Am I making this too easy?

(Katie Murphy) #1

I see these posts of people asking is “ such and such” ok for keto? I only eat eggs, meat, nuts, butter and cheese with occasional veggies ( count the carbs) and fatty dips (homemade ranch / no sugar / guacamole / Greek dip) and a glass or 2 of white wine a day and my total carbs are at less than 20 (usually 15) a day. I test urine with keto strips and am always in moderate. I’m losing weight at a rapid pace 3-4 pounds a week. I feel good and not hungry. It is easy. That is all it is, right? Or will I hit a wall because I’m not concerned with macros? Also pay attention to calories and generally stay plenty below 1300 (I’m using carb manager). Thanks!

(less is more, more or less) #2

Living a healthy low-carb lifestyle need not be complicated. Many people are confused by the wildly-popular growth, attention, and misinformation about “keto” diets (I prefer “low-carb” as a phrase) that is everywhere. 2+ years in to this way of living, I do not track my calories or macros. I don’t bother peeing on sticks. It’s a waste of time. I stick to Dr. Westman’s Page Four recommendations. That’s all I need to do.

Complexity is the wedge marketers hope to use to get your wallet to go on a diet.

(Joey) #3

@Katie_Murphy I’m new to this myself, so temper my reply accordingly, but I would say (1) yes, it’s that easy, and (2) nothing about our bodies goes in a straight line for long. And so, whether you call it “hitting a wall” or reaching a “plateau” or “reaching maintenance” or whatever terminology comes to mind, the odds of things progressing along forever just as they have so far is remote.

That doesn’t mean it’s not working well for your health, or that it’s no longer easy. It’s just that when there are kinks in the curve we’re watching, or inflection points in progress (however we might be defining that), things will change. When they do, as long as you’re still feeling good and you’re eating to your point of satisfaction, don’t sweat the fact that our bodies don’t typically do things simply because we want them to (at least mine hasn’t done so yet over the course of my 60+ years).

Best wishes!

(ps - CarbManager is a great tool for looking into what does and doesn’t affect you. I’ve learned a lot by keeping track of things this way. At some point, I’ll put it aside and just float along with the benefit of those insights. But for now, I find it a fine way to gather those insights.)

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #4

You’re fine. Carry on until it doesn’t work any more. No need to fix something that ain’t broke. @SomeGuy gave you good advice.

(Ellen ) #5

Well said!

(Marianne) #6

Yes, it’s that easy. I am so glad you have discovered that so early! You are doing great. You know you’re doing it right when “you feel good and are not hungry.” Sounds like you are eating cleanly, too, which I think is good.

Only things I do differently is I don’t test pee or anything else (because I really don’t want to track anything that closely), and I don’t count calories. I might encourage you to consider eating more calories but if you don’t feel a need to, if you do get hungry, weak or start to crave carbs, I’d encourage you to add more food/calories to your meals.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #7

The only risk is that 1300 calories may become a bit too low at some point, at which time your body will start slowing down your metabolism and start hanging on to your fat reserves, in order to get you safely through the famine. A more successful strategy is to eat to satiety, so you know you are getting enough calories to convince your body to part with any excess stored fat it has hanging around, and possibly fast for a day or two, every once in a while. For some reason, fasting doesn’t trigger the famine reflex the way short rations does.

(This only works in the context of low carbohydrate intake, of course.)

(Joey) #8

[In the context of a low carb diet] I wonder if the answer differs for those who are lean vs those who have higher body fat (even obese)?

Put differently, if one has little to no excess body fat and is already fairly insulin sensitive, does fasting for even a day or two produce incremental benefits - or does it really force the resting metabolism downward in an effort to preserve what little body fat is available?

(Katie Murphy) #9

Thank you! That was going to be my next question and you anticipated it. :blush:

(Joey) #10

@Katie_Murphy @PaulL Yes, it’s something I’ve been wondering about lately.

I understand some believe that - even for lean, insulin-sensitive individuals - there are benefits from extended fasting in that it promotes autophagy (cleaning up old cells/waste materials). But what I’m wondering is whether, in the case of lean individuals, is there a resistance to further consumption of (limited) body fat during alternate day fasting (when insulin sensitivity is already high), such that the more significant effect of fasting would be for the metabolism to slow down to resist further reductions in weight. Perhaps negating the effects of the fast.

In other words, if you’re already healthy, fit and have a “proper” hormonal diurnal profile, is forcing oneself to skip a day’s worth of food (as in alternate day fasting) accomplishing anything further that hasn’t already been accomplished?

I’m not really talking about intermittent fasting, e.g., 18/6 hr feeding windows, or OMAD… I’m talking about 1+ day or longer fasts, again, in the context of a well-established low-carb ketogenic eating fat-adapted lean individual.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #11

Joey, you raise some interesting questions, and I’m not sure we know all the answers yet. Or if “we” do, I certainly don’t.

What I do know, from reading these forums, is that lean people tend to have trouble with extended fasting, and they might need some fat every day in order to gain the other benefits of fasting.

On the other hand, perhaps exercise is a factor in making ketones available. Zach Bitter and Timothy Olsen, two keto-adapted endurance runners, seem to have no trouble running while fasted. Bitter holds the record for longest distance run with no exogenous carbohydrate intake, and Olsen once won a 100-mile Iron Man race, and then ran a marathon the next day, just for fun.

Evolutionarily speaking, it wouldn’t make much sense if it weren’t possible to go out and run down another mammoth, once the meat from the first one ran out.

I don’t fast, for psychological reasons, so take this with a grain of salt: I’d say we should go with what our body wants. If it wants to fast, then fast; if it’s hungry, eat. I don’t believe in forcing the body to do any particular thing, because I have a philosphical problem with the notion that we can out-think two million years of evolution.

(Joey) #12

@PaulL

I like your answer - it squares well with my own “not knowing.”

But not knowing something never stopped me from talking about it :wink: so here I go…

In general, the Paleo (evolution-based) rationale for how we ought to go about things has always struck me as being fraught with hidden assumptions. With all due respect to the Paleo-eaters out there (including my own physician), I often wonder how much we really know about human eating habits eons ago vs. how much we have backfilled with our cartoonish imaginations.

For example, if I understand correctly, even the most native/primitive cultures we’ve come across and carefully documented (before messing their lives up with Western diets) had a range of food storage/fermentation/preservation methods that were well-developed in various forms. This strongly suggests that these lean, muscular hunter/gatherers were clearly not inclined to “go hungry” until the next mammoth wandered by.

Many of us keep telling ourselves that, in our prehistoric state, we did a good bit of fasting for days on end while trying to find our next kill. Well, that sure doesn’t seem to be true with respect to those who actually survived long enough to be around for us to meet.

Instead, we learned that they had developed ways to ensure there was stuff leftover to eat between kills. And when the white men showed up and tried to live with these resourceful people, they quickly learned how they’d solved the “how not to run out of food” challenge. In short, these resourceful people were clearly not indifferent about eating vs. abstaining from food until their luck turned around again.

It seems (at least to me) far more likely that the frequency of their eating was both daily and fairly regular - even as the overall mix of macronutrients changed along with the seasons (reflecting the relative availability of game, roots, fruits, etc.).

Could these people survive if the food ran out for a while? No doubt - we all can. But was skipping a day or two’s worth of food a common choice (given the various stored/preserved nutrients on hand from prior hunting/gathering efforts)? I highly doubt it. So much for our assumptions about what our great-great-ancestors did.

Having said all this, illustrations of great athletic performance during extended fasting are intriguing. It gives me pause that perhaps there’s something powerfully healthy about reaching a metabolic “zone” of this sort. Whether it’s a zone I need or want to reach is a question I’d have to grapple with further :wink:

And yet, in the end, it seems virtually all “reasonable” answers we offer up to questions along these lines seem to come back to the Satiety Principle.

On the one hand, that’s a bit of a cop-out to reaching a true science-based answer (viz., do we address any other complex health question with, “well, just do whatever feels good, that must be the right answer.”…?).

But given how our bodies use hunger and satiety as essential signals of what we ought to be doing for our own good health (driven by a constellation of hormones), I am inclined to give Satiety-based responses their due.

With that in mind, perhaps I should rephrase my question not so much in terms of biochemistry, but in terms of how might I re-establish an inner connection with a natural sense for hunger and satiety?

Having spent so many decades driven by carb-insulin cycles of eating, I’m afraid I’ve lost some basic trust in what my sense of hunger and fullness are telling me about what my body really needs at any particular time.

And so, in lieu of satiety signals I can fully trust, I guess I’d appreciate a bit of science. You know, just to hold me over :slight_smile:

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #13

There’s also a daily limit to just how much endogenous fat one can burn. I don’t have the several posts in front of me where this is discussed. I did a quick search of the forum but didn’t find any. But I think the number is a few hundred total calories, give/take based on total body fat. That would be like a fraction of a pound of fat, calculated on approx 3500 calories per pound.

At any rate, my point is this. My current body fat is about 14%, or approx 20 pounds. Thus, I have about 70K stored energy (20 x 3500 = 70,000). I am thin. Yet I have enough nominal stored energy to last a month. Realistically, that means I could probably go without eating for a month, or maybe even two, without starving to death although my BMR would undoubtedly go down and I’d have to curtail my DREE considerably.

(Raj Seth) #14

1300 seems way way way too low. Some stats please - age/weight/yoyo dieting history etc. Hope you didn’t set the app to deficit - that is bogus.

(Raj Seth) #15

About 31 calories per pound of fat per day. so for your 20 lbs of fat - 625 kCals / day
Also rate limited for exercise to about 1gm fat per minute, can be raised to as high as 2gm / minute with training. that’s 60 * 9 = 540 / hour, as high as 1,000/hr - but obviously somewhere it hits a limit. I don’t know the bio-chem behind it.