Week 1 down. 13.2 to go! My daughter made some amazing keto food in the Instant Pot last night – didn’t eat it =( Had some heated up chocolate Keto Chow instead. Today I’m going to try to get another test batch of the in-development savory flavors going. Want to be able to have those far along by the time I’m hitting around day 80 so I can use them in my tests. Speaking of product development and availability: we talked to the company packaging the samples yesterday. It’s looking like we won’t be getting onto the machine until late January or early February. Miriam got a little… “agitated” and told them “we’re dying here!” It was good to have her on the call =) They are trying to do everything they can to squeeze us in wherever they can and a second packaging machine is going to be coming online in February as well so this shouldn’t happen again. We’ll see.
We’re going to be doing our weekly Facebook Live tonight – it’s scheduled for 7:30 pm, mountain time but may start a little late, we have a concert for our kids and I’m not sure what time it will end.
I can report that what I’m eating (3 meals of Keto Chow) is most definitively supportive of a ketogenic diet – I tested my blood ketones at 2.4 mmol/dL this morning with 14.2 ppm on my breath acetone. So, what do those numbers mean? In my own personal opinion: anything over 0.3 mmol/dL of blood ketones means you’re doing really well. You’re producing ketones (ketogenic) and you’re burning ketones (ketosis) as well as fat. Are higher numbers better? They can be if you have a neurological condition that benefits from higher ketones (dementia, Alzheimers, epilepsy, depression, autism, etc…) – higher ketone levels correlate with higher ketone metabolism in the brain so you’d want “therapeutic levels” of ketones. This is also the group that can see potential benefits from using exogenous ketones.
For those that do not have a neurological condition, higher ketones just mean that you have higher ketones. It is academically interesting but it isn’t a predictor of faster weight loss. What I’m eating, combined with how my liver is working, I’m getting relatively high numbers. I like seeing those higher numbers because it assures me personally that the diet I’m eating is A-OK for keto (in the “Chris Bair metabolic model”) beyond a shadow of a doubt, which makes me feel good about recommending it to people as a meal that’s a good idea when doing keto. I’d still be happy if I was at 0.5 or 1.2, or even higher. All of this is why it’s said to “chase results, not ketones” – I’ve gotten my ketones up to 5.8 mmol/dL before (3 meals of Keto Chow a day, only avocado oil, no heavy cream, a little MCT oil) and likely will again during the science portion of this 100 day experiment. It did (and likely will) put my brain into overdrive – which was great as I was doing classes at the time – again: neurological benefit, not necessarily weight loss benefit.
Dr. Berry happened to post a video today that’s also about who should use exogenous ketones:
https://youtu.be/gjD_mQtscy4
