Fatkins Part II
or
The Ultimate Showdown
There is nothing so thrilling, gentle readers, as using one's own body as a test subject. For starters, it allows for perfect sympathy and understanding of the subject's experience. It also eliminates the need for consent forms and any chance of a lawsuit resulting from mistreatment. Screw true scientific rigor. This is SCIENCE with all capital letters - the kind of reckless experimentation of which dreams are realized and formalities are broken. BRING IT ON!
So I started Atkins. Until this point, I had been subsisting on plant products only - a radical vegan diet adopted for the fuck of it. It was rather nice. But its time has passed. Only meat now, and tons of it.
Well, fish to be more exact. And cheese. Lots of cheese. Lite silken tofu. Low-carb over-processed this-and-that. Shirataki noodles (AT LONG LAST!). The occasional shot of hard liquor. And a metric fuck-ton of diet soda.
Why? Because I CAN. And I'd never (knowingly) been in Ketosis before.
KETOSIS: a stage in metabolism occurring when the liver has been depleted of stored glycogen. Energy from fat is mobilized to the liver and used to synthesize glucose (a process called gluconeogenesis) from lactic acid, glucogenic amino acids, and glycerol carbon substrates. Ketones are also produced during this fasting state, and are burned throughout the body.
Ketones are a means of making the energy of fat available in water soluble form, and to displace as much burning of glucose as possible. Glucose must be conserved in the fasting state because parts of the brain, retina, kidney and red blood cells depend exclusively on it for energy, and in order to conserve muscle protein which must be catabolized to provide the glucogenic amino acid substrate for synthesis of glucose. During the initial stages of starvation the brain does not burn ketones, since they are an important substrate for lipid synthesis in the brain. But after several days of starvation, the brain transitions to burning ketones in order to more directly utilize the energy from the fat stores that are being depended upon, and to reserve the glucose only for its absolute needs, thus slowing the depletion of the body's protein store in the muscles. The brain retains a residual need for glucose, because ketones can only provide energy aerobically via mitochondria. In the long thin neurons, much of the metabolically active cellular membrane is too far from the nearest mitochondria and must derive its energy anaerobically (without oxygen) from glucose without the assistance of mitochondria.
The breath of people in a ketagenic state commonly contains acetone, detectable as a sweet smell that may be mistaken for ethyl alcohol.
Yes. My breath does, indeed, smell of ketones. Some of my coworkers and compatriots have accused me of binge drinking the night before. But that is simply not the case. I'm merely running on Empty, even though all I do is eat.
My brain is swiftly adapting to my body's ketogenic state. The sensation is rather like the dull haze of mild opiate pain-killers. I am slightly euphoric and detatched, a little insensitive to certain sensations, and tinged with a feeling of well-being. My muscles feel a little weak sometimes. I expect that will get better as time goes on. The scale says I am the same weight (it initially dipped down) though I think I look like i've lost fat/gained muscle. I have, after all, been lifting weights throughout.
And in case I've effectively bored the shit out of you with my discussion of metabolic processes, here's THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN!!!!!11
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