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by mmaunder
3806 days ago
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I've played with ketosis. You can verify your body is in a state of ketosis using "keto sticks" that you pee on. They change color and prove that your body is outputting ketones. That's also what causes your breath to smell like something died (my wife's comment). One of the leading thinkers on this is Tim Noakes who has written some excellent literature on the subject and is a keen runner. He became famous for "Lore of Running" which is a tome of a book but is an excellent primer for any runner serious about nutrition and metabolic processes. Noakes has more recently joined the low carb/low GI movement and has some pretty radical thinking in the area. I would also echo some other commenters here that Ketosis is IMHO not a healthy state and can have quite far reaching health consequences. One of the by products of ketosis is acetone which is what makes your breath smell - so there are some fairly radical changes in your body's chemical functioning as it goes into starvation and survival mode. I tend to gravitate away from radical experiments like this and more towards what the leading edge professional athletes are doing, minus the steroids. They have plenty of motivation to innovate in the field in a sustainable way. |
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To do this, I stuck myself on a fixed daily 700kcal diet, ran 15km a day, and got on with life as usual. I measured blood sugar, weight, fat mass, resting pulse, b.p.
Needless to say, I lost weight, fast, and was down to 180 by the time I ended the experiment, four months later. 80% of the mass I lost was fat, 20% muscle, my sleep apnoea was cured, and I felt good about myself for the first time in years.
I also got some beautiful graphs out of it. By keeping the inputs all constant, I could see my weight shifting along a curve as my metabolic requirements shrank as I dropped mass, I could see blood pressure and glucose moving in curves beautifully correlated with my fat mass. To that end, everything went as planned.
About six months after this, I started being sick. I'd spend days puking and delirious, and would then be fine for months, or weeks - came and went at random. Several years of baffled doctors later, I diagnosed myself with gall stones, got an ultrasound, confirmed my hypothesis, and had my gall bladder removed last year. Turns out that having a prolonged low calorie diet pissed my duodenum and gall bladder off mightily, and they grew a huge cluster of stones in short order. I'm seemingly fine now, after five years of misery.
Long story short, you're not actually invincible, don't learn this the hard way like I did.