As I pointed out in the
Week 8 Summary, I met with the Julia Kelly, a
nutritionist at Nourish Balance Thrive, to discuss fine-tuning this ketogenic diet I've been on. This was more of a check for me to make sure I'm not missing anything, I haven't overlooked something, and to get some advice from a professional who has experience consulting on low-fat diet plans for athletes.
I've had pretty good results to date with my ketosis journey, but everything I've done (even choosing this diet or Way Of Eating) has been based off books and internet findings. I have not consulted with anyone who has actually done this before and has real life experience - the ups, downs, and in-between's that I'm sharing with all of you here. I really feel like I'm missing something. My weight loss has pretty much stalled and I'm still having issues with waking up daily at 4am and not being able to go back to sleep. The weight isn't necessarily cause for alarm as I'm still progressively loosing size around my midsection, I'm still getting visually leaner each week, I'm recovering quickly from my workouts, and I still feel really good, I just can't help but think, "maybe I can be doing something better."
Enter Julia! As I stated above Julia helps athletes including her UCI pro mountain bike husband Chris, perform and "thrive" (small pun there) on a low-fat diet. For background credentials, Julia was educated as and formerly worked as a food scientist before founding Nourish Balance Thrive with her husband Chris. After listening to their podcast entitled
Frequently Asked Questions, I felt she was the professional I wanted to work with.
So Julia calls me to discuss my needs and we have an hour long call which she followed up with an email about topics of discussion, links to further materials, outline of her suggestions for change that we discussed, and a brief summary of how we go forward. Pretty standard stuff that you would expect when you purchase professional services.
Okay so the point you've all been reading for, what did Julia suggest we change? Nothing, all was great and that's the end of this blog post.... Kidding, there are several things she suggested that I do. I'll line out a few of them here.
First a little context. As an athlete, (sounds funny saying that because I don't get paid to play my sport, I'm not famous, nor do I necessarily consider myself an athlete by definition) I need more to make sure I have plenty of nutrients and calories. Food is fuel for the body and I must make sure I'm supplying enough of it, in high quality sources, to facilitate recovery, growth and general health. Burning an extra 800+ calories a day from bike workouts puts a lot of extra stress on my body and properly fueling it is even more important than someone who does not. Further, training at a higher level (intervals, racing, and higher volumes of riding) requires a lot more micro and macro nutrients than I was giving myself. There's no real source of information (blogs, books, or studies) that say "if you're riding 10 hours a week you need to be taking in X-amount of calories and X-amount of carbs."
Despite being on a ketogenic diet and wishing to remain on a ketogenic diet, Julia suggested that I take in a lot more carbs though leafy greens and non-starchy vegetables. This is the biggest change of all and one of the hardest for me to do had I not been told to do so by someone who's "been there done that" and has the pedigree of success to support making the change. After years of studying food and nutrients and recovery and training and hormones and whatever else I could find to get better, I know I need the micro-nutrients of vegetables and yet with what I know about ketosis, the carbs in vegetables don't necessarily have a lot of room in the traditional 25g or less of daily carbs allotment of the keto WOE. According to Julia, for athletes, and in the case of what I'm doing, we need more nutrients that can only be obtained through vegetables. The net carbs in most vegetables are pretty low because of the fiber so they will be okay.
Now I should note, I'm paraphrasing here so what Julia actually says and what I type may not be exact but hopefully you get the point. If you want to know what she really says set up your own damn appointment! :)
In addition to carbs I was told nuts are not a food group and she suggested that I cut back my use of them drastically. As I look back through my food journals, approx. 22% of my daily calories are coming from various nuts - yep, I probably am using them as a food group.
One of the big things she suggested that I do is put more sources of fat in to my meals. We discussed how to do this with various oils, tallows, lard, and other sources. Truth be told, I thought I had a pretty diverse fat profile for my meals but after talking to her I see I was not that diverse after all.
Another suggestion was to cut out cheese and dairy from my diet for a month. Basically she suggested I do the
Whole30 program for a few weeks. I'm still not sure on that one, though I will be cutting back my use of cheese. My use of cheese is up there with nuts in regards to how much I've been consuming every day.
The last suggestion and it was one of my biggest questions/concerns, don't worry about calorie counting or restricting calories. It would seem I'm in the ball park currently on calories per day as I am losing bodyfat and recovering from my workouts and races. The truth is, there is no magic number as traditional dieting would suggest especially for those that train like I do. I need to simply eat with a diverse selection of fats, eat lots of vegetables, and I need to eat enough each day that I'm not starving or having hunger cravings. If I follow this I will eat enough and the weight/bodyfat will come off but above all I will be healthy.
You can see from last weeks food journal I started implementing additional carbs in to my diet in the form of non-starchy vegetables as directed. I actually had my blood ketones knocked out of ketosis (0.3) but Julia told me this might happen and not to worry about it. The main goal for now is to monitor my blood sugar and hour after the meal to see how the extra carbs affected my blood sugar. I did this for Friday, Saturday,and Sunday and to my surprise, I had no major blood sugar spikes after my meals.
I'll keep down the path Julia suggested and see how things go. It's now been over a week since I met with her and I've had a full week of upping my carbs from about 5% to 10% of my daily intake. I've seen no big changes in adding weight, smoothing out, and/or performance. I was scared I would slap on 4-5lbs with the extra carbs but this has not happened. I'm still leaning out too. I still haven't not crossed my weight threshold in to 219 but I'm still knocking on the door. I got on the podium last Sunday (Oct 4th) at a mountain bike XC race so I still have all my performance. With the exception of my blood ketones being out of the ketosis range, all is "normal".
On a sidenote, I quit testing my BHB (blood ketones) last Sunday. That wrapped up almost 8 weeks of testing each morning. I still continue to use the
Ketonix several times a day including in the morning when I get up. According to it, ketones are still present and mid-levels in my breath so I'm still in ketosis and that's good enough for me.
Here's a chart of my Ketonix readings for the last month. Most days I take several readings throughout the day - it's just the convenient. The last major drop below 40 was when I initially added the carbs after talking with Julia. You can see they have been working their way back up. Had a little lower session earlier this week - it was my birthday and I may have indulged a little in ketogenic pudding with a chocolate bar. :)
I'll have more to report in the coming weeks.
