still metabolically flexible

Yesterday J and i took a road-trip with the kids.  After the carb-orgy the evening before, i was planning to fast till dinner, so had nothing but coffee-with-cream (everyone else had lunch before leaving the house).  We took off across Houston to visit the farm of a friend of my husband's, where we'd been invited to go see the animals.

See the animals we did!  They have hundreds of donkeys of every size (mostly rescues), a number of horses and a handful of mules.  Ever see a Percheron?  It's a draft breed originating in France, not quite as big as a Clydesdale -- beautiful, intelligent horses.  The children liked the ponies, miniature horses, and standard and miniature donkeys best, being more their size.  The "mammoth" donkeys, i mistook for mules!  The kids fed the "equine collection" with gingersnaps provided by our host.  Two baby donkeys, too young for the cookies, were the stars of the show.  The finale was a visit to a young Standardbred horse they had just rehabbed from a tendon injury -- a gorgeous creature who was enjoying his newfound health by frisking around his paddock, playing with his "jolly ball" and kicking up his heels.

We stayed longer than i would have expected, and there was a 1 1/2 hour drive back before we got our dinner.  I was ravenous when we entered our favorite neighborhood restaurant ... but i hadn't been particularly hungry during the day.

It's a pleasant surprise to me that having once become keto-adapted, i seem to retain metabolic flexibility even after "overdoing" holiday carbohydrate foods.  I certainly retain carbohydrate sensitivity!  Don't get me wrong -- my diet has still been low-carb compared to the SAD -- just high-carb for ME.  I guess that, once the fat-digesting and -mobilizing enzymes and such are established, they'd have to be neglected for a time in order to not click back on as needed.

The biggest danger of reintroducing more carbs to the diet, in someone like me, is that they ARE yummy.  And UBIQUITOUS.  Let yourself have a few blue-corn chips (and i did), and the immediate ill-effects are ... not perceived.  So they didn't hurt, right?  WRONG.  You let your muscles burn glucose, and stored some expeller-pressed sunflower oil.  When the latter comes out to be burnt it doesn't flip the switch back to make those muscles insulin-resistant, so they want to burn more glucose.  Time to nip it in the bud.

No more cheat-foods for me.  In fact, i have a new real-food, portable, low-carb recipe find (thank you, Gina!) for my recipe page....