As I have continued on this pursuit, I have noticed a interesting trend. When I engage in a certain activity that is intended to achieve a certain result sometimes it just does not go as planned. In fact, it seems that sometimes the exact opposite occurs. Unfortunately, I have often thought the reason that I am not getting the results that I want is because I am not doing the activity good enough, or adequately. So I naturally double down, pouring more effort into the activity thinking that I am right and that I just need to suck it up more.
However, here is the issue. Sometimes I am just wrong. I am not getting the intended results because I am pig headed about my path I have chosen and the path that I am on will just never achieve the desired result. Let me take my battle this last year with my food intake as a for instance.
I have had great success with following a keto type diet, way before that was even a thing. I noticed the blood sugar stabilizing effects of long term fasting and as a consequence started eating only foods that would not spike blood sugar and was something that the body could not store, but could only burn. I did really well on that type of lifestyle and probably would still do ok on it. However, here is the problem. I started doing a lot of pushups, sit-ups, squats and running everyday. My caloric requirements went through the roof. I might have been getting to a requirement for 3 to 4 thousand calories per day but unfortunately I was still in this mode of eating less than 2000. I dropped down to less than 200 lbs. My ideal weight with muscle mass is about 230. So I started to have this real problem.
I could not maintain the effort any longer, body fat was starting to disappear. Good thing right? Well not so good when you are just not eating enough to replace that body fat with lean muscle. All the protein and fat that I was eating was going to maintain basic health and to try to keep up with the energy demand. I was getting the opposite result that I wanted. I could not sustain the energy requirements, I was not getting muscle growth, and I was getting increasingly tired all the time. Running 50 to 70 miles per week and doing over 300 pushups a day was draining me. I was able to sustain that for a quite a while, but something was wrong.
My approach was to double down. Keep up the ketonic diet, just be much more disciplined. That might have worked, an fat optimized metabolism has been scientifically proven to be effective, but here is the problem. My volume of food intake, in terms of just raw calorie count would have had to be about 2X or more than what I was currently eating! So in reality, I needed to do the OPPOSITE of what I was trying to accomplish! So maybe, instead of thinking that you are totally right, you need to think about the opposite!
Guy Reams
