Day 1 of my 90 day keto journey – What is not in your awareness, you can’t see.. and what you can’t see, you can't change.
First rule of driving is that you keep your eyes on the road. If you drive with closed eyes, you won’t go very far. Doesn’t matter how good a driver you are otherwise, how strongly committed you are to make the journey, how well is the road that is laid out in front of you or how fancy a car you are driving (Keep Tesla out of this discussion for a sec :-) ). This is true with any journey you make in life. Awareness, and ability to measure your progress is key to success.
Same is true with Keto. When you are starting off in your journey, you must have a way to measure how you are doing. I know many people, including me, think we can just do the entire math in our mind and don’t need any help. But that is not true. You do need an impartial, objective and accurate method to measure your progress. I recommend using https://cronometer.com It is a free tool, very intuitive and easy to use. You can record everything you eat in here and at the end of the day, you know how you did. The first day it can be a bit of work to figure the tool out, add the details, but starting next it becomes much easier. You can, with a single click of a button, copy the entire past day to the current day and make small tweaks as necessary. This feature is incredibly powerful. When you are working towards a goal, you don’t get up every day and do re-planning on what you must do that day to get closer to your goal. You must have a routine, a discipline that you follow every day. You make small tweaks to refine your routine so ever day you are getting better and your efforts are being spent in best possible way. By having data in cronometer in front of you on how you did on certain day, you can tweak and decide before hand what you must do next day. This takes the guess work away from planning your meals each day and you won’t get surprised end of the day on how you did. Second, by recording what you ate, you can easily see what foods are causing trouble for you to meet your goals. Sometimes these are not obvious For ex, yesterday, I had 3 cups of milk! That is 36gms of sugar right there! It stood out loud and clear and today I’m going to fix that. So, don’t make assumption. Record your data, set your goals and see how exactly you are doing.
So, my day 1, I would give it a Yellow. I did well but was off from where I need to be to accelerate my body to get to ketosis. Normally, when you are in ketosis, the macros I did yesterday would be Ok! You would maintain the state of ketosis, no issues. However, when you are getting into ketosis, you need to be little more strict. For ex, when you are not well, you avoid certain foods. These foods may otherwise be ok for you eat when you are healthy. However, if you eat them when sick, they can prolong your recovery. Same with my diet yesterday. If I continue eating they way I did yesterday, I will get to ketosis eventually. But it will take long time.
Tomorrow I will talk about what should be percentages of the macros when you are trying to enter ketosis and why? Also, what should be the absolute amount of carbs and proteins you should consume and why?
Stay tuned and very best!