In my last post I talked about how I used to be very fat. I am still fat. I am starting my weight loss journey again to lose these last 30 LBS. Lots of people have suggested two things to me: Keto diet and intermittent fasting. I’ve seen my friend Ben lose lots of weight on the Keto diet. I’ve also seen some friends gain weight on it; they were following it exactly. I’ve also done both of these in the past. However, I did intermittent fasting by accident. Both of these were resounding failures for my health and I had to stop.
While I have talked about cleaning up my diet on here already the part I left off was my ill-fated attempt at a Keto diet. For those who don’t know, a Keto diet is where you consume mostly protein and fats then you cut out carbs. The science behind it is that the excess protein will turn into energy, so you don’t lose what you would have gained from carbs, and by consuming more fats your body will start to digest fats more. Your body will replace bad fats with good fats too. So, you’re cleaning your body out. Since you are eating more fats and protein you don’t need to eat as much to feel full. It sounds too good to be true. Yet, I have seen it work before. Why was mine ill-fated? Family history of heart issues.
When I first started the Keto diet I noticed a few things. I had more energy, my skin was getting worse, my shits stank, and I no longer had a poop schedule. You will notice three of these things are negative, but more energy is great! No joke, I loved having the natural energy. I stopped drinking Red Bull’s because of the natural energy. After a month of the Keto diet, and I strictly followed it, I noticed some weight loss but I was always hungry. Despite what everyone told me about the diet making you full for longer I found the opposite to be true. Then about halfway through month two I started to have severe chest pains. My left arm would hurt randomly and I had shortness of breath. Not all at once, but randomly throughout the day. I went to talk to my doctor and I was dangerously close to having a heart attack. I will point out during this time I was doing cardio via walks and jogs. I was doing daily cardio before I started the Keto diet too. My physician told me that the Keto diet is not safe for people who have a family history of heart disease and other cardio vascular related issues. That I needed to eat a balanced diet. It wasn’t until after I swapped to the balanced diet did I really start to lose weight and improve my health. It was at this point my poops started to smell better, had a schedule again, and my face started to get better. However, I was losing energy.
Now, I am not a physician. I trust what mine told me. I remember the chest pains becoming unbearable. None of my friends who have done the Keto die experienced this, only I did. I felt like at any second I was going to fall over and die. All of that left when I switched back to a natural and balanced diet. I got my carbs from fruits and veggies. Chicken and tuna were still my main source of protein and I stopped eating butter again. Now I know some of y’all are arguing about the butter there. I was getting natural organic butter. Every Keto website at the time told you to eat more butter and to this day it is a contested issue. So, I do not care what you have to say about the butter.
“What is intermittent fasting?” I hear you asking. Well, I only recently found out what it is, despite doing it by accident, and I can’t recommend against it enough. “How did you do it by accident?” Well, once I explain it I am sure you will understand. Intermittent fasting is when you phase out snacks and then you phase out breakfast because you are no longer hungry in the morning. Then you start to phase dinner and lunch closer together. Within a 6 hour window is what some would recommend. This is so your body is fasting for longer. The point of intermittent fasting is to have your body fast daily and for long stretches of time. You are basically starving your body, but your body doesn’t feel hungry. From what I have read you want a 6 hour window where you eat two meals and then 18 hours where your body is fasting. Due to my shitty work schedule at the time I was already doing this, and for a long period of time. I was skipping breakfast because I wasn’t hungry and my lunch and dinner were insanely close together because of my work hours. How did it go wrong? After all everyone says this is how you reset your body’s natural order. From resetting gut flora to cleaning out your liver.
It went wrong by giving me two ulcers and an infection in my large intestines, multiple times. You may be wondering how. Apparently my body was still making enough stomach acid like I was eating. Despite me not eating breakfast for months. The stomach acid was tearing away at my stomach lining which gave me two stomach ulcers and then seeped into my intestines where it destroyed the lining and caused them to get infected more times then I care to count. Not only that it lead to tons of polyps in my colon that didn’t exist before, some pretty big ones, and my colon was stained with my stomach bile. It was not a healthy red colon but a sickly corrosive green looking one. The red color is starting to return to my colon; this was confirmed by my last colonoscopy. I am not even 40 and I have had a lot of colonoscopies. They were super worried about my colon and intestinal health.
For the longest we couldn’t figure it out until eventually they asked if I was eating breakfast. I was always told breakfast was a scam and to instead slam down coffee, I chose tea, because breakfast just makes you fat. It turns out what breakfast does is absorb some of that stomach acid that has been building up to prevent you from getting ulcers and an infected intestine. I was prescribed antacids to deal with this. Not like Tums but some weird goo that I needed to have 3 packs of a day. They also asked if I was snacking. When I started to eat breakfast again my intestinal pains started to leave and so did my stomach pains. As I added back light snacks, like bananas, I was no longer in any discomfort throughout the day.
Currently I have cut most carbs out of my diet. I am still eating fruits and a piece of bread in the morning with my eggs. Switching to a mostly natural diet is helping me lose weight again and pretty fast. Since I have started doing this, a week now, I am down 10 LBS. I was 205 and I am now 195, in the mornings. This is also with me lifting weights twice a week and building up muscles. Some people are going to assume that’s what is causing me to lose weight but lifting weights didn’t help a god damn thing. When I started to do what others suggested, which was less cardio, I started to gain weight. No, that’s not muscle. You don’t go from 198 to 212 in 3 weeks with muscle. I switched back to focusing on cardio and fixing my diet. Now I am getting back to where I was before everything went sideways a few weeks ago. Having a bowl of veggies with every meal feels great. My skin is getting better. My sleep is better. Just life feels better when I am eating healthy.