For this one I answered your questions inside your quoted text in bold...
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Originally Posted by Bintang
... I have a couple of questions:
1) Have you done any monitoring of your uric acid levels? If so what changes did you see?
No I have not. I never have had gout that I am aware of, so I've never had any cause to monitor uric acid.
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 analyze 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.
I weigh at least twice daily and I have done so for a while. But I do not log that data in any spreadsheet. For the first 50 (or so) pounds that I lost I was too heavy for any scale that I had. The doctor visits were my only source. I logged my weight in my journal sporadically in the beginning. I got more consistent with it as time went on. I joined the TDC weekly weigh-in thread more than a year ago. You are welcome to browse through that thread if you want more data. At least there you will see that my losses have not been as linear as the graph I posted shows. I tended to update the data in that graph only once a month or so. It was the trend I was looking for anyway. What happens daily or even weekly does not accurately reflect the fat loss.
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Originally Posted by Bintang
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.
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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.
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Originally Posted by khrussva
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Originally Posted by cotonpal
So, today I am thinking about the advice people give other people. With all the best intentions, people often over generalize from their own experience. I especially notice this on a number of topics where my experience does not fit the norm. The top one for me is when people assume that everyone experiences a dramatic enough reduction in hunger so that eat when your hungry, stop when your full becomes the universal advice. It doesn't work for me. Hunger is not a reliable indicator for me so I have to use portion control or I would probably eat beyond what I need. Certainly eating low carb has helped significantly in reducing hunger but it hasn't eliminated it as a problem.
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Coincidentally, I just measured this effect with my breakfast today. I had a doctor visit at 8am and needed to be fasting for some labs. I had a breakfast consisting of a chocolate flax muffin, breakfast sausage, and coffee with CO & HWC at 10am. I was finished by 10:15. The hunger I was feeling before the meal was still there and the pleasure of the food actually heightened my desire for it. I wanted more. Had I put twice as much food on my plate I would have just continued eating it. That is pretty normal for me. It is one reason I make a habit of planning my meal before hand and getting up and doing something after I finish my meal. My STOP signal just takes too long to kick in. Somewhere around 11am I noticed that I was feeling satiety start to kick in. I was no longer hungry and I was not thinking about eating anymore.
There are many reasons that we overeat. I see Jean, me, and Jo as being very similar in both our hunger issues and our methods to resolve them. We found a solution and made it work. Perhaps that is one reason why we've become good LC buds over time. We share a lot in common. I'm sure there are others like us. They just may not have figured themselves out yet.
I know there are other buddies of mine on this forum that don't experience the same things. I can tell by their responses to some of my messages. They didn't really "get" my point because they don't have that issue. It is only human to interpret things by your own experiences. Hunger may be defined as a desire to eat, but there are many causes of that. What makes me feel hungry may not be the same thing that you are talking about when you say you are hungry. That is why having one universal "healthy" diet concept based on the experiences of the naturally weight stable is such a bone-head idea. It was a square peg in a round hole for me. The solutions they provided to "feel full" never worked for me. They don't have the same experience with the food that they eat. I had to find my own way. The Ken diet works pretty well. For me, anyway.
Still, sharing our experiences here on this forum is incredibly valuable. I'd see someone have success with something. I'd try it myself. Sometimes it worked for me. Sometimes it didn't. I snagged ideas from books, videos, various studies, etc. and finally found a workable solution for me. Now that I found success, I believe that much of what I do and share will help others. But I know that my way may not be the best way for them. That is one reason why I always talk about what I do and don't often tell people what they should do.
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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.