Ketogenic Way of Eating

I have yo-yo dieted all my life which has left me with a wrecked metabolism. I read Wheat Belly and decided to go wheat, barley and rye free. Felt so much better and read about fermented foods and found Weston Price Foundation and Nourishing Traditions. Felt even better. Started looking at processed foods and decided to quit sugar. EVEN BETTER! Then I learned about ketosis and how the body really needs high quality fats from pasture raised animals. Started on that journey and once I was keto adapted I felt amazing! Looked up some support groups for more information on how to loose weight and maintain that loss. Found Ketogenic Women on Facebook and that led me to start tracking macros with MFP.

If you are interested in doing this too, please friend me. I especially like researching the science behind these changes in nutrition that I believe we should ALL know instead of the CRAP that we are told by the mainstream media, medical professionals and USDA. I have lost 5 pounds so far and I am about to break a barrier of 120 lbs. That number has always been my plateau. It isn't a pretty 120, it is flabby with gobs of belly fat, cellulite and wiggly everything that I have managed to hide under clothes. I am going for what ever weight my body wants to be while looking lean and having a BF of 15%, with lots of nice muscle tone, it is about 30% now but I am seeing improvement everyday where muscles I haven't seen are showing a tiny bit. I do exercise that uses my own weight as resistance and gives me a cardio burst for 30 seconds with a 60 sec cool down in-between. I am not an exercise fanatic, but my life is not sedentary as my husband, son and myself maintain a ranch with lots of animals and a year round garden/greenhouse, I clean rental cabins and spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking and preserving food. I do enjoy stretching and yoga, and will do these to CD's or Youtube in my living room.

I am 54, and 5'4", my Keto macros are 20g or < of carbohydrates, mostly from green vegetables. 94 g of protein, and 90g or < of fat. Primarily I hold my calories to 1300/day, but not by trying all that hard. When I was yo-yoing or eating "a low fat" diet I would go for 500, and I was starving myself and loosing muscle. I never lost much fat and I felt terrible!! Now, I eat the required protein to maintain muscle, but I try to keep down the fat on my plate until I get the weight loss that I want. My body will dish into my stored fat for the energy it needs instead of searching out glucose from carbs. I mainly eat enough fat up to 90g to make sure that I don't get hungry between meals and to add flavor to what I eat. I stop eating at about 6 pm and I have breakfast at about 8, after chores. It is a big breakfast with bacon, eggs, or pastured meats. When eating meat I eat about the size of my fist and the quality of the meat is of up-most importance. We raise a lot of our own food, so I am lucky that I am getting great quality grass fed and pasture raised everything.

I am getting a blood ketone testing device in a few weeks and the strips because I want to find out if I have food sensitivity that will throw me out of ketosis. I can tell that at least part of the time I am already in ketosis and that I have fat adapted because I feel great, full of energy and no longer have the hormonal imbalances that I once had with mood swings and hot flashes. It will be my own self experimentation to dial in my best weight loss strategy. I suspect that cheese may be keeping me from loosing the remaining pounds, but I hate to give it up so I want to be sure.

I keep repeating a saying that helps me to keto on, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". I would exchange the skinny for lean, toned and healthy, but skinny sort of says it. I have been skinny fat most of my adult life, so this is my half of my life to really be at my optimal body shape, health and appearance.