Ketosis & Whole Life Challenge Day 3

At the very last minute on Friday night, I decided to register for something called The Whole Life Challenge. This is designed to help you to create long-lasting habits in your life that not only improve your health and fitness levels but your overall fulfilment and happiness. It’s an 8-week online, community-building, game that challenges you and your friends to create happier, healthier lives by making small, daily changes – apparently. We shall see..

These 7 Daily Habits are:

Nutrition. Your food choices have the single greatest impact on your health, well-being, and community. When you make choices that keep you healthy, you give yourself the fuel to fulfil all of who you are.
Exercise. Humans are designed to move daily. Whether through workouts, activity, or simply enjoying the full use of your body, daily movement keeps you healthy and vital.
Mobilize. In a sedentary world, our bodies get stuck. Daily mobility and stretching helps you move the way nature intended and continue enjoying freedom of movement into your later years.
Sleep. Modern schedules tend to dictate how many hours of sleep we’re entitled to. A practice of increasing that time, even by a little bit, can make big strides in robust health.
Hydrate. More than anything, your body is made of water. This habit ensures that your body gets enough of its most basic resources for life.
Lifestyle. These weekly practices turn a life into your life. Learn to step back, take stock, connect, and turn your attention to what is really important to you.
Reflect. Looking back, looking inward, or looking forward, daily reflection draws your awareness to what is working and what needs your attention today. Read more

As you know, the gap between knowing something and doing it can be wide. The Whole Life Challenge turns doing it into a game that requires the three most fundamental tools necessary to create new habits: structure, support, and accountability.

So far so good. In terms of nutrition, you can pick one of 3 different levels of nutrition – I chose the performance category which is the top level. This requires strict paleo – so no alcohol, no grains, no sugar, no dairy, no high GI carbs, just veggies, fruits, meat, fish, eggs and anything that is natural. It’s pretty much the diet I follow normally, except I’m normally a little relaxed about various forms of rice and eat quinoa (officially a seed) and buckwheat and millet. I normally drink wine (not a lot, a few nights a week) and also the occasional treat – normally dark chocolate. I also normally eat butter (from grass-fed cows) and a decent quality cheese like brie.

I chose to go one step further and re-enter the awesome world of ketosis. This is when you completely eliminate sugar and high GI carbs, including sweet potatoes (that are actually allowed on this plan) and tell your body to stop burning glucose (from carbs) for energy. Instead, your body burns ketone bodies from fat (dietary and stored body fat). This is for both your physical energy and your mental energy. Your brain functions incredibly effectively on ketones – some say it’s like a super fuel for it.

Ketosis is safe and one of the most effective ways to burn fat fast, and also to reverse type-2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, various forms of cancer (as you’re not feeding cancer its #1 fuel which is glucose), and it helps with many neurodegenerative disorders and even seizures – so it’s been proven to help with epilepsy too. Since you can’t eat anything that is high glycemic (high in glucose) you can’t eat a few veggies that grow below the ground, such as carrots and beetroots – and of course white potatoes and even sweet potatoes. You fuel off fat instead. You still get s ton of micronutrients from plant-based foods from vegetables that grow above the ground.

For exercise, you need to be active every day (we need to be anyway). Workouts must comprise something that is measurable, so you can see your improvements over the 8 week period. You must hydrate daily

Here is my food diary so far

SATURDAY:

Breakfast: Nothing. I had to skip it as I was at an event with free breakfast and by the time I had arrived, there wasn’t anything left I could eat – including fruit. I decided to just drink a few cups of water and coffee and breathe deeply whenever hunger pangs showed up – a remarkably effective and simple way to get over hunger pangs! Taking a break from food is actually a good thing believe it or not. Intermittent Fasting for example has so many health benefits as you’ll see here.

Lunch: Large assorted salads from Lemonade and a 16 oz green vegetable juice (no fruit). Snacked on cashew nuts.

Dinner was quite a challenge. I ate out with five friends, none of whom drank any alcohol so that wasn’t so bad, but it was an Italian. Needless to say, the focus was wheat and carb-based dishes.
I chose sea bass and pork loin – with sides of veggies and a starter of tuna and lettuce (a ridiculously over-priced dish that didn’t fill me up in the slightest). This restaurant really lacked vegetables. Note to self: Never choose Italian again unless there are main dishes with veggies!

I meditated for 10 minutes using Headspace (a very cool app, get it, you won’t regret it), did a 20 minute workout comprising 4 sets of push ups: 51, 26, 16, 14 (to failure each time) with sit ups in between not to failure: 50, 45, 40, 35, 100 bodyweight squats and then a 2 minute plank (possibly the hardest part of whole exercise). These are all compound exercises meaning the span your largest muscle groups and gear you up for some decent hypertrophy, muscle toning and fat burning for up t0 2 days after the work out.

I drank tons of water, easily a third of my bodyweight

SUNDAY

No breakfast and a 2 hour hike in the Hollywood Hills with friends and entrepreneurs – a fairly regular activity of mine. I’m very fortunate to be in LA right now. Lunch comprised a Greek Salad with chicken – which actually meant I screwed up as I completely forgot about the feta cheese until I was 3/4 of the way through it! I had to deduct points for that on this day (I forgot to mention it runs on a personally-scored points system and requires for you to be honest to yourself and your team mates).

In the evening I attended a friend’s bbq. I ate an awesome beef patty (organic beef from grass-fed cows of course) with various salad dishes. I ate a bite of a veggie burger as a friend couldn’t finish hers and immediately realised the ingredients probably possessed something I shouldn’t eat – and it did – wheat flower, corn flower, potato and even sugar. Sugar in a veggie burger?!! Really? This is why I don’t buy packaged stuff ever. I had to deduct points for that too.

Later in the evening I was hungry again so I fried up some cut veggies in coconut oil and threw in 3 whole organic eggs. Super tasty actually.

MONDAY

Breakfast: After a 30 min run I had a green veggie juice with ginger. I ate the remainder of coconut oil fried veggies with 3 whole organic eggs to make an omelette again.

Lunch: I ate out and had a 6 egg white omelette loaded with cooked kale (it was meant to have quinoa in it too but I had it removed so I could remain in ketosis). Side of avocado and covered in extra virgin olive oil and various spices with chia seeds – rich in omega-3s. I had a green veggie juice too to load up on the micronutrients.

Dinner: First home cooked meal in ages: Coconut oil fried veggies –
zucchini, broccoli, leeks, egg plant with chicken in various spices and a side salad of spinach, vine tomatoes, avocado, celery and cucumber laced in olive oil.