War on Carbs
Dropping Weight Eating Mostly Meat
Hello! Finally getting around to publishing! In the coming weeks, I hope to share some of my meat receipes, training goals (and approaches), and more. To kick this newsletter off, I wanted to share with you an update on how intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet has help me shave off a ton of weight fast and am feeling better than ever.
A little more than 3 weeks ago, I had decided I had had enough of my ballooning gut and generally feeling kind of crappy. I was actually in decent shape in terms of strength and getting through workouts but blood pressure had been high for awhile and my eat-all-the-things approach was clearly making things bad. Before I got home to my home scale that automatically records my weigh-ins, I had used a scale at our lake house and it recorded me at 266 pounds.
Heaviest of my life.
I had started then to just get back to the basics with a combined intermittent fasting with a 6 hour window (goal, but sometimes went to 8 hours) and keto focused diet (though at first higher protein, lower fat -- I had plenty of fat to burn that was stored up!).
By the time I got home, my first recorded weigh in was at 262.1 but was already feeling better.
Now that I was home and not in vacation mode with family, it was going to be even easier to focus on good eating.
I had been considering entering a weightlifting competition, my first, sometime in the near future and being in the 260s meant I'd have to compete in the bigges weight class. I knew a good amount of weight I was carrying wasn't contributing at all to my ability to move the barebell, if anything it probably made things more difficult. I'd love to get into the next weight class down but wasn't sure if that would be realistic. I'd need to have a weigh in below 240 to make that work.
Well, it's been just over 21 days and I'm down 22 pounds. The pounds are coming off slower, but still seem to be flying off. I'm trying to get a good rotation of low carb vegetables like greens, brussels sprouts, and bell pepper for the nutrients. I'm supplamenting with fish oil, vitamin d, and a magnesium blend. I've also been taking some MCT oil and collagen. My thinking with the collagen is that it could help with some of my cranky and worn out joints (no meniscus in my right knee). I think the combination of the collagen support, the weight loss, and what is definitely a low inflammatory diet has done wonders for my knee.
My diet is still very meat-forward. Somedays have two meals a day, somedays only one. I haven't started back training yet and it will be interesting to see how my lack of carbs can support training volume necessary to get competition ready. Not sure yet what I'll do. I've read some keto sources that speak to increasing fat consumption to support energy levels once you are fat adapted which I have to think I am at this point.