This was my ketostix result five days into my CKD

I have come back and re-visited this post with some more details. I started this diet a week ago, and have much more that I can share at this time than I initially could at the time I originally posted it. Some learnings I have so far:

• CKD is not easy for those who have a busy lifestyles, especially…
• If you do not have constant access to food, CKD gets even harder.
• CKD takes planning and execution of your plan. Without both, you can not succeed.
• CKD does seem to get easier as you continue on it, but only if you don’t mind eating the same foods every day.

My basic routine that I have been on for the past 5 months has been to exercise soon after I wake up. I do this on an empty stomach minus the pre-workout supplement(read: drink) that I take. After I work out, I have a protein shake and begin making breakfast as I watch CNBC to see what is going on in the world of finance and markets that day. Here is where the first change of CKD hits me. A typical breakfast for me would be a rotation of:

• oatmeal
• peanut butter on whole wheat english muffins
• maybe sometimes eggs

Depending on how hungry I am, I would eat 1 or 2 of those things. With CKD, Two out of those three are out. Oatmeal and english muffins have far too many carbs for this diet. So every morning for the past week, I have eaten 3 eggs (fried or scrambled) with 2 slices of cheese melted on top, and 4 pieces of turkey sausage.

I’m not trying to make it sound like a hardship here, that is a nice breakfast to start your day with. My point is that I like to mix up breakfasts and have some variety. So far, the most variety I have had is switching to turkey bacon instead of the sausage.

Now I’ll address the first two bullet points I mentioned above. Without carbs in your diet, you get hungry. Without question, I felt myself feeling hungry more often over the past week, than I would normally. However, the plan is to eat very often on this plan, so while I would feel hungry often, there would be food inbound shortly there after. Around 10 am at work I would take a hardboiled egg out of the fridge in my cube and eat it. So if you don’t have a fridge in your cube, look elsewhere, like to beef jerky. That egg would get me the next 2 hours until lunch around noon. I had some fun with lunch this week, getting burgers without buns, grilled chicken breasts, and that sort of thing. The best meal was probably just a bunch of sashimi sushi.

But then 2 o’clock rolls around and you guessed it. Hungry. So back to the cube fridge to take out 10 slices of pepperoni. Eat that at my desk, and I am ok again for a while. Ding dong, 4 o’clock is here. So now it’s the home stretch. Almost getting ready to go home for dinner, but too hungry to last, so it’s whey protein time. What you don’t have a big tub of whey at your office? I brought mine in this week just for this occasion, as well as the free shaker cup I got from bodybuilding.com. So at 4, I’ll make a shake and that will get me until I am home.

Dinner is at your place, so you really have no excuse to not have a solid Keto dinner. That is of course unless you didn’t properly shop for your new diet. I think the shopping list is worthy of another post, so I will work on that this week. As I said when I started, this diet NEEDS a plan and execution to work. I’ll talk about the shopping trip as well as the software I use for daily calorie tracking to make sure I am getting just enough carbs, fat, protein and total calories to be on schedule for CKD.

For those of you that are interested in the science of how this diet works, you can check it out here — Step By Step Keto Diet Plan!.

Other posts of interest

• The ultimate CKD shopping guide
• P90X – Kenpo X – When it starts to feel too easy
• Inspiration: If you can’t find time to exercise
• Tracking bike rides part 2 – RunKeeper