December Climb
I'm not gonna lie, December has been full of high carb, high sugar foods. I haven't maintained ketovore at all and haven't been able to maintain my alternate day Intermittent Fasting that was so successful in November. This month, I gained nearly 15lbs. It was the holidays and so I'm not beating myself up over it, but I did learn some things that I wanted to document.
Influencers
One of the things that I've never been a fan of when it comes to dietary social media influencers is that it always feels like everything is dramatized or over emphasized.
Over the past few years, as I've started and restarted my health care journey, I've followed so many influencers who go on an on about the benefits of certain ways of eating. They say that their particular way of eating changed or even saved their life. They expound upon the dangers of carbs and how cutting carbs made enormous changes in their overall health - citing cutting carbs cured everything from dental issues to autoimmune, heart, or other physical and even mental ailments.
To be honest, I've always been annoyed by those posts and never given them much credit.
To be more honest...I was probably wrong to doubt.
How It Started
When I first started my health journey, I eased into it. I started by settling on a plan for portion control and a general low-carb way of eating, long before I eased into keto, carnivore, and eventually ketovore. I think the slow start and easing into this journey is one of the reasons that I never saw the drastic health changes that so many social media health influencers rave about.
Whatever changes occurred in my body, occurred so slowly that the only ones I noticed were the obvious weight changes. THAT was the change I was tracking, so it's not surprising that it was the only one I realized was occurring.
Sudden Shift to Carb Eating
In the month of December, 2021, I had an abrupt and unplanned shift back to a carb-heavy, sugar-heavy way of eating. There are a lot of reasons that this happened, much of it due to my own lack of willpower, but what I'm trying to focus on is not so much WHY or even WHAT occurred, so much as how it affected me when it did. I didn't notice changes when I changed to healthier eating, but boy did I notice them when I changed back!
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These are just a few of the symptoms that suddenly hit me with the change in eating. It started by heart palpitations coming back. I'd had these occasionally in the past, and they concerned me, but somehow I missed it when they disappeared. Same with the joint pain and inflammation; I've had bad ankles my whole life, which eventually caused arthritis in the ankles as well as knee and hip pain. It took the pain returning for me to realize that I cannot remember the last time, prior to December, that I had to take something for the pain.
The binge eating, nausea, and extreme hunger were obvious to me when I changed my way of eating, though I blamed them more on my lack of self control with food than on the carbs themselves. Yet, surprise, I didn't experience them while ketovore. In fact, being ketovore made probably over 90% of my binge eating and snacking habits disappear (though I'd still have episodes every few months, but it was always carbs that I craved and that I satified these episodes with...chips for the most part).
My anxiety returning hit me the hardest though.
I had anxiety while ketovore, but it was during a very high stress time in my job and disappeared when that obvious source of stress was removed. Now, there was no reason for me to feel anxious. Yet, somehow, sitting on the couch and watching TV, suddenly my heart was racing, my breathing increased, my mind panicking...no outward cause for the anxiety attack other than the fact that I'd spent the weekend eating carbs and drinking sugary sodas (a lot of them).
That was my biggest clue that I had been so wrong about disregarding the health benefits (other than weight loss) of cutting carbs. Clearly, there is something in them that my body, at least, does not respond well to.
Back to Ketosis
Today, I am sitting here, feeling worse than I've felt in months. I'm nauseous, tired, vaguely out of breath, my heart is beating too fast and too hard, and I'm trying not to slip into another anxiety attack. This isn't how I want to feel and this isn't how I want to live.
I'm attempting an 18-22 hour fast today. Nothing crazy, just pushing myself back into ketosis in the quickest way that I know how. Then I plan to make a carnivore dinner (pork chops and cheese) before heading to the grocery store and stocking back up on ketovore foods and snacks. The holidays aren't quite over, and I have a friend coming to stay with me for part of the week, so getting back to healthy eating this week will be tough. But feeling like this is worse. And dangerous. The way my heart is beating, and has been beating, this month is scaring me.
Yes, I've gained back 15 lbs and want to get back on track to losing weight. But this has become about so much more than that. This month has taught me that I need to do this for my health and my life, both current and future. Because this, how I'm feeling today, isn't right, or healthy, or desirable.
