Slow and steady wins the race, as the saying goes. And I think I’m okay with that considering that I am going to win this race. My weight finally went down a little this week. I went through my plateau and did my reflections. I’ve also been recording my food intake much more carefully. I have discovered that although I’m doing intermittent fasting, I’m not intaking a lot of calories. Yes, it seems like losing weight, eating less calories is the thing to do. But I really don’t think it’s helping. On average, I’m consuming less than a 1000 calories a day. This is not great. Keto Lifestyle isn’t about counting calories. I have found that my appetite is smaller, making my portions smaller.

I did a small experiment this week. On Thursday, I was hungry so I stopped at McDonald’s and grabbed a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, no sauce, no bun. That day I consumed a little over 1200 calories. So the week I had a McDonald’s burger is the week I lose a pound. Now I know that doesn’t mean for me to go and start eating a McDonald’s burger diet, but it does mean that I need to get a few more calories in me through the week.

I’m finding it a little difficult to work on keeping the fat content high without increasing the protein too much. A lot of what I’ve been reading says that the protein each meal shouldn’t be larger than your fist. So I’m working on that. I am using the Samsung Health app to help to monitor my macros, exercising, and glucose levels.

And speaking of glucose levels, I was entering all of my past glucose levels onto the app and I was absolutely blown away by the progression. Back in February 2016, I did fasting labs for my annual check-up. My fasting glucose was at 276 mg/dl. I couldn’t believe it. Needless to say I was officially diagnosed with type II diabetes and put on Metformin. I started doing my research and started working on getting these numbers down. By September 2016 my fasting glucose was at 219 mg/dl – lower but not low enough. I kept working on it and went back to the doctor after one year. In September 2017 I started taking my blood sugar levels. They weren’t much lower than the year before. It was ranging between 210 and 232. My doctor started me on an additional medication: Invokana. It came down a little bit to 197 mg/dl.

On December 1st, when I started Keto, I was ready for some drastic measures. And on January 3rd, my glucose was at 177 mg/dl, the lowest it’s been. I started doing intermittent fasting and I stopped taking the Invokana – one, it was giving me stomach bloating issues (side effect is yeast infections and I think it was causing issues in my GI system), and two, I didn’t want my blood sugar to crash during a fasting. After one week of starting the fastings, my blood sugar was between 112 and 182. And this last week – my highest blood sugar was 151 mg/dl! On top of that the ranging of my blood sugar has decreased. For January, it was 101-182 (a range of 80). For March so far, it’s 110-167 (a range of 50). So not only is my blood sugar coming down, but it’s also stabilizing. This is key for a diabetic. To have diabetes means to have blood sugar levels that are somewhat out of control and bounce around. I’m going to kick this thing…