Morning all- thought I’d make a post I can refer back to and hopefully keep me going over the next couple of months….

Just a quick bit of background- I’m 48, male, about 5′ 10″ and work a desk job in IT. I was always pretty slim until my late 30s when I gave up smoking, and before I knew it had gone from around 11 stone to over 13 stone. A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and had to have several courses of steroids to damp down the effects before starting on chemotherapy for the condition. As a result of the steroids and being largely unable to exercise, my weight shot up to over 14.5 stone. The final straw was seeing this beer bellied blob in the background in an ice bucket challenge video my kids did. I was mortified, especially looking back at pictures of me not long after the kids were born. Anyway last year, the chemo started working, my RA abated, and I did Atkins and started running. By October I’d shed 2 stone, and was regularly running 5K in well under 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, I damaged my foot last November, and couldn’t really run properly again until about May this year. And, while you do lose weight on Atkins, I found it exceptionally difficult to continue with it as it was starting to make me feel ill and upsetting my stomach. I put on over a stone between Christmas and August this year. I did try Slimming World, but the weight loss was so slow (maybe a pound or two per month), that I got discouraged and quickly fell back into bad habits (beer and crisps mainly…).

I’ve got a 10K race to run in November this year, and the extra weight is really making training more difficult than it should be, so this diet and the amazing results many of you have had in such a short period of time looks ideal. Reading through the book, it looks far more maintainable than Atkins (and a damn sight more healthy too). I plan to try and lose 1-1.5 stone as quickly as I can, then revert to the 5:2 diet to keep the weight off. Currently, I’m 13 stone 9 lbs and have a 39 inch waist (up from 34″ at Christmas 🙁 ).

Just a quick question-

The 10K training regime isn’t particularly onerous- there are 4 sessions per week, and in the latter stages I’ll be running up to 50- 60 minutes or doing intervals (1 minute fast running, 1 minute jogging, repeated 5-10 times depending on how far I’m into the plan). The 3 rest days from running, I’ll be doing some light dumbbell work, concentrating on core strength. I’m a bit concerned that a low calorie diet might cause issues with that, so would be very interested from anyone who’s followed the diet and done running and whether they had any issues. I’ve usually found bananas to be ideal for energy prior to runs, but they seem to be frowned on a bit as they’re relatively high in carbs compared to other fruits.

Thanks for reading, hope I haven’t been too self-indulgent. I’ll try and update once a week and include details of any issues around the exercise in case it can help anybody else.

Ah, apologies, I’ve just realised that there’s a dedicated exercise forum further down- I’ll take a trawl through that to see what experiences others have had.

Welcome aboard Sportbilly, hope you achieve your goals – you will find support on the forum, so make good use of it. I can’t advise on the running / Fast 800, as I don’t run and train as you have described – it sounds very full on! I’m sure someone will offer some advise though.

As far as the banana thing goes, if you are keeping other carb intake low, I don’t see why you couldn’t have your pre-run banana if it helps. Most of us who are tracking carbs, try to keep at 50g carbs a day or lower. A medium banana contains approx. 27g carbs, so if you kept the rest of your carb intake to around 23g on running days, you should be fine – and believe me, that is doable.

Look forward to hearing your progress.

Hi Sportbilly

you might be interested in the following site
http://keto-calculator.ankerl.com

Which gives you more details about levels of carbs (it does have some Atkins adherents, so you may have come across it before), but I do 20-25g per day, and follow the calculations it offers for fat and protein which I used on MyFitnessPal.

You should find that once you get into the swing of this, you may not need the carb loading or the carb hit of a banana.

Good luck with it all, and do keep us posted! 🙂

Thanks for the replies and advice, guys. I’ve decided to just have a banana on run days and, as SunnyB mentioned, adjust carbs accordingly so I don’t have an excessive amount. Talking of which….

The first day was fine, I’m used to the light-headedness kicking in around 11 am from when I did Atkins, so it didn’t bother me this time and I felt fine in the afternoon. I plugged my food into My Fitness Pal at the end of the day, and it came to 900 calories. I’d used up 260 calories on my run, so thought this was a decent effort overall. Unfortunately, I’d managed to eat 116g of carbs- I’d had the banana pre-run, an apple when I got back, and a couple of Clementines as a snack in the afternoon, which contributed around 80g between them. So, today I’ll have to knock the fruit on the head, which is a shame.

Anyway, I’m down to 13 stone 5.5 lbs and my waist is now 38 inches, so it’s starting to work, but I need to be much more strict on the carbs to get the full effect, I guess.

Forgot to say, Igorasusual- I ran OK on Atkins last year on far less carbs, but it wasn’t calorie-restricted like the BSD, which was why I was slightly concerned. Thanks for the site link, that looks very useful.

Hi Sportbilly, congratulations on the results.

I found the fruit issue – i.e. the number of carbs in things like clementines and apples – quite astonishing! We were on holiday at the beginning of July, did lots of walking, and I had bought apples and clementines for lunches (made sandwiches for the others, and had Leerdammer cheese slices with smoked salmon for mine).

At the end of the week, I ‘ate up’ the residual apples and clementines. Yes, I did have a few, but given that ‘fruit is good for you’, and my love of clementines (especially at Christmas where I eat them in volume ‘because they are better than mince pies’), I was totally overcome when I entered it all into MyFitnessPal! Aaaaaaargh. The sugar!!! The resulting carbs!!!! 18 carbs per apple !!!!

Am very much more circumspect about fruit since then. Although I must confess to eating a few blackberries as the brambles in the garden (specially kept for fruiting purposes) keep ripening day by day and even hour by hour.

I found that keto site very helpful, and my 20g of carbs (now increased to 25g, with slightly more calories to avoid muscle loss), balanced by targeted protein and fat, is great for MFP.

Best wishes with everything! 🙂

Thanks again- no fruit yesterday aside from some blueberries with my yoghurt. I had 820 calories overall, with around 40g carbs. Weight is now 13 stone 3.5 pounds (down 5.5lbs since Monday), waist is 37.5″ (down 1.5″) and body fat seems down from around 27.5 to 26.3, although I don’t really trust my scales as it can vary wildly. I did feel a little ‘jittery’ around midday yesterday, but nothing too bad or worse than I had when on Atkins. I’m quite enjoying this now, and the results are very encouraging so far :).

First half stone gone- I was 13 stone 2 pounds this morning, and my waist is 37″.

I’m really pleased with that- I had a similar sort of initial loss using Atkins, but that was from a higher starting weight and it rapidly petered out to maybe 0.5 pound a week. This diet feels much more sustainable than Atkins, it’s not making me constipated and psychologically, the rapid weight loss makes me much more likely to carry on with it.

Just a quick anecdote- I usually work from home, but yesterday I had to travel to Newcastle for a meeting with a client. The journey’s about 3 hours away, so I was out most of the day. I had my usual yoghurt/ blueberries at about 7, then decided to try having bacon, egg and a couple of spoonfuls of beans at 9 just before I left. That kept me going until 8 pm when I got home and had my dinner. No cravings, no ‘oh, I’ll just get a pasty/ chocolate bar at Edinburgh to see me through’. That’s encouraging, as I frequently ‘broke’ Atkins last year when I had to travel to the office, simply because it’s really difficult to get low carb food at stations/ hotels/ the sandwich guy at work etc. Knowing that eating something high fat before I travel can keep me going for the best part of 12 hours feels almost liberating 🙂

That’s great news Sportbilly – congratulations on your first half stone, that’s an amazing result! 🙂

And good that you can not be hungry for such a long time… scrambled eggs and beans are my go-to when I’m out too (I like to have Saturday brunch with friends after yoga class). It keeps me going for hours too. Low carb and high fat is definitely the way to go, I had scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning, came into work and a big birthday cake was sitting in the break room ‘to share’ and I wasn’t even tempted! In the bad old days I would have had a massive slice 🙂

Congrats again and have a good rest of week!

Karen

Thanks, Karen. Week 1 summary-

Start weight: 13 st 9 lbs
Finish weight: 13 st 0.5 lbs
Loss: 8.5 lbs

Start waist size: 39 inches
End waist size: 37.5 inches
Loss: 1.5 inches

Food of the week: Izzy’s stuffed peppers- https://thebloodsugardiet.com/recipes/bacon-and-courgette-stuffed-peppers/ Really easy to make and absolutely delicious.

Slip of the week: I had a bottle of wine and a packet of crisps on Saturday evening. I didn’t let myself feel guilty, just got straight back into the diet on Sunday. I might just keep the wine as a weekly treat and have something to look forward to. Not bothered about the crisps as I didn’t really enjoy them.

All’s been good so far, running hasn’t been affected, weight loss is brilliant and I haven’t particularly felt hungry. I’m probably not in ketosis as I’ve been having extra fruit after runs, but I’m still losing weight so I’m not too worried about that.

This week will likely be much slower judging by other people’s results, but my wife wants to have a go too as she has about half a stone to lose, so there’s a good incentive to keep on going.