis movie called “The Disorderly Orderly.” In one scene he has pushed an old lady to a table with some other old ladies, and they’re talking about their “female problems”. Lewis is standing behind them, crossing his legs and rolling his eyes; he doesn’t even *have* those parts, but he has the symptoms anyway.

Most of what I’ve done for a living revolved around troubleshooting, and that’s how I’m approaching this. That’s why I keep tediously detailed logs now.

As for corn… I always wondered why corn had such a high calorie count when it mostly came out looking exactly like when it went in. Much later I found out it was because the calorie charts are a fraud. The older charts were just guesses. Some years ago the FDA changed things, and now they’re not even that. Which is the reason the chart I memorized as a teenager never agreed with any of the charts I saw later, which didn’t agree with each other either.

We see a lot more concensus now, but I suspect most of it is just because the web people steal content from each other instead of looking things up for themselves.

Yeah, calorie counts are bullshit. The only way they are useful is in terms of more or less than last time but only in the context of the same diet. I guess the best approach to diet is maximizing nutritional density for satiety. If your body is asking for a particular nutrient you’ll get a craving for something, the trouble is that most cravings are run by the microbiome and so if you have a bunch of bacteria that like eating sugar in your gut, you’ll get cravings for sugar. The good thing is it takes about 2 weeks to lower their numbers enough to not get the cravings.

It’s a good approach. You might like the work of Dave Feldman . There are a lot of engineers in the nutrition field these days.

Although I have said this already so many times, be careful with MD. An MD, regardless of specialty, has ZERO jurisdiction when it comes to nutritional science. Why? Because is not their field. They do not study it, they do not learn it. An MD has only one semester of nutrition in medical school, with zero nutritional science.

I mean, the situation is so bad, that following an MD for nutrition advises is like calling a plumber to fix a leak in your car! That is exactly how it is Is just that we have been desensitized over decades and brainwashed to make us believe that an MD is pretty much there representative of the Gods on earth.

With that being said, what your wife was told is garbage. First, you dont need an RX for vitamin D. 2nd, 5,000iu a week will do nothing. Third, once again as I have said before, taking a vitamin for this an a different for that and a mineral here and there, does not work. Again, that does not work. Do not waste your time and money. The body, in order to properly function needs all 90 essential nutrients, every single day at the right amounts. All essential nutrients work synergistically.

The proper specialist, a Naturopathic ND.

P.S. if you need advise about brands and products, I can help you through a PM. last time I shared with everybody the best products here, some brilliant beauty claimed that I was trying to sell supplements. Thats the type of brain that spend millions on doctors to never be cured.

Yes, I know. But she doesn’t listen to me…