Hats off to you Ken. I'd be proud of even making it halfway to what you have achieved. Well done.
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Thank you everybody for the wonderful comments and accolades. It has been an amazing ride and I'm not sure that I could have done it without all the wonderful support and information that I've received from this wonderful forum. I plan on sticking around. I've got a maintenance goal to accomplish.
I surpassed my original goal weight of 210 pounds this week and I'm still losing. And to cap an awesome week, I had that doctor visit that I mentioned in my milestone and it was a very happy visit. The results were in with my new cholesterol numbers. IMO - the results could not have been any better. Here is an update of my cholesterol chart with the added numbers. One thing I didn't mention in the milestone was that I did have an NMR done in December 2015. That test actually measures LDL cholesterol as opposed to the estimated LDL/VLDL numbers on a standard lipid panel. An NMR also measures partial size where the standard test does not. The results were good and as expected for a low carb diet. The particle size was large and fluffy and the count for small, dense (bad) LDL cholesterol was very low. All good news. But my LDL particle count was still very high. I'm sure would be better now given my most recent lipid panel. The results from the NMR: LDL-P was at 1577 -- at the high end of the "Borderline High" range. The other results from the NMR were as follows:
I don't know if my high cholesterol issues was a cardiovascular risk or not. But I'm still glad that I was able to change my numbers for the better. I chose the "better safe than sorry" approach to this. My doctor was happy about the results of my year long experiment. She was amazed in fact. Twelve months ago she was talking about prescribing a strong statin. There is no talk of that now. |
You make me happy. Every time I read your update I feel that there is hope. So rarely in this world do we see the oppressed rise to freedom. Okay my words are a bit extreme but that's how I feel about all things including the battle for health that so many face daily. You put a smile on my face. Thank you for the story, again!
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Ken, congratulations on your achievement. It is really fantastic and should be an inspiration to a lot of people. I remember the BBC documentary series of about 2 years ago called the "The Men Who Made Us Fat" and "The Men Who Made Us Thin" in which the interviewer comes to the conclusion after talking to doctors and researchers that 'diets never work and are doomed to failure'. I wish I could tell the interviewer that he was talking to the wrong people. He should have talked to people like you. I have a couple of questions: 1) Have you done any monitoring of your uric acid levels? If so what changes did you see? 2) Would it be possible for you to share with me an excel file with your detailed weight versus time data as I would like to analyse the trend mathematically. Am happy to share any of my own data in return if it is of interest but its nowhere near as impressive as yours. |
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Ken, I have another question about your data. It is clear from the table in your post that you have been monitoring your calorie intake. When you started on low carb did you deliberately try to restrict your calorie intake or did you eat until satisfied and then for the record tally the calories you consumed? The reason I ask is that it appears that as you have been losing weight your calorie consumption has actually been increasing. This is something I have experienced myself and I have been wondering whether it is just me or whether it is a general response to low carb eating. When I started low carb 10 months ago I found initially that with a high fat consumption I was pretty satisfied on around 1850 calories per day. But as my weight has dropped I found myself needing to eat more so that now I consume between 2100 to 2200 calories per day. The incremental calories are primarily fat calories with a little bit extra protein. And I wonder if the reason this happens is because in the obese state at the start of eating low carb one's body suddenly has access to a large fat store for food but as weight is lost and the fat reduces there is less for the metabolism to use and so your brain tells you to compensate by eating more. |
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Interesting. I'd like to know about that as well. Ken, congratulations on the great doctor visit. Thank you for sharing more wonderful and helpful info! :clap: |
Wow, your pictures say it all. I also enjoyed reading your journey ... all the NSVs along the way, and the mental processes we have to go through in order to stay the course. I'll be reading your post a few times. Like you, I often gave up after 2-3 months in the past. It's extremely helpful to read your story. Thanks so much for sharing it.
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For this one I answered your questions inside your quoted text in bold...
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What you are not seeing in my data is my increased activity over that time. In the period where I was eating 1800 calories I was recovering from a broken foot. I intentionally dropped calories to keep the scale moving. If you note on the graph, my weight loss slowed at or around December 2014. That is when I broke my foot. As the foot healed, I started walking more and more. Also note that the period where I ate the most calories I lost the least amount of weight (only 10 pounds from the previous doctor visit). I know that CICO is sacrilegious on this forum, but even Dr. A said that calories do matter. I eat low carb and I watch the calories. As you will see in my post below, I believe that have to. I cannot rely on feeling "full" to tell me I'm done eating. I've learned through this 2+ year long journey that I am not an "eat when hungry, stop when full" kind of guy. My satiety "stop" signal takes too long to kick in. I've learned that there are several other forum members here that experience the same thing. We all arrived at the same solution... we plan what we are going to eat in advance and stop eating when we finish what we planned on eating. I recently did a post about this elsewhere. I'll post it below. Quote:
For the first 3 or 4 months of the diet my biggest objective was to eat exclusively on-plan food and TRY to stay under 30 net carbs. I only did spot checks on carbs and most days I was under that carb limit. At my weight I was losing just fine with that approach. My appetite did fall over that time and I did start eating less. But from my spot checks, I found that I had settled into a regular pattern of eating 2800 to 3200 calories a day eating < 30 net carbs. I noticed that my weight loss started to slow down fairly significantly at around 8 months into the diet. I'd lost 100 pounds. My energy needs were going down but I continued to eat the same amount of food. I was still losing, but I felt it was going to continue to slow down if I didn't curb the eating. I was over the hump with this WOE. It was much easier to stick to plan. But still had some bad eating habits. So in the fall of 2014 I intentionally started cutting back on my eating. I found it hard to cut back at first and it took me a couple of months to get it done. I worked on eliminating snacking between meals. I experimented with intermittent fasting. I joined the TDC 90 day challenge to help me stay accountable. Eventually that lead to me tracking my food daily. After the cholesterol issue happened, I got a little Type-A about my tracking. I found I actually liked logging my food and I loved the data it provided. I wanted good data so I made an effort to be as accurate as possible. I've done it ever since. It really came in handy as I tweaked my diet to try and bring down that LDL cholesterol number. That process worked for me. I was "dieting" within my way of eating and ultimately landed on my maintenance diet. Logging food, tracking of my macros and aiming for my goals consistently was teaching me how I needed to eat. I've practice that for a long time now and how I eat is becoming second nature. I won't need to track everyday. I know what the right food is and I know (within reason) how much of it I should be eating. I have satiety between meals. I don't go to bed hungry (most days, anyway). I'm still losing weight. Life is good. That is not how things worked when I was addicted to junky carbs. FYI: I use this forum's MY PLAN feature to log food. If you click on the MY PLAN button on the bottom of any of my posts you will see the food and exercise data. I've logged food there for over a year and I've logged my exercise for at least 6 months. |
Ken, FWIW, I have a similar, but not identical issue with fullness.
I can eat beyond comfortable satiety, if I eat quickly. And, if I'm really hungry, I eat too quickly. I'll eat my serving, then think, "Hmmm. More." and eat that, as well. By the time my satiety cues kick in, at about 20-30 minutes after I start eating, I'm stuffed. So I try (not always successfully) to do two things. First, I choose, like you and Jo and Jean, and many others here, how much I am going to eat before I even put the plates on the table. And second, I try to eat slowly. Cut the food into small pieces. Have a conversation while I eat. As Husband works very long hours, and is in training for a half marathon, that "conversation" is frequently here. It slows me down, and my stomach has a chance to become aware of the fact that it's comfortably full before it's UNcomfortably full. It doesn't always work. But it's the best I've got, and it works most of the time. |
Thanks SO much for sharing this, picture and all! I am a relatively new LCer... just 2 months in. I have lost 26 pounds, and just this week started going above 30 carbs a day and dealt with major cravings for the first time last night, so reading about your journey was inspiring and helpful. Losing the first 28 pounds has made such a difference in terms of general "getting around" energy and ability to move, but I had my first "OMG how am I going to stick to this?" moments. Congratulations, and thank you!
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Wow, you're so amazing, Ken. And I just love how you keep track of everything. Are you an accountant? If not, you missed your calling!
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Truly astounding. It is so good to come back here after an absence and to find that you have reached goal. The pictures are fantastic and all you have shared is so very helpful. Thank you for sharing your journey with us !
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So inspirational ! ☺️ |
Hey Ken,
Thanks for posting this. I am one month in and was at a similar starting point as you and a few folks nudged me in your direction. Hope to be in a similar place as you in a year or so. |
Well, what can we say?
Ken, you are an INCREDIBLE inspiration to us ALL!!! :agree: Just read it all, again. There aren't enough positive adjectives to describe you and your mind-blowing accomplishment. Cheers, to an amazing human!!! :clap: :rheart: jams |
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