My IF and keto journey

I never thought I’d be able to remove the excesses off of my body. Two months ago I honestly imagined I’d be miserable my whole life (mostly because of recurring depression) and that I’d just have to accept the fact that I’d carry around my excess fat for the rest of my life because there’s no way in hell I’d be able to take off 20 kilos of fat and go back to wearing my favorite clothes (which I’ve slowly curated for more than 10 years, keeping only the pieces I love and cherish and wear - used to wear - on a regular basis).

I’m sure I am not the only one on this planet with such thoughts. After all, so many people are fighting obesity and depression, but there is such little information out there on getting back in shape (with regimens that actually work in the long run) and keeping in shape (and getting your mind back to normal in the process). I knew I wasn’t eating right, but I didn’t know what I was doing so wrong.

For one month prior to my realization, I quit all packaged food completely. I wanted to help the environment through this little step, buying fresh or dried ingredients to make our food, trying to get everything in reusable or recyclable packaging (no plastic), which limited my selection a lot, especially in the supermarket (we don’t have markets here, unfortunately). I started carrying my handmade produce bags (which I made using lightweight cotton fabric from a sheer curtain) and selecting only those ingredients which came in cardboard boxes or glass containers (with the mention that I could return the glass - I found yogurt and cream in reusable glass jars). It was a lot of fun, but not easy and not something I could keep on doing because most of the foods that I need come already packaged in plastic and there’s no alternative for them. There was no effect on my overall health, however.

So I decided to let in some plastic packaging, but only for basic ingredients that can be bought in bulk, such as beans, seeds of all sorts, condiments and so on. I was never a fan of ready-made meals because my tastes differ significantly from those of the general population, so I never actually bought any of those, but there are several other processed foods that I do enjoy and they are not the best to have every day.

Have you ever been in a German supermarket? Because let me tell you that the sweets aisles (yes, there are several) are larger than the fruits and veggies aisles (that’s also valid for beer/other alcoholic drinks). In every damned supermarket. So it’s easy to get seduced into buying this little bag of sweets, that little waffle, they are all so small compared to the enormousness of the whole selection, that you don’t even feel you are doing so bad. After all, why would the aisles be so big if people didn’t buy that many sweets and snacks, right?

I guess the answer to that is “marketing” and the fact that sweets have a long shelf life, are cheap to make (especially if they are mostly sugar) and can be piled on in enormous quantities without any one human being able to make even the tiniest dent in the pile. There’s also this cycle of overeating, going to the gym to get rid of the excess, going to the doctors when the gym doesn’t work and then getting depressed and eating more sweets because “nothing” you try can get you out of the cycle, except quitting.

So that’s what I did. I quit all sweets, stopped buying them and eating them to supplement my afternoon headache fighting regimen, I even got my hubby to stop consuming sweets. I wanted to make some homemade cake to replace them, as I don’t put nearly as much sugar in my own cakes as the factories put in theirs, but I was too lazy and low to even attempt to do this.

As you can imagine, it didn’t work. My mood stayed low, I still had episodes of depression (of a week or more out of two), I had no motivation, my weight kept going up…

So I ended up weighing 83 kilos and only fitting in my elastic or normally loose-fitting clothes. I could feel a fold of skin forming on my back, touching my waist, and I hated it. I never felt this skin from under my shoulder blades touching any other skin and it was eerie. You may be laughing at me, ha ha, only 83 kilos, but that’s too much for my small-ish frame and it made me feel even worse than before.

This process in which I went from my usual 60 kilos to 83 was not fast. It took years. It started around six years ago and gained momentum during the last two because of the depression that hit me from all sides. I didn’t realize how much I was gaining because I didn’t have the time or energy to care, for many years I used a broken scale which showed 3 kilos less (so I thought I was still OK, only recently realized it was off) and towards the end I even stopped weighing myself because I hated it so much that I didn’t even want to know the number. It’s better for your mental health to not know the number, right?

Not really. It does nothing to your mental health or your health in general. Numbers are just abstractions, they have no equivalent in practice, but not knowing this specific number allowed me to stop beating myself up for not being able to stop gaining weight.

I’ve known for a long time that diets don’t work.

As a true Aspie, I never cared much for my looks, both the shape of my body and the appearance of my face. I always believed that I was OK, even though I was no beauty (I didn’t know back then about all of the beauty rituals that people force themselves into to look prettier). I was never thin and I never tried to be thin because people wouldn’t like me anyway, no matter what I looked like. They’d bully me and make fun of me for not being like them (and for being obnoxious, I accept, I wasn’t the easiest person to have a conversation with because I’d dissect every single sentence and point out the flaws in every affirmation), so I was not exposed to the horrors of dieting from a young age. My parents are quite relaxed about this topic and we never discussed weight in other terms than growing (or maybe they didn’t share their own insecurities because I was too young — or maybe they did, but I didn’t get it because… Aspie).

We never discussed dieting, but I read extensively, so I knew that thin people were trying to be even thinner (I never understood why, still don’t), but there was no obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic back then. There were many “get thin fast” advertisements (for products and diets that probably didn’t work), but I simply assumed they were for middle-aged people wanting to get some excess fat off without trying too hard. Back then I didn’t have access to the wealth of information that is the internet nowadays.

I also wasn’t fat. I wasn’t thin, I was what I enjoyed calling “just right” (which might have been too much for some people, but I didn’t mind and I was happy with that). For many years I was in this window of “just right” for me, so I didn’t understand why my classmates (who were all thinner) would keep on talking all the time about their weight and how they didn’t like themselves, so I ignored them. I would phase out from conversations happening around me and go into my imaginary wonderland where nobody talks about their weight, but rather about that rad horse they’re going to pet or whatever.

I’m glad I did ignore, them, though, because had I listened to them and hated my body as much as they did, I would have probably tried the self-mutilating techniques they were discussing and would have ended up where I ended up anyway (deep in depression), but even worse. Adolescence is difficult enough without body-shaming and self hate, so why do we still expose adolescents to this?

Today everybody knows that calorie-restrictive diets don’t work. Even though many people still say “remove the sugar from your current diet and you’ll drop ten kilos in a month” or other similar crap, it’s not true. If you restrict your calories, but keep your eating habits, your body will start demanding that you go back to the original diet, or it goes into starvation mode. “What’s happening, where’s the sweet reward I get when I give you a headache and dizziness? Why did it stop coming? Are we starving? Will there be no more sweets, ever? Let’s hold on to every little milligram of fat, we don’t want to die, do we?”. That’s probably what my brain would say if it had separate words of its own (it already has words, but only in the cerebral cortex, the one I’m using now to think about things and put them in words).

I tried it and it made me go deeper into depression and hate myself more for not being able to even do this simple thing. Excess is excess, if I haven’t used it for the past five years, it’s high time that it gets thrown out and replaced with open space, waiting for new fat. But the human body doesn’t do this because we are highly adapted to the possibility of long-term famines. My body doesn’t know I don’t necessarily want to have kids (maybe I’ll change my mind, but that’s another discussion), so it keeps on churning out eggs and throwing out a big chunk of my blood every month (sometimes even twice a month) and it keeps on to every little bit of food I eat, just like a worried mother “are you not taking this with you? what if you need it later?”.

I know there are people out there whose metabolism runs faster than I could ever imagine, but I haven’t seen any statistics on their distribution in the population, so I can’t say anything about that.

For me the reality is I build muscle fast (for a woman, anyway) and I lose it even faster, I also gain fat fast, but I can’t ever get rid of it, even it it goes beyond what is accepted as a healthy amount. Until recently, at least.

In January I found out I was an Aspie (formerly separated from autism, now on the autism spectrum in the “high functioning” area). I’d like to write more about how many doors that discovery has opened in my mind, but what was the most important for me was the understanding that my depression had a source.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, I didn’t have an unresolved conflict or a major traumatic event in my life (unless you count a PhD a major traumatic event that lasted around four years), it was just my brain (and potentially the sedentarism of my job). My brain, this tool that I’d been abusing all my life, filling it with facts and images and stories and imaginary worlds. This wonderful thing that has helped me survive and thrive as a child, even though I’d been hated and bullied and made fun of for so many years exactly because of it, my brain.

Of course, as any new topic that interests me intensely, I began searching and reading, watching whole movies and documentaries and generally digging up whatever I could find on the subject (not that much, really, as it’s only been recently recognized that women also suffer from autism - oh, the horror; and there are very few resources specifically about autism in females) so it’s no wonder my search and browser history is a big mess.

Probably Google knows me better than myself (which is a feat quite difficult to overcome), because after a friend sent me an article about religious practice (and sometimes fanaticism) by medical doctors back home, in which there’s the description of a fake doctor that was preaching about fasting in a camp for religious medics (I know, weird), somehow youtube decided it was a good idea to recommend a video about intermittent fasting and the benefits of fasting in general. I never believed fasting would help anyone, let alone people with depression. Hello, when I’m depressed I need food, how could I survive without it?

Until the day I watched that video about fasting and its benefits on the human body, I never, never ever considered not eating. Skipping meals? Nope. Not eating breakfast, “the most important meal of the day”? How could I? I’d go insane with hunger/low blood sugar/low blood pressure. At least that’s what I thought. I never questioned the truth of this practice that’s been ingrained in my brain ever since I was 1 day old. And I’m the one that questions everything! Even the best slip up, right?

So after a whole month of absorbing every source of information I could find about autism, in women especially, there came a new month of absorbing everything I could find about fasting. I won’t make a list here because, as always, I only take bits of information and facts from all the sources I can find and make my own “model of the universe” limited to the subject. If you want to try, just google “intermittent fasting” (or search for the same keywords in google scholar) and you’ll see why I didn’t make a list.

Everything about it is changing as I’m writing now. There are no textbooks (there are some books, but I can’t recommend them because I haven’t read any of them) or dedicated websites with trustworthy information, it’s all a mess, but a slowly coagulating mess. This practice that has been a part of human culture since the beginning of time is coming back into our lives and is being explored both by pseudoscience and the scientific channels (which are much slower, but much cleaner too).

The most important part that’s missing is the information on how fasting works for women. Most of the studies are done on men, most people who talk about it are men, but women have more complex issues, you don’t just open a tap and all the fat flows out. I (and many women) have a cyclical metabolism, my weight goes up and down with my fertility status, it’s not that simple to just stick to this constant regimen of eating/not eating and everything will happen the same every day. Female hormones are super powerful and I’d like to learn to cooperate with them, not fight them, in their own environment.

I’m glad that I stumbled upon fasting (or it stumbled upon me), because now I have something that I can do, without trying too hard, to get out of the big mess that I’ve been slowly flowing into, without realizing.

The good news is that it works.

The bad news is that it doesn’t work as expected (unless you’re a guy, in which case, congratulations, your problems are less complex, give yourself a pat on the back).

I started intermittent fasting more than a month ago (today is March 7th 2019) and I saw the effects immediately. I chose a simple regimen, but I may have started a bit too harsh, with a 36 hour fast because I had no idea what I was doing. I think I was aiming at 48 hours, but my common sense kicked in.

It did help start my healing process, though, so I regret nothing. It got me used to the discomfort of not having anything in my stomach for part of the day and to the idea that breakfast isn’t actually necessary for a decent working day (for me - I mostly work with my eyes, brain and hands, not the rest of my body).

After the first intense hurdle, I continued with a 16/8 hour cycle, 16 hours fasting, 8 hours for eating (normal meals, no excess to make up for the skipped breakfast). I’m still doing this with variations (increasing the fasting window at times) and a few times I didn’t skip breakfast because I felt sick (possibly from a virus) and didn’t want to add extra stress to my body.

The immediate effects were a small drop in weight right in the beginning (it didn’t continue falling), an increase in mood (I no longer hate myself or my life and the heaviness is gone from my mind) and a redistribution of the fat in my body. My guts relaxed, the inflammation that I had went down and I stopped feeling bloated and heavy, those horrible flaps under my shoulder blades started to retreat and no longer bother me (because they don’t fold over themselves any more) and the fat around my body has started to become softer and more mobile.

Today I weigh 76.8 kg, but I don’t know what I started from because I didn’t weigh myself at the beginning of fasting. I feel less heavy, even though I still hate going up the stairs (any kind of stairs) and I look almost as big as before.

No worries, though, because I have a plan. As I was reading a lot about intermittent fasting, I also stumbled upon the ketogenic diet (old news, I know). It’s a low/no-carb diet (without other restrictions) that theoretically gets you into ketosis, the state in which your body no longer has any carbohydrates to burn, so it turns to fat (and in a small amount to protein).

The good thing is that through fasting you can get into this state and you burn fat, in this case your own fat. The bad thing is that when you break your fast with lots of carbs (meaning a normal meal), you go back into the usual process and it take a long time of fasting to get back to ketosis.

As I would never support an extended fast for obvious reasons (there are many health risks associated with long water fasts), I decided to try to stay in the ketosis state by eating low-carb for a week. Then, if I want, I can break the cycle and see what happens, or if I’m happy with how it’s going, I’ll continue.

Because my short memory is crap (meaning medium memory, my super short memory is quite top notch), I need to write down what I observe and learn over time so I can analyse and adjust as time goes by and also to keep motivated, as progress is small in small windows of time, but having a full report of evolution I can observe the macro changes. This need prompted the current article and my experience so far needed a summary, that’s why there was such a long introduction.

Day 1. Wednesday

As I only thought about writing about my keto journey this morning on my way to work, I have to remember all I can from yesterday and put it here.

In the morning, I weighed 77.7. I dreamt of the day the scale would show 66.6 (the number of the beast, which I only enjoy because it sounds funny and there’s so much fear and controversy about a piece of fiction, but more on that with another occasion). It’s good to dream of something, even if it’s simply a number (I know what I said just earlier, it’s an abstraction, but it’s one that allows me to just breathe and relax).

I had just started a new fasting week on the app that I use (which I don’t enjoy very much because it’s badly made, so I won’t recommend it, but it’s the only one without ads, so I tolerate it and use it to remind myself to eat/not eat) with a new regimen (which I chose out of the limited number of about 10) that starts out longer (19 hour fast, 3 hour eating window), then continues with smaller fasting windows.

This fast ended at 3 PM and it was a bit difficult for me because I’m used to eating at around 12 now, as I already got used to skipping breakfast. I did it, though, and rewarded myself with the food I had prepared one day before just for this occasion, all keto: four seed crackers for eggplant salad (the best dish on this planet, honestly), a bit of cheese and dried salami, the leftover egg white from preparing the eggplant salad (waste not), a few red radishes and a carrot.

That was enough to lock my stomach and make me feel bad for the rest of the day because somehow I was not able to digest it as any other normal meal, even though the quantities themselves were exactly the same as usual (or even lower). It may have been the seed crackers, I’ll try to make them thinner next time (I still have a lot left, though, so they need to be eaten first, before making more). It also may have been the fact that I changed the hour for eating and my stomach was in no mood for digesting “I’ll do that later, leave me alone”.

I put some chickpeas in water to let them swell up for cooking the next day in the evening.

As I ate so late and got home at around 6, I didn’t eat anything more except for an apple, in the hopes it would help speed up the digestion process. I think it helped and I also needed to get some more vitamins in before the next fast began at 6:30. I slept like a baby and had vivid dreams.

Day 2. Thursday

Weight: 76.8

In one of my dreams, I traveled through time and ended up in the same place, but with some stuff missing, instead of my laptop and the two eggs I was carrying around (don’t ask why, dream logic in action), I now had one metal egg. It was nice, heavy and with a rugged surface. What does that tell me? Maybe I’ve been sitting to much on the computer and thinking too much about eggs (eggs are awesome for keto, they go with anything).

As I still have some eggplant salad in the fridge at work and a lot of those crackers left, I took four more with me to work for lunch, adding the same cheese/dry salami/radishes and carrot, but in smaller quantities. Maybe it will be different today if I eat slower (yesterday I was ravenous) and take the time to chew better.

I plan on making something with the chickpeas today, but I’m not sure what yet. Everybody loves hummus, I hate it. I may have to search for a decent recipe that doesn’t make me throw up and then I may be able to make hummus and use up more of those seed cookie/crackers. I might actually enjoy hummus for the first time in my life.

In the brain department, as I’ve written this whole text in one sitting, I realized I was making lots and lots of mistakes, many more than I usually make when I write anything. It’s as if my fingers have forgotten where specific letters are and just press random keys. As you may also do, I never look at the keyboard while writing and I usually don’t make mistakes, but damn, today is not a good day for typing.

It is a good day for writing, though, as my mind is clear and I can follow a train of thought without being distracted every two seconds, so I guess that’s nice. I haven’t written in a long while, though, mostly reading lately, so that may be why my fingers are so clumsy.

No worries, though, because if my plan doesn’t fail, I’ll be writing every day. I’ll update this article as I see fit, hopefully every day, but if by any chance I miss a day, well, too bad. I can’t go back in time.

Day 3. Friday — read about it here