About KetoOS: How to feel pretty solid and other musings about supplemental ketones

Facebook chat log:

Dave:  OK, round two is underway.

Josh:  Awesome!!!  How do you feel?

Dave:  Pretty solid – blog on Sunday

Josh:  I’m glad bud!

 

It’s Sunday, April 10th, 2016.  I’m on a 30-day beta-hydroxybutyrate test drive.  Today is the start of week three and day 21.  That snippet up there is part of a chat I was having with a new friend about KetoOS.  And I’m sure you might be wondering, what does “pretty solid” mean anyway?

So let’s talk about KetoOS real fast.  The nutshell is it’s powered MCT oil and an exogenous ketone salt supplement.  It’s what I believe is the catalyst for the “pretty solid” feeling we’ll ba talking about in just a moment.  Check out the website at Pruvit.com for all the data if you need to but here’s where I’m at with it.

The 30-day test drive was to answer two key questions about supplemental or exogenous ketones like KetoOS:

1.  Will supplemental beta-hydroxybutyrate support the claims of cognitive improvement?  Will this make my brain perform better?
2.  Will supplemental beta-hydroxybutyrate support the claims of improved physical performance, body composition and reduced belly fat?

So far, 21 days in, I’ve made a couple decisions.  The first one is that yes, supplemental beta-hydroxybutyrate does support the claims of cognitive improvement.  How do I know?  Well, you’ll have to take my word for it I guess, but what I’m noticing is faster reaction times at work, less “brain fog” and increased mental energy.  You know how sometimes your brain just get’s tired?  Mine seems to be able to work longer and better.  This is 21 days in.  Sleep has improved.  Dreams are more vivid and starting to approach lucid.  Now I’ve been taking Alpha Brain by Onnit for a while now and while that has certainly done wonders for my focus and cognition, I never got the lucid dream stuff that Onnit talks about.  At lease not until I started taking the KetoOS.  My dreams have been incredibly vivid and really close to lucid.  I get the sense that the beta-hydroxybutyrate and additional MCT oil has ramped that all up.  No complaints there at all…  Obviously.

The second observation about KetoOS is at day 21 is that I can go hard longer with less fuel.  Meaning what?  Well, I’m a huge proponent of The Warrior Diet.  If you haven’t read this book, it can be a real game changer for you with how you view “hunger” and how you incorporate “hunger” into your life and use it to your advantage instead of being used by it.  Bottom line and the realization here is that you don’t need 3 squares a day to survive.  Humans can go days, even weeks without food.  Just watch Naked and Afraid to see how you can survive in extreme environments and how the body adapts.  If you’re a lumberjack from the Victorian era, 3 squares a day make a ton of sense.  If you work in a corner office on the 22nd floor with a 90-minute commute both ways, 3 squares is just a bigger ass and tighter seatbelt.  The average American eats more and moves less, whereas 150 to 2000 years ago, we ate less and moved more.  Also, what we ate was incredibly different.  Here’s the ultimate question:

Are you controlling your body or is your body controlling you?

So with that being said, I can take the KetoOS in the morning with my coffee and heavy cream and not need to eat until 1-2 pm.  And when I do it’s usually an all veggie smoothie from my Nutribullet or a couple scrambled eggs.  If I’m going to have a pretty hard workout that happens at 7 am, I’ll eat within 90-minutes after the workout.  I’ll just have the veggie smoothie sooner and toss in some protein powder.  And here’s the best part.  When I’m training, especially fasted, with KetoOS before the workout, it’s still game on.  I’ve been keto-adapted it seems for a couple weeks now but the longer I am, the more amazed I am at how I feel when I’m training.  Case in point:  Friday night, had dinner at 8 pm.  Then yesterday at 8 am, had 1 serving of KetoOS.  Drank my coffee as usual and did my Saturday morning reading.  I started my training session at 1 pm.  Clearly in a fasted state.  Did this as an experiment.  Trained pretty hard:

• 10 minutes of jump rope
• 10 minutes of joint mobility
• 10 minutes of pull ups and pistol squats
• 10 minutes of heavy Turkish get ups
• 12 minutes of heavy kettlebell swings
• Atomic push-ups 5 sets of 10 superset with
• Alternating Dumbell Curls 5 sets of 10
• 5 rounds of Hill Sprints 25 yards superset with 15 medicine ball slams

Had the energy.  Didn’t feel that crash of “uh-oh, I’m out of sugar.”  Why?  Because (as of last week) at 174 pounds and 11% bodyfat, I am walking around with 19 pounds of stored energy.  That’s like 66,000 calories.  More than enough energy to get that work done.

So why bother with supplemental ketones????

Shouldn’t this just happen on its own?  Yes, it should and to be completely transparent, it does and it will.  Here’s the deal; or at least my deal.  What happens when you put an octane booster in your car?  What happens when your favorite song comes on while you’re working out?   What if there was a way to make your body more efficient and effective at using ketones as fuel?  What if there was a way to reduce the odds of breaking down muscle tissue in a calorically restricted environment, like performing an intense exercise session in a fasted state?  And what if there was a way within that to improve your mood and general feeling of well-being?  Wouldn’t it make sense to help your body do that in a natural way by “priming” the ketone pump if you will?  Call it what you want, some call it bio-hacking, some call it human optimization, I’m going with “pretty solid” right now because that’s how I feel.  Pretty f@#%ing solid!  About my progress and about KetoOS.

For week 3, here are the measurements:

• Scale Weight in pounds:  172.2
• Body Fat % 10.7
• Skin Pinch at belly button: 16mm

Last week’s for comparison: 

• Scale Weight in pounds:  174.8
• Body Fat % 10.9
• Skin Pinch at belly button: 18mm**

So, again, something’s happening!  In one week I dropped 2.6 pounds, my body fat reduced another .2% and I moved down another 2mm on the skin pinch.  PROGRESS!  After week 4 and the 30-day mark, you, like me, may be wondering, now what?  Well, I’ve already made that decision and know exactly what the next step will be.  So make sure you’re subscribed and following along as we go into the second leg and transition the quest into finally finding the answer to the question that plagues so many…  fade to black.

**NOTE:  Just noticed that calipers measure in multiples of 2, not one, so that’s good news and also an error in last week’s reporting.

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