First Week of the Keto Diet
Around 11:00 AM today I smelt the most delicious aroma I thought I could possibly smell. I swore it was some kind of taco salad in a a crispy tortilla bowl and I WANTED IT. For about 10 minutes I chatted with my cubicle neighbor about how amazing the smell was and how hungry we were and how it couldn’t possibly be anything I could eat while keeping to the Keto diet. This was silly of course, because except for the possible tortilla shell and beans if they were included, everything was perfectly fine to eat on the diet. Lettuce, meat, tomatoes, sour cream, guac/avocados, and salsa/onion (no thank you on that for me though).
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up from my desk and went to the door of the manager who usually ordered in food for her lunch and casually asked her “So… you got lunch huh? It smells really good. Taco salad?” “Oh it was pretty good. A tuna salad.”
… A tuna salad. Once she pointed out the container I recognized what she was talking about exactly. I have had this exact salad before from the deli just down the street. It was a salad with tomato slices and a liberal scoop of tuna on top. I no longer wanted it. I liked the salad enough besides the fact that they use a mixed greens at that particular deli that contains more root-type greens than I would like, but as soon as I knew that the smell was not some delicious Mexican food that I could not have, (again, I could…) the appeal was gone.
I’m on day 5 of my most recent Keto dedication. The first few days are always relatively easy for me because the excitement and novelty of “new thing” lets me focus on the possibility rather than the monotony and hunger that comes the following days. Monotony is a me thing — not necessarily a Keto thing. I’m just not very interested in cooking a variety of foods so of course that limits my options since my take-out options are much more limited on the diet. My husband has offered to cook meals that I can eat on Keto but only if I give him meal ideas and recipes. To this end I have purchased two different cookbooks and he has indeed made a few of the meals. Unfortunately I am a somewhat picky eater and most of the recipes given in the books are based around foods I don’t like. Onions and peppers mostly. My husband doesn’t eat the other half of foods that I DO eat, so although he will make me food, he usually won’t partake. An angel, I know.
Now the hunger… that doesn’t mean I am starving myself. It just means I am not snacking constantly like I am when allowing myself to eat whatever. My body takes a couple weeks to get used to eating an appropriate amount of sustenance. The feeling goes away and I can go about my days without constantly thinking about food.
If I can make it longer than a month on the diet, things get MUCH easier and I don’t get tempted away as often. Although if I take a break meal (cheat meal, but I don’t love that term…) that usually kicks me out. Not only of ketosis, but out of the whole mindset. If I DO take a break meal though, I have found that if I do a 24-hour fast, my body cycles through the carbs that I have ingested and I’m back on the Keto train.
I have found that if I use ketosis strips daily, (little sticks you get from the drug store that you pee on and they tell you if you are in ketosis or not), I can easily discover if I have eaten too many carbs and my ketones are light, and then can do my little 24-hr fast thing to get right back in. Otherwise if you are kicked out of ketosis it can take up to 5 days to get back in. It sounds kind of complicated but it really isn’t. And if you don’t care that much if you are in, and are just using the diet to make you eat less carbs and sugar, don’t even bother with the strips and live your life!
I weighed myself this morning for the first time since my last day on Keto the last time at the end of October, and I weighed in at 197.6. I try not to put much effort into the number on the scale, but staying under 200lbs is useful to me because once I hit that number my back rolls tend to be large enough to roll down enough to rub the skin below in a very irritating manner similar to my butt cheeks rubbing below my butt at the same weight. I waited until now to weigh myself because it takes a few days after starting on a Keto diet for your body to shed the water weight and the inflammation that carbohydrates cause. if I were to weigh myself before now it would just cause unnecessary stress and disappointment. As it is, weighing myself at this point is kind of unnecessary as well since what does it matter as long as I am eating in a manner I am trying to? Eh, why do we do anything?
