I am an over 40 year old male who has exercised intensely the better part of his life. I got my first gym membership at 14. I played high school football and worked out nearly every day with weights. I was big and strong and my peers often motivated me by noticing how big and strong I was. At the age of 17 I was probably around 210 lbs, had a max bench press of 365 and did squat reps with over 400 lbs. I ran a 4.8 sec 40 yard dash. I was never what you would describe as “ripped”. I was athletic but also a big, bulky kid. As many kids my age, I was on the “See Food Diet”, you see it, you eat it. The diet featured a lot of pizza and even some weekend benders with my best friend that consisted of pizza, whole bags of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Dr. Pepper. If it turned out to be an overnighter, there were donuts involved in the morning. I was young, very active and presumably had loads of the good hormones.
Flash forward to 2016, I am now in my 40s, the diet is nearly the same and the workouts have become sporadic at best. I am now married, have one child and one on the way. I am about 232 lbs and nowhere near as strong as I once was. The bulk has definitely shifted. I hate to think about it but I was likely over 250 lbs at my heaviest in my late 30s. I tended not to weigh myself then. I do however remember the scale telling me 248 once and the feeling of disbelief that I had. The most successful weight loss to this point was a gallbladder that acted up and was removed. The “Gallbladder Removal Diet” helped me drop about 15 lbs. A year or so prior, the most weight loss I had seen actively trying to lose weight was going vegetarian, even vegan for a bit (I saw Forks Over Knives). That whole veg experience lasted 9 months. I lost 12 lbs eating this way and stopped being tired all the time but I still maintained various issues and it was honestly hard to maintain the diet or break the 12 lb plateau.
I started my most recent weight loss journey on Oct 14th, 2016. As of this writing, it’s been a bit over 2 years and I have lost 50 lbs. I also seem to be maintaining the weight loss. At 44 years old I have so far reached 182 lbs and have the best body composition I’ve ever had in my life. I can actually see some of my stomach muscles (only two though but I’ll take it!). So what did it? How did I find success this time and not in my previous attempts? This time I tried the Ketogenic Diet. The spark was seeing my cousin lose quite a bit of weight and talk loads about the Keto Diet on social media. Firstly, I did some research and while it seemed so far off of what I was taught up until this point, it was about the only way of eating I had yet to try. As I detail in another page N=Me, by this time in my life I had also developed quite a few health issues and I was at the end of my rope.
A big part of the Ketogenic Diet is reducing carbohydrate intake. I was well aware that reducing things like flour and sugar would make an impact, I’ve even done that to some extent, but what I wasn’t so sure about was the part about dietary fat. The whole premise of the Keto Diet is to replace carbs with fat in your diet and that the fat is there to satiate you, make you feel full. You intentionally eat fat, including the dreaded saturated fat! The idea behind the macronutrient swap was also to help eat less (frequently) and supposedly “train” your body to burn the stored body fat, producing ketones, hence the name.
It only took a month to see the scale move and 5 months to see major changes. By March of 2017 I had broken the 200 barrier and was around 195-198 lbs. To me, this was a huge milestone. The very quick progress of this diet is in itself motivating but I had not seen lower than 200 lbs since Junior High. I need to add that because of certain health issues, I worked out very little at the start of the diet, probably not for about the first 3-4 months. After those first months, I started to do push-ups and sit-ups only. I didn’t do any cardio in the first 16 months of the diet.
Months passed and the rapid weight loss slowed. While below the 200 mark, I lost maybe 1 or 2 lbs a month. I was stuck at 192 lbs from that point on and because the initial loss was so quick, I started to get a bit frustrated. This is when the really immersive reading began.
“Keep Calm and Keto On,” I read. I was also advised to try removing dairy or nuts since those can entice you to overeat or may cause intolerances in some leading to a plateau or even a gain. I read about fasting, both intermittent or extended fasts. The info available on fasting confused me whether this was good or bad for you. I also read to reduce the amount of calories (eat less) and I also read to increase exercise (move more). While these last two pieces of advice are very common and not specific to low-carb diets, since they did not seem to matter to this point I was averse to trying them now. I eventually added intermittent fasting (16-8) and got rid of dairy and nuts. My meals naturally reduced to twice a day. I did pay attention to overeating but I had not counted a single calorie to this point and I did not start to either. I started to feel quite comfortable in how I was eating now but the weight still didn’t budge. Enter Zero Carb.
Also called Carnivory or a Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet, Zero Carb is a simple meat only diet. As the folks on the “Zeroing In on Health” Facebook Group will tell you, eat meat and drink water until full. Even after all that I had experienced to date, this still seemed over-the-top to me. Besides the incredible weight loss, there is one other great benefit of low-carb, it gave me a new relationship with food and a resistance to hunger that allowed me an incredible flexibility and a willingness to experiment. Because of this, meat-only was not a stretch, and so I tried it. It took just one month to see the scale move again. It took two non-consecutive months and I was 10 lbs lighter and now at my all time low of 182 lbs. The really interesting part of this new experiment isn’t the breaking of the 190 plateau, it was what I discovered about myself. I actually discovered I am allergic to legumes! (UPDATE 2020: It’s unlikely a legume allergy. Soy definitely bothers me but no reliable issues with lentils or peanuts). I might never have discovered this allergy had I not eliminated everything but meat and water from my diet (I am still bummed about peanut butter. UPDATE 2020: Peanut Butter still OK but also still not back on the menu for other reasons). Another interesting result going Zero Carb was that I also lost (more) weight without working out, again! You see, I took a break from exercise the entire first month of the Zero Carb change partly out of fear that I’d feel terrible, partly to see if I’d still succeed. Lastly, I calculated daily caloric intake for about a weeks worth of the new ZC diet (using My Fitness Pal) and I actually ate 500-800 MORE calories Zero Carb, PER DAY, than I ever did doing the Ketogenic Diet. Let me repeat that, I ate more total energy of only steak, eggs, pork, hamburger and some cheese, by as much as 800 calories PER DAY, and LOST weight… Again, this is not me at my heaviest, carrying a lot of extra weight, this is me while at the lowest weight I’ve seen in decades, as an adult. If I needed more fuel for my dislike of the “eat less, move more advice”, this was it. There is CLEARLY something else going on. This is exactly the reason for this site, to explore and document such events to hopefully develop some understanding. I have since hopped on and off Zero Carb in my quest for further experimentation. In some ways I might describe my current diet as part ZC since it made such an impact. Nearly every breakfast is carb-less or at least completely animal-based. If I eat plants at all it’s typically at dinner or some in-season fruit just after.