Day 1

Weight - 225.6 Measurements - NA Attitude - light headed Observation - increasing protein content and cheese certainly slows down the ol' bowels which probably explains why I gained weight. My colon is probably impacted. Biochemical Lesson - How important glucose is. I really can appreciate how much your brain is dependent on glucose. Despite eating fruit, chocolate and drinking some wine, I'm still pretty foggy. I'm guessing that means I depleted my glycogen stores pretty quickly. What's glycogen? A huge polymer of glucose chains, it's essentially your body's way of storing glucose. After a meal, the glucose that is not used by tissue for direct energy is stored as glycogen in the liver and muscle. As an aside, whenever we looked at liver histology we always fasted the animals in order to deplete the glycogen stores. It made the liver a lot easier for the pathologist to read. Your liver is the main source of glycogen synthesis since it can make it from dang near any metabolite....except fat as we learned previously. There's another critical tissue to 'fogginess' that can ONLY use glucose (the brain eventually will use ketone bodies but more on those later). Red blood cells have no mitochondria so they are completely dependent on glucose for energy. I'll have to double check but I suspect that they'd get their stores from Mr. Liver. I don't know how much oxygen transport decreases as glycogen stores are depleted. You do need glucose in order to make 2, 3-BPG which is a regulator of how oxygen is bound to hemoglobin (it makes it easier for your RBC to kick off oxygen and deliver it to peripheral tissues like the skeletal muscle). Less 2, 3-BPG, I would imagine would mean the hemoglobin would tend to hold onto the oxygen a bit longer thereby decreasing the amount of O2 delivered. But what the threshold is for that and if the ketogenic diet approaches that, I have no idea.