Low carb recipe: Coconut Cream Pie (with chocolate crust)

Coconut Cream Pie with Chocolate Crust.

I think it needs refinement, more and firmer topping (probably doubled amount), so may have to resort to adding gelatin(e).  Tastes great though and the crust is good; possibly good enough to consider making cheesecake with it using salted butter instead of coconut oil.

Dust with cocoa powder to present when sliced and on the plate.

Low carb recipe: cauliflower and bacon gratin

Egg custard is clever stuff :o)

Net carbs 8.3g per serving

• Prepare the cauliflower and par-boil it in chunks, drain it and and let it steam itself dry.  Pan cook the bacon and chop it into bite-sized pieces (I used smoked back as that's what was available, preferably use a good streaky bacon).  Slice the mushrooms.
• Bring the the milk and cream to the boil in a pan and take off the heat.
• Finely grate the parmesan and whisk it into the egg yolks.
• Mix the cauliflower, bacon bits and mushroom slices in a baking dish.
• Grate the cheddar coarsely.
• Pour the milk and cream into the whisked parmesan and egg yolk and whisk until well mixed, then return to the pan the milk and cream was heated in and heat gently, stirring all the time as the mixture very slowly thickens.  It will thicken to a very thick cream consistency over 8-10 minutes; do not be tempted to turn the heat up to make it go more quickly as all that will do will give you scrambled egg in cream.
• Once that mix has thickened, take it off the heat and pour over the solids in the baking dish.  Press the mix down a bit and then top with the grated cheese.
• Bake in the oven for 20 minutes at about 150C (you can leave it in there for up to a couple of hours if you need to for any reason).  Brown under the grill if desired.

Nice test!

I was quite apprehensive about today's Thames Turbo Half Marathon for a number of reasons.  Firstly, my pace is quite compromised from weeks of no exercise, then weeks of very little exercise of any form after crashing and then surgery on my clavicle.  Secondly, I'm 2.75 weeks into very low carbohydrate nutrition and have very very little carbohydrate in my system (<50g taken in every day) and there was a very real risk that I would have fuelling problems due to not having adapted to accessing fat as a fuel during longer exercise just yet.

For breakfast this morning, I had Bulletproof Coffee (with 50g butter).  In the race, I slowed and walked through aid stations three times, to have a cup of water only each time.  And the short of it is that, yes there were a couple of weird points where I felt quite light-headed and one dark moment when I thought walking and probably stopping would be quite nice, but I pushed through them and was fine after that.  Moreover, I held a stable, high heart rate all the way around (over 92% of 196 if we take that to be my HRmax now).  I held a stable, good cadence all the way around (good indication of mindfulness/lack of tiredness) and I got all the way around the furthest run I've done (by 6km) since Ireland 70.3.

Nike Run to The Beat last year

Today's Thames Turbo Half Marathon

All of that, despite the not sparkling finish time (and going off course and adding a bit in and it was quite hilly) which is irrelevant at this point, is very very pleasing indeed.

A quick little... WTF!?

A quick little parkrun (Upton Court Park) this morning.  5km in the marshy, squishy grass and a bit on paths on a pretty flat course.  A bit slippery in places but I thought I'd give it a bit in advance of tomorrow's half.

Stuff the time, I actually don't care about that.  There were more interesting revelations today.

I thought my HRmax was 192, and that's certainly the highest I've ever managed while being puce in the face and about to throw up while running uphill when I first decided to try running.  Turns out I'm wrong.

Exactly 12 minutes today, at parkrun, at 190 BPM (in theory 99% of HRmax) or higher and for the last couple of minutes, drifting up from 192 to 195 with a blip to 196 BPM.

There is no way on god's earth that 192 is my HRmax, nor is 196 BPM.  Nobody can hold 99% of their maximum heart rate for 12 minutes, or even 5 minutes, though some elites may be able to hold it for a couple of minutes or so(*)  Makes me really wonder what my HRmax is.  I've known for a while that it must be higher than 192 due to several training sessions and parkruns where I've held 98%+ of 192 for several to tens of minutes.

And the thing is, I felt that it was my legs that were the limiting factor, not my cardiovascular and respiratory bits.  (Phinney et. al. have a lot to say about CO2 removal during exercise as a fat-fuelled athlete and that you need to do less of it, so you need to breathe less hard in the exhalation - more reading required).  I'm really rather excited by this indeed.  It seems to say that I can push harder (once I get a bit more strength and endurance into my leg muscles) and most likely harder for longer with this new fuelling mechanism.  So, once I'm a bit fitter, I'd like to go for the hideous torture that is an HRmax test to find out what it really could be and then I can adjust training zones appropriately and get even more out of it all.

* - From Lore of Running, by Tim Noakes, MD (1991), pages 39 and 40: "For reasons that are not absolutely clear, it is not possible to run at 100% VO₂ maximum for more than a few minutes. This concept has been most clearly researched by C.T.M. Davies and Thompson (1979), two eminent British physiologists who found that trained athletes could maintain an average of 94% (range: 89 to 100%) of the VO₂ max values for a 5-km race, 82% range...for the standard marathon, and 67% range...for the 85-km London-to-Brighton race."

Are we there yet?

It's been 16 days since I started on a "very low carb" diet of under 50g carbohydrate a day.  In theory, it takes 2-3 weeks of constantly low insulin knocking about to flip that fat burning switch.  So, am I adapted yet?  How can I tell?  Has my carbohydrate level been low enough?  All of the data that drives the 50g threshold comes from studies that have been on men, so it might be that due to my different absolute body-weight and/or hormone profile, I might need to go even lower with carbs to adapt.  If I don't know whether I have or haven't adapted, I don't know if 50g was low enough (though, to be fair, most days it's been very comfortably under 50g and, on average, around 6% of my total caloric intake).

Having not noticeably had ketone-smelling breath, I'm not sure whether I have adapted or not.  I've been drinking a lot of coffee so it could be hard to tell whether my breath is that sort of smelly through the coffee smell.  And that's not the be all and end all of it either, so I have no idea.  The only real way to find out is have a gas analysis test.

Possibly a problematic amount of alcohol over the 2.25 weeks in there for adaptation?

And that's exactly what I'm planning to do.  Cadence Performance in Crystal Palace do RMR and Steady State Fuel Analysis testing (along with a whole bunch of other exciting things) and I'll hopefully be going in next weekend at the beginning of December to get strapped into some contraptions and analysed.  That should help me to understand whether I've got there to being fat adapted by then, and if not then I'll have to think about lowering the threshold for carbohydrate and/or examining what I'm eating in a bit more detail.

This weekend, however, I have to drag myself around a half marathon in an indeterminate fuelling state.  This will be... interesting.  My pace has been low since I started back after surgery and it's not really got any better in the last couple of weeks.  The longest I've run for is 90 minutes and that was 2 weeks ago.  I'm thinking I'll not be breaking any PBs on Sunday but I'm more worried that I may actually bonk if I'm not adapted enough yet.  And that would be very miserable indeed as I wouldn't want to crack and eat a banana; the insulin spike would strike fear into me.  However, if I make it around the course and I don't bonk, that would be rather a successful outcome indeed.  We shall see!