After my recap last week, I wanted to talk about a couple things I’m going to experiment with the next little bit: sauna use and carnivore diet. And, if you’re interested, you can just skip to the bottom and find my choice podcasts as well as my Health Journey blog series all listed for your convenience if you want to know what I’ve been up to.
I’ve been getting more comfortable with eating keto. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been looking at it as an opportunity for creativity in the kitchen and it’s actually relaxed my paranoid tendencies towards what potential food could be harming me. I just make sure my macros are on point. Usually a keto diet is 5% of the weight of your food is carbs, 60% is fat and 35% is protein (please note that this can be and is very different for different people, do what works for you or consult a doctor). When you look at it like that, it seems complicated if you aren’t already aware of what macronutrient ratios are in the foods you eat. Fortunately there are a lot of apps out there that can help you calculate it. It takes a little bit of work but after a week or so you should be able to figure it out without having to input every single ingredient.
Going out to eat and seeing how many carbs my body can tolerate. Not that many turns out. I get so tired after! But I don't get as bloated as I once did...
Personally, things have been going just ok. My functional medicine doctor (FMD) wanted me to have more blood work done. She said that she could do it herself for a fee or send my General Practitioner a letter with the reasons for particular blood work and hope that he gives me the requisition which would then be covered through OHIP. Well, turns out I was way too optimistic because as I was telling the FMD how sure I was my GP would give me the requisition I could tell she had heard this before.
She was right.
My doctor opened up the letter in his files and closed the document in an instant and asked me how I was feeling. This was after I had told him that the FMD had sent him a letter and I had wanted the lab tests done. First of all he had told me that most people live with parasites and it’s normal to have them and secondly he didn’t give me (all of) the blood work the FMD recommended I needed. And then to throw all the parasite info out of the window he gave me an OHIP covered requisition for a stool sample when I had already done one (on my dime). I do respect that he has his own practice, though, and relies on his own morals. No hate to general practitioners!
Still tho…
So I decided to just go through my FMD to do the blood work which cost about $240. Not only was the (fasting) blood work a really uncomfortable 30min poking around looking for veins (not done by her by the way, it was at a lab) but she had written one of the blood sample requisitions wrong. Very annoying and disconcerting. She won’t charge me to retake the sample but I just wanted to get it over with. I was about to travel to Europe for a month and was hoping to get everything out of the way before I left so I could bring the appropriate supplements with me.
Either way, the update on my health is very positive. I feel like I have more energy, less crampage during my PMS and I’m REGULAR!!! Hallelujah. Yes talking about poop is TMI but I didn’t want to hold back in case you are also going through the same thing. But ya, I was borderline in IBS mode. Every. Month.
Before seeing the FMD I was obsessed with discerning what food was causing me to bloat instantly. It was maddening because it felt as though I would get incredibly painful bloating (I’m talking instant 3 month preggers look and, aesthetic aside, it was PAINFUL). It has only happened once recently and I wondered and wondered what I ate differently than what I had been since going keto and then it hit me – processed meat! Right? It was a generic ‘ham’ that I had while working on a film shoot that was in a frittata. Oh, bonus was that the eggs were from a carton however the ingredients on that were just eggs. Either way, I had a lot of processed food that day even though it was high fat. It was wildly painful.
I should also mention that I got a little too caught up on forcing my body to fast. I had mentioned it before but intermittent fasting (IF) is a common way of eating alongside eating keto. I was trying to push my breakfast too late in the day and waiting until noon to eat. I had felt so awful despite eating a normal amount of calories for my body. I did some research and although some people suggest eating within an 8 hour window (for example you only eat from 12 pm to 8pm and nothing before or after until the next day) women need to eat within a 10 hour window AND all I changed was that I just ate when I got up.
Unfortunately I succumbed to the hype that I would have superhero powers and only run on my body fat after being keto for a little over a month but nahhhh, that didn’t happen. Well, it is according to my daily testing (I test with pee sticks – fun!) I am in ketosis but I just cant fully function on stored body fat in the morning. My FMD said that I may not be genetically predisposed to fasting. Either way, I eat as soon as I get up and then eat two more meals during the day when I’m hungry. Snacking at night isn’t really a problem for me unless there’s popcorn or Doritos around.
Wait, what about Doritos flavoured popcorn?
