Hello Lovelies,
So, week five was an interesting experiment. I decided not to track at all. Y’all, seriously, I am so tired of tracking. It has become kind of an obsession that I next level hate. As a young teen, I had a really unhealthy relationship with food. It took me years to undo that unhealthy relationship. But the last 19 months has found me becoming very OCD with all the tracking and having a super negative feeling about food in general. So I decided to take a week off from tracking. I’m not sure that was the best plan as I look at the Keto Day 35 results.
Let’s see what we can learn from my choices.
Keto Day 35- Week 5 Measurements
Last Week
This week
Exact same weight. Which was kind of disappointing. My neck and waist are down a quarter inch, and my hips are down a whole inch.
But I was feeling super depressed about no weight loss so I decided to measure the rest of my measurements to help me feel better, hopefully?
Let’s see. Day 21 measurements
Vs. Day 35 measurements:
My left Bicep is up a quarter inch, forearm is down a quarter inch. Right bicep is down a half inch, forearm is up 2 inches! Breasts are down 3/4 of an inch, Ribcage is the same, Butt is down 1 1/4 inch, Left thigh is the same, left calf is down a 1/4 inch, Right thigh is down a 1/4 inch, and calf is up 1/4 inch.
My math is not strong when done this way but I think that I have lost 4 inches. The gain in my right side I attribute to the workouts we’ve been doing. So let’s jump into that data next.
Keto Day 35- Week 5 Fitness data
Last Weeks Fitbit data:
Sunday June 21 3,769 steps, 1.74 miles, 25 minutes of activitiy
Monday June 22nd, 9,489 steps 4.27 miles, 64 minutes of activity (I actually should have had more active minutes because I went for a 57 min walk Monday morning, and Monday evening it logged at 10 minute “walk” that was actually my doing the resistance bands and I’m pretty sure that time was closer to 20 minutes as I was doing a video workout that was a 15 min video, but I had to pause and adjust the bands a couple of times to do the workout.
Tuesday June 23rd. 7,112 steps, 3.29 miles, 50 minutes of activity.
(Again, I actually should have had higher because according to my workouts I had a 60 minute swim and a 23 minute walk. I know the swim was a bit long because I realized when I got back to the car that I forgot to turn the workout off. )
Wednesday June 24th 2,219 steos 1.03 miles 0 minutes.
Wednesday I should have had more active minutes because I did a leg-focused resistance band video that went for 30 minutes. But I forgot to click “workout on the fitbit and because it was all in my legs, Fitbit didn’t detect enough movement to see me “working out.”
Thursday June 25th 11,388 steps, 5.11 miles 73 active minutes
This should also be higher as my Workout tracked shows a 3 mile walk. I think we were out for about 45 minutes. It also shows a 60 minute workout that evening which I honestly am not sure what it was tracking. I am thinking when I was doing chores? Sad, it registered my chores as more of a workout than my morning walk. *shrug*
Friday June 26th 14011 steps. 6.49 miles, 171 active minutes
By Friday I had figured out that my Fitbit hasn’t been tracking very accurately so I made sure to actually tell it I was going for a walk (100 minutes. It was a great 5 mile walk around the neighborhood and came in at 8000 of my total steps for the day!) and told it when I went for my swim for 43 minutes.
Saturday June 27th 1,220 steps, .56 miles 0 active minutes.
Yep, this was my rest day. After crushing 10,000 steps the day before and hitting 9 workouts for the week I feel like I definitely earned that rest. Going just on what Fitbit tracked, not adding in my somehow untracked workouts, I hit:
49,208 steps- up 6559 steps from the week before.
22.49 miles- Up 2.89 miles from the week before.
383 active minutes (according to the minutes tracker. According to my known workouts it should’ve been at least 491 minutes) up 13 minutes (or 121 minutes, respectively.)
Clearly I need to get in the habit of tracking my workouts manually instead of relying on Fitbit to recognize them.
For most of shut down, we kept our walking up but weights went by the wayside. When we realized that after everything opening up we don’t feel comfortable going back to the gym we decided to find a better solution. HIIT has not really been that for me so I got a set of resistance bands and have been using those twice a week.
We also got some extra gear for our swimming to help with resistance training: a pair of fins and a pair of paddles. My hope is that those have added to the toning. We all know that muscle weighs more than fat so with that toning it would suggest that I should see some loss coming soon, right?
Keto Day 35- Week 5 Food Data
As I mentioned, I really totally slacked off with tracking food this week. My hope was that I could transition to lazy keto and not have to track obsessively. A lot of people on keto focus on the “eat when you’re hungry” mentality and lose tons of weight. So I tried that.
I did go back and do some math based on what I remember eating (which on Keto is actually super easy because I really only felt hungry and ate twoce a day most days. Until Yesterday. I swear I just ate all day long yesterday, grazing and snacking all day.)
So based on my loose calculations I was good at sticking to 15-20 carbs each day. (I tracked that every day.) but my caloric average was 1800, which is way below my basal metabolic needs calculated by both keto calculators and my nutritionist (who is not an expert in keto but as her numbers and the keto calculators are about the same, I trust her to keep me good with that.)
She said that being a couple hundred calories under my base every once in awhile is fine, but to do it regularly could undo all the hard work we’ve done the last couple of years. As much as I worked out last week, I am surprised I wasn’t more hungry (though it explains my non-stop eating yesterday, my body was in panic mode because I was at such a severe deficit.)
Loosely my fitbit calorie burn is estimated at 26,000 calories for the week. My consumption is roughly 12,000 for the week and should be a minimum of 16,100. If, as the Mayo Clinic says, 3,500 calories equals one lb of fat, then I should have lost 4 lbs. Now, it is entirely possible that I also gained 4 lbs of muscle. However, according to most resources, it is physically impossible to gain more than 1 lb of muscle in a week and most people will struggle to gain more than half a lb. While I reconize that there is absolutely nothing normal about me, from the amount I need to consume to my massive frame, I am inclined to suspect that this average is probably true for me based on this excellent article from Bodybuilding which explains how muscle is built.
So based on that research, I reached out to 28 Days of Keto-Women Only support group. (For any men in the group looking for support, you might want to check out 28 Days Keto Challenge. I think that the reason for separating the group is so that women might feel self-conscious sharing their progress/ etc in a mixed group.)
Generally, I find that you have to be very careful about the recipes shared in the group and there are a ton of people trying to sell keto products. But there are also a ton of us who are all on this journey together and trying to support one another with shared knoweldge. I have found that the people trying to sell products are less likely to engage on your posts. Again, I always have to thoroughly research anything I get from the group, but I have gotten some interesting content from there.
I reached out about my stall in weightloss and a crazy bout of cravings I had and one person looked at my information and suggested that while some people have a hard time with diet sodas creating cravings (what I suspected was to blame) it could also be the cherries I was eating.
See, I haven’t been paying a ton of attention to the food charts. I just track in Myfitnesspal and a carb is a carb is a carb, so long as I stay under 25-30. But she said that while there are plenty on the dirty keto diet who do believe that in her experience working with a lot of people on the keto diet there is also a tie to how certain foods effect your glycimic response and while cherries are relatively low on the glycemic index for diabetics, for those on the keto diet they are high and don’t show up on any of the food lists.
While the cravings went away after I stopped drinking the diet soda (I rarely ever have it, but just happened to have some while I was out one day and forgot my water. Then had another the next day from James’ stash.) I did help finish eating the cherries this week, limiting it to 5 a day. While I don’t use the pee stick test for ketosis because having tried Atkins in the past I NEVER got into ketosis even doing strict Atkins, I have noticed this week that my urine has smelled differently so I wonder if that may be part of the problem as well. I’m not going to get the pee sticks because quite frankly if I can’t figure out a system that allows me to be less obsessive about food, I may need to find a new weight loss system. (Not there yet, folks. Still sticking to this.)
Keto Day 35- Next Steps for Week Six
Where does all this information leave me?
Well, I am renewing my efforts to find a Keto dietician specialist who can hopefully help me address my struggles. In the mean time I think to reach a happy medium on the food front, I will plan out a daily menu that allows me to hit my macros goals (especially fat, because I feel like I might have let that slip a bit this week.) and my caloric goals.
That allows me to not have to obsessively track every day. I know what I need to eat and I will set it up so I am at 20 carbs, 145 grams fat, 120 grams protein and 2300 calories, that way if I want/ need to snack more it gives me some wiggle room in each category while limiting carbs as much as possible.
While I really do want to lose weight, I am tired of my weightloss efforts costing me so much time and money. I am also going to spend some time getting back in touch with how beautiful I am because so much of this obsession makes me forget sometimes that I am #Fatandfit and #fatandfabulous.
I need to remember that just because I am not seeing the results others see on Keto, doesn’t mean I am failing. I need to remember that just because I am not achieving my weight loss goals, that does not make me less than. I am stronger than I have been in a long time. I am beating my health issues. I am getting great quality time with my family while getting fit. I am beautiful.
If you would like to see my Keto Journey, you can check that out here:
I will spend the week trying to figure out the best way to be able to share my meal plans with you if you would like to see the meal plans? Just let me know in the comments.
Until next time,
Keep being inspired!