Usually people go on a diet to lose weight. However, although I have lost weight on keto, it was not my motivation for going on the ketogenic diet. I didn't even realize I had gone on the ketogenic diet.
It was a long time ago now, when I was a youngster. I had autoimmune problems that made me feel terrible, however, most people looked at me and saw a healthy person. All this stuff about not feeling well was an excuse for lack of motivation.
What was my most vexing problem? Extreme sleep disorder. What does that sound like when you complain about it? Whining. Psychological problems. I sometimes stayed awake for three days. And I sometimes suddenly fell asleep without warning at odd times. I tried to keep going to work and live a normal life, but obviously to everyone, something wasn't right. Usually I was assumed to be drunk. And usually I was fired. All except once. I lived in Miami and was a medical transcriber for the VA. My sister and I lived in an apartment and shared the rent. But she found a nice apartment in Ft. Lauderdale and moved, expecting me to go with her, but not running the idea by me first. Well, how was I going to drive so far to work every day? I was very nervous about this because although my boss pleaded with me to quit partying on week nights, supposing I always had a serious hangover, he put up with me and my problems since he was just a nice person and the VA was desperate for medical transcribers. In addition, since I had been in the Army, and this was a federal job, I had started with three years of seniority, and had perks like three weeks of vacation time a year, lots of holidays and two weeks of sick leave a year. On average I only had to work four days a week. Plus I had already racked up a substantial retirement for having only worked one year. And so it was the one and only way I had found to stay employed. I told my aunt that I was planning to continue working at the VA in Miami. She said, "You are going to drive 50 miles each way to work every day????!!!!!" She thought that was stupid. Well, OK. So I quit my job. That was my very last job that I was able to hold for more than a few days. Before long I went to live with my mother, and hoped a breather would improve my health. Not so much.
Things took a nosedive with my health, and I went to a local doctor who tested me for food allergies. Oh my. What a mess. I went on a hypoallergenic diet, and guess what? My health improved incredibly.
I had the GI Bill and used it to go to graduate school. So for around three years I floated long being a student. This was more manageable because the hours were so flexible. But all that came to an end when I graduated, and the GI Bill was all used up too.
And so I became an instructor at a technical college. Well.... That had some of the advantages of being a student because of the hours, and I managed to cling to that job for a while. But one sad day, poof, fired again.
I saw that diet was key to me limping through life. I also saw that I was going to need to do everything it took to go on disability, so eventually that worked out for me, and a whole lot of the chaos of my life eased.
And so, I made up my mind to experiment with diet until I found something that helped me. The hypoallergenic diet worked pretty well, but it was very hard to follow because I was limited to very few foods, and these foods had to be rotated and only eaten once very four days to prevent new allergies from developing. At no time should I even look at dairy.
I eventually found that a very low carb diet, 20 grams a day, with about 50% of the calories from fat, worked about as well as the hypoallergenic diet, and it was much more flexible. So, ever since then it's been keto for me. If I get too far away from keto, even for a day, I've got the devil to pay, so I don't much do that. And I had beautiful numbers. Cholesterol and especially triglycerides were low, things like that. The number one thing to me was that I usually slept better.
But wait. New information. A doctor recommended that I read The Specific Carbohydrate Diet. This is different from keto in that one eats carbs, but only monosaccharides. Disaccharides or polysaccharides are the carbs one must avoid. OK. What does that do? For me it did as well for autoimmune control and narcolepsy as keto. It has helped a lot of people with epilepsy, autism, and all sorts of immune and neurological disorders. I thought it might be better to switch over to this diet, except that my cholesterol and blood pressure went up, so I decided to just do keto.
Anyway, I've been mostly eating a carnivore diet, with almost no carbs. But sometimes I eat cantaloupe. Yesterday it was cantaloupe and watermelon, one pound of each. Yikes! That was around 70 grams of carbs. But, no matter. I slept normally and felt fine. This is most likely due to the carbs being monosaccharides.
Another curious anomaly though, was that on the day that I ate the potato flakes, I ate only mashed potatoes that day, but lots of them, and probably 80 grams of carbs. However, my fasting glucose the next day was even better than it is on carnivore. Mashed potato carbs are starch, which is not a monosaccharide.
So the diet mystery continues.
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