There's HOW many carbs in that!?

It's the oil you're not suppose to heat up. It's more delicate than if the seed is whole or ground.

However, that's why I buy the whole seed and grind it myself. I don't like the idea of ground meal sitting around for who knows how long before it's used.


http://www.livestrong.com/article/533140-does-flaxseed-lose-nutrition-when-it-is-cooked/

Fat.

Beef tallow and Lard are just about the perfect composition for the body.

About 60% of my calories are coming from fat.

The fat's to be avoided are the one's that have a high percentage of Linoleic Acid, which is Omega 6. (the blue parts of the bars on the chart below)
Omega 6 was touted as cholesterol lowering. However, what it lowers is your HDL's.

You'd want to increase your Alpha Linolenic Acid (Omega 3)

Saturated and Monounsaturated fat lowers you LDL's.

My fats are coming from cheese, eggs, avocado, olive oil if it's not being heated, duck fat (the jars almost gone, so I'm going to open either the lard or tallow), grass fed butter, and whatever is in the meat and fish I eat.

Aesthetically, my skin and hair look wonderful. Physically my gut works well, I sleep more deeply, but less, and spikes in blood glucose is gone. Still have slightly elevated BG when I get up, but getting better slowly. Today is was 87, which surprised me. That shows me insulin resistance is decreasing.

In case you think there's no vegetables, today I've had: Avocado, onion, red bell pepper, spinach, tomato, cucumber, black olives.

Interesting experience, learning event, validation I'm doing the right thing last night.

I still have higher than 100 BG when I get up. It ranges from 103 to 107. However, at any given time during the day, regardless of if I'd just eaten a meal, it stays under 100 at all times. Usually ranges from 85 to around 95. So, if my A1C were taken today, I'd be in good shape.

Last week I had a couple of days were morning BG was under 100. I'm trying to pinpoint what I did, and replicate. It's been very cold where I am, too cold to swim, even in a warm spring pool. Getting back into that when it warms up will help.

Anyway, my learning experience...

A friend of mine is in town for a couple of days, and we went out to dinner. He wanted to eat at this pizza place named DeSano's. He had eaten there in L.A. and loved it. BTW they currently have 5 locations, L.A., Austin, Nashville...and at the airports in Charleston an Ft Lauderdale. Coming soon to Charlotte.

I figured I'd get a caprese salad or something, but when I saw the place, I decided, what the hell, I'm just going to experience it. I did, I loved it, and don't regret having it. However, I saw the immediate effect.

When I got home maybe 3 hours after eating, my BG was 120. For normal people BG is supposed to be 140 after 2 hours. I thought that extra hour should have dropped me closer to 100. So, I waited another hour and a half, took it again, and it was I think 123. Wasn't going down. I ate a few ounces of cheese, waited about 45 minutes, took my BG again...it was 95.

This morning was where I really paid the piper. 117 upon getting up. Hasn't been that high since 11/8/16, when I ate a salad at a restaurant the night before, and realized later I had the taken the wrong kind of dressing. That produced the next day reading of 125. That was 3 weeks before I went keto, and started taking only 8 or 9 net carbs per meal.

The pizza was great, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it when I choose to indulge again in 6 months or so. I enjoyed it that much more, knowing it was a super special thing.

If I had bg reads like those, I probably wouldn't check more often than a single fasting read in the morning.

By the way, I've made big changes to the diet and had the med switched to Glipzide. One or the other has caused a drop of 50 points across the board.

Oh yeah. I mostly just check my morning BG and maybe once a week at a random time. BG holding steady after eating food in the morning to under 100, so I'm just in the habit of checking the fasting one.

This pizza episode is literally the first time I've eaten any bread type carbs in months. My carbs come 90 to o 95% from above ground vegetables, olives and avocados. The other tiny part comes from 1 carb for every 2 eggs, a tablespoon of cream in a recipe, or the stray carb in uncured salami or other marinated/fermented items. I wanted to see the effects of a very heavy carb meal over several hours to gage my current insulin resistance.

Keep in mind roger that this one meal involved taking in at Least 10 times more carbs than I normally eat in an entire day.

My next A1C test will show me to be not even pre-diabetic. I will not become Diabetic and will not have to go on any medications.

That's just the way it is.

50 points across the board is huge! Congratulations roger.

It's good to see people taking responsibility and control of their own health!

An inconvenient truth...

I firmly believe we are all in the middle of a very large public health experiment. An inadvertent one, I might add; it's not like these were the intended consequences. But subsidize corn, demonize sugar and fat, and add antibiotics to farm animals to make them grow faster, all while advertising ever-increasingly processed food all over the Internet, TV, and radio. And make sure to push the manufacture and sales of cars and cut funding for public transportation and don't assure bicyclists' safety and you get, well, you get the US, circa 2017.

Oh! I should add, the above is the US obesity percentages map for 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Unfortunately, I don't think this was largely inadvertent. Just a small part of it. When our weight and health started to go tits up, I believe the scientists knew very well what was causing it. The sugar lobby had a lot of money and in no way had the public interest or health in mind. But the going back/reversal/making the public aware wasn't going to make anyone $$$. So it was buried under slick advertising, and the propaganda of "You deserve this! Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness equals not thinking about or taking responsibility for the results!", and above all "BUY! BUY! BUY!"

It only took a generation to forget food doesn't grow in boxes.

Might also be due to fewer people smoking/more people living longer: http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/demographic.html

Cauliflower pizza crust is actually pretty good.

Especially when you reheat a piece the next day in a skillet. Ya gotta brown the hell out of it.

Yes, and you can buy cauliflower shredded at Trader Joe's and use it instead of rice.

Interesting read, Chai! You went from counting carbs and eating still a lot of carbs, but very few vegetables, to eating veggies, cheese, meat, and fat. When you first said you're a plain eater, you changed that too as you make more elaborate meals now. Pretty good! That vegetti thing is great too - I call it spiralizer, but I love getting zucchini spaghetti out of it with pesto and olives, very tasty! Carrots are excellent spiralized, I add honey to it and that's my dessert.
Of course, I am also a chocoholic, I will never give up sugar, but I try to eat healthy to offset the occasional candy/cookie/cake.

Keep on going, you're doing the right thing!

Surprisingly, straight chocolate like Hershey's isn't that heavy on carbs if you stick to what they call a serving size. I won't say it's low fat, though.

I don't eat Hershey's, roger - if I get the calories then it has to be better than this, but you're right, it has more fat than carbs.

Hmm. Don't see where I ever indicated I wasn't eating vegetables, or that my eating has become elaborate, but if that's your take on it, ok. I guess I don't mention the vegetables, meaning ones that grow above ground, as that's a given. Vegetables are probably 95% of the net carbs I eat each day. Net carbs are total grams of carbs minus grams of fiber.

I aim for 7 to 9 net carbs per meal, 24 or 25 per day. To put that in perspective 24 net carbs would be any one of the following: 12 small avocados, 24 cups of raw spinach, 3 cups of chopped onion, 4 cups of tomato or equally generous amounts of zucchini, broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, etc. The thing is you eat them prepared with fat, a lot of it.

On the other hand I think something like 1/2 cup of sweet potato would be an entire days allotment. Not worth it, so no sense even thinking about it. The happy thing is, when the body is running right, you don't think about it.

What I did need to cut out entirely was fruit, as the results of even a small amount wasn't worth it.

When I say elaborate I mean meals that take far too many ingredients that really are just for show, or processed, or trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. An avocado is an avocado, nothing more or less. Cauliflower that's been smashed flat and baked so it hardens up is just making a device to carry other stuff, like oil, cheeses, olives some tomato up to my mouth. I still appreciate it as only cauliflower.

When I say I am a simple eater, it doesn't mean mean I don't get a wide variety of foods. In fact, I don't believe anyone could be successful in eating this way having a limited daily diet. I just generally eat things in their basic state, even if it is cut up with a spiralizer and not a knife.

I gotta be clear. Eating a ketogenic diet isn't about eating in the order you said, vegetables, meat and cheese and fat.

It's about eating FAT, a moderate amount of protein, and Very Low Carb.
That means 60 to 70 percent FAT, 20 percent protein and 5 to 10 percent carbs.

That doesn't mean if you look at a plate of food, most of it is covered with butter, lard, tallow, various oils, etc. It's 70% of your calories that come from fat, not the actual portion of food.

The key is eating more fat, of all the types listed above, than at first you can believe, until you start experiencing the results.

It's really mindful eating for me, as I need to optimize each meal so I don't feel like I'm missing out on something. There is no "I'll just have a little and it won't hurt". I've made mindful decisions 2 or 3 times to eat carbs, knowing the results. The results are you are thrown out of ketosis, and it will take me at least 2 days to be back in it. I know I'm back in it when my body stops sending subtle signals to eat more carbs.

What I've found for myself is it's not about deprivation. It's not wishing you could have a brownie or some thing you see in a commercial or magazine. It's about those things not even being on your radar 99% of the time. On the odd time that it happens, you go eat something with a lot of butter.

Huh?

Maybe for someone not watching carbs, and willing to settle for less than 2 ounces.

Come on, get real. Not directed at you roger, but in general.

The numbers they put on these products, as in taking a product of refined sugar and claiming it's part of an outrageouly high normal allotment of carbohydrates, is what is sending us into a tailspin health wise.

Yeah, I'm sounding preachy right now, but seriously?

People don't realize that they go to the doctor presenting with health concerns, and are given options/solutions that are so watered down that it does little but lead them further down the road towards a disease?

In some ways I can't blame doctors. They see so many people walk into their office that feel like even the most insignificant change is like climbing Mt. Everest, and they just say the words, knowing the patient will find any excuse not to make it work....because it's "so haaaaard."

We rely (my opinion) too heavily on what physicians tell us, and won't get off our asses and do our own research, and work to improve our own condition.

Yeah, it would be hard, at first. Whether is be type of food, lack of exercise, facing mental problems, etc., yeah your body and mind are going to fight it, and not want you to get over the hump, where after that, you reap the rewards.
We're impatient. We want results too soon. If you've wrecked your body, it'll take time, more than you realize, to even get it on the right track.

I retrieved a wrapper of Hershey's Special Dark from the trash. Serving size is 36g, calories 170, fats 7g, and carbs at 22g. I'm not going to track down a label for you; you can take my word for it, or not.

I have to wonder about a serving size of 1 & 1/4 bars. Kind of like the servings per can a 14oz can of vegetables being 3 1/2 servings. Nobody is dishing out a half serving.