I'll start by saying that I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. Hell, I didn't even go to university. With this all in mind please do not take anything you read here as any kind of advice or recommendation. The following posts are purely my thoughts and observations.
Living in a fast paced fast food world, any diet takes willpower and with keto being a total change to the way you eat it makes it even harder.
I have been finding that following a ketogenic diet is both fun and rewarding - at least for the first few months anyway. On keto your options are somewhat limited. There are only so many ways you can prepare minced beef, eggs, or -dare I say it- bacon.
The point that I fail is when the thought of eating a keto meal makes me feel nauseous. I've tried to add as much variety to my meals as possible, making meatballs to steak to holy grail pizza. Eventually the meals become less than unappealing.
Talking to my Fiancée, she mentioned that her sister was taking some diet pills - Fat & Carb Control tablets. I've taken fat blockers before with little success (and lots of orange greasy diarrhea), but a carb blocker? This interested me. I did some research and found that the same company did a carb only blocker.
I was skeptical to say the least. If a tablet could help you lose weight then why was it not mainstream prescribed by the NHS? I concluded that - if nothing else it was probably because the NHS believe that 30% of your daily intake should be from starchy carbohydrates.
Being inquisitive and always on the look out for an easier life, I started researching carb blockers. I could find a small amount of info here and there and I began to piece it together. The general attitude was carbs = bad so any reduction was a good thing. Being on keto we measure how many carbs we eat. It's the single most important factor for being in ketosis or not. Eventually I read (on Yahoo Q&A of all places) that they block 35-40g of carbs. Score. This was the info I was looking for.
There was one other thing that I needed (and quite possibly need to learn more about, at this stage) is the type of carbohydrates these tablets are supposed to block. They say that they only block complex carbohydrates. So what is a complex carbohydrate? Back to researching. So it turns out that you have simple carbs which are single molecules, whereas complex carbs are 3 or more joined together. Simple carbs are things like table sugar. Complex carbs are found in things like grains. Our body needs to break down the complex carbs into simple carbs to enable them to be absorbed.
This raised another question - how do I know which carbs are simple and which carbs are complex?
The nutritional information on packages says "Carbohydrates: x grams. (of which sugars: y grams)". I made a guess that the former was complex and the latter was simple. The NHS website verifies this was the case.
I started looking at the nutritional information on all of my keto food to see how it was split into complex and simple carbs. I was finding that a lot of keto food was low in carbs, but all of the carbs were from -presumably natural- sugars. I was slightly surprised by this. I was hoping that maybe I could block all the carbs from certain foods that I already eat - milk, for example - but alas, no.
During a shopping trip I started looking at the nutritional information for products picked almost at random. I found that a lot of foods - flour, pasta, bread, etc - had a high complex carb count, and a low simple one. This raised not one, but two of my eyebrows.
The decision was made. I had a slight grasp of what the tablets would block, a rough idea of what foods I could eat, and a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I bought some carb blockers from Boots (UK) for £19.99 for 60 tablets.
Looking over the info on the packaging I saw the line I was looking for that explained that 2 tablets would block around 200 kcal of complex carbohydrates. Bingo. A quick calculation later told me that each tablet would block 25g of complex carbs.
The plan
On keto it's recommended that you keep below 20g of carbs (in general) in order to stay in ketosis. My idea was to instead of tracking the total number of carbs, I would track the "of which sugars" value, on the condition that the NET complex carbs was no greater than what the blockers could block (carbs minus sugars).
I did some more reading and found some conflicting information. I read that processed food - such as white bread - loses its complexity due to the refinement process, and becomes a simple carbohydrate. So actually I don't really know my simple carbs from my complex carbs. I'm going to play it safe and buy my high carb foods from a list of foods with complex carbs. As a result of this I decided to buy some sweet potatoes, wholegrain/brown rice, pasta, flour.
I have no way of actually measuring my blood glucose levels without buying a testing kit. I'm broke so I'm not going to get one just yet. Luckily I've been in and out of ketosis more times than I care to admit, so I know the signs. And the obvious one is weight loss. I'll keep you posted..!
Please feel free to contribute to my knowledge on the subject by leaving a comment, and I'll document my progress.
TL;DR
Going to use carb blockers, try stay in ketosis, and record the results here.
Next: Carb Blockers on Keto - Day 1 http://ketocafe.blogspot.com/2016/03/carb-blockers-on-keto-day-1.html
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