Calories vs Keto

(Dwayne Robinson) #21

Yeah
Just eat til you’re full or almost full.

Keep carbs in the 20-50 gram range and from approved sources only.

I run a keto diabetes group and I have to remind them occasionally that we are on a tight budget when it comes to carbs.
Yeah
You can fudge the limit and eat a crap carb, but what will you eat to stay on budget???
Eating the wrong things results in being hungry and being hungry will blow your attempts AND you’ll end up screaming that keto didn’t work for you.
No, what didn’t work was you caved and ate off plan.

Yeah, we shoot straight. Lol

Eat to your macros.
Make absolutely certain you get your protein daily.
Our body can create or store glucose from carbs, yes even Ketogenic carbs.
It has multiple days of calories stored as body fat and if need be it can create it from glucose.
Our bodies cannot create or store protein. It must come from diet.

Some suggest limiting fat if you have body fat to lose. I tend to agree BUT I use keto to manage my glucose not anything legit related.
Even with it limited, fat should still be your largest source of calories.

You’ll soon find that keto means you aren’t even worried with calories most of the time.

I lost 30 lbs immediately before diagnosis.
I lost another 30 immediately after with the ADA crap diet and I lost another 20 or so since going keto almost four years ago.

With Keto I have maintained EVERY pound lost.
I’ve weighed between 159-177 At any point in that time no more no less.

People don’t even recognize me now and for some, it’s a good thing. Lol

I would suggest you use an macro calculator and some nutrition tracking app to help you stay on track until you get used to the diet.

One last tip
Kick up your electrolytes.
Salt your food really good
Use lite salt, It’s half potassium and half sodium. Two electrolytes one product and drink water to replace the water weight you’ll lose.
Don’t fool with electrolyte drinks.
Just drink water and use salt or make your own electrolyte mix. Lots of recipes online for it.

Good luck
Happy keto’ing!!!

(Angelique Jury) #22

Thank you so much for all the information :blush::blush::blush:

(Consensus is Politics) #23

Good news! If you aren’t eating all those carbs, then there is no reason to worry about calories. They are ‘mostly harmless.’

As it turns out, calories have close to zero effect on weight loss. That’s assuming you are eating enough to sustain body functions of course (eating one slice of bacon a day, I’m sure that’s not enough caloric intake to maintain) but I digress.

You could eat and additional 50% calories, and not gain weight. You could eat a lot less than you normally do, and not lose weight.

Two things I recently learned, one of them counterintuitive to everything I’ve been told, about burning fat.

1- spread your meals out. Eat 5 smaller meals a day. That’s pure BS. That’s a recipe for GAINING WEIGHT even eating at a deficit. (The reason? See number 2)

2- Insulin prevents fat loss. When insulin goes up, fat burning gets shut off, or ate the very least, attenuated to the point that it’s ineffective at being used. Insulin itself is short lived. A half life of about 5 minutes. But the effect that that hormone has on fat being used/oxidized/releases lasts a lot longer than that. I couldn’t find the data for actual length of fat blocking. I hope someone else here knows this. This makes it important when wanting to lose body fat.

Instead of thinking in terms of number of meals a day, think more in terms of an eating ‘window of opportunity ‘. Pick a time frame. Six hours should work. Four even better, the lower the better. But for this, six hours should help you understand it. So let’s say I pick my window from 9 am until 3 pm. I can eat breakfast at 9am, lunch at 12, and finish dinner before 3. So my entire food consumption happens in those three hours. With in just a few hours after the final meal at 3pm, so maybe around 6pm? Assuming the effects of fat blocking be insulin has worn off by then, that will leave me with 15 hours where my body can then consume its own fat. As long as I didn’t eat or snack outside that window, I’m in fat burning mode.

Something that works even better, is one meal a day. They call it OMAD. You’ll see reference to it a lot here. It’s what I try to do, but often I just make it a four to six hour window. What can I say, I love food.

Believe it or not, in that one meal, you can eat your entire calorie loaf. AND LOOSE WEIGHT🤠

(Angelique Jury) #24

So are u referring here to IF? Cos i hv considered marrying that with keto.

(Consensus is Politics) #25

Lol… yes. That’s it completely. I missed the initialism there. I try not to use them, I actually really hate them. They tend to fog things up a bit. I guess I’ve just been getting spoiled by my iPhone, it often just fills in the words for me. Like when I get 2 letters into Obesity Code , it’s already populated it for me.

For some reason I thought you were knew to Keto. I hate using initialisms when giving any info to someone knew to almost anything. I also believe there is no such thing as to much data. So, often times, I’m very verbose🤠

(Angelique Jury) #26

I am very new to it lol… but been doing a lot of reading.

(Consensus is Politics) #27

Especially when I post :cowboy_hat_face:

#28

Sharon this is a wonderful post, you should have a gold star on your lovely keto forehead! :smiley: Thank you for posting this. I think I’ll copy and paste it into a document in my personal Keto folder. It is a fabulous and concise explanation that I can share with others who are wondering about CICO and keto and where the two cross over, so to speak.

(Angelique Jury) #29

Ok. Coming back to my original question… in total i hv eaten just under 2000 calories today and hv been extremely good in terms of keeping within my macros. (See attachment)
Should i worry about how high those calories are?
Note: had cashews as a snack on the run and i think that was a bad idea !

Screenshot_20180112-194549|243x500

(Sharon A Peters) #30

Helewisa, thank you for your kind comment. The more deeply I read into keto, metabolism, hormones, etc., the more I try to frame it to myself in ‘kitchen chemistry’ terms … to make sure I’ve gotten it (it sometimes takes a loooong time). I’m delighted it made some sense.

(Sharon A Peters) #31

Angelique, it occurs to me that there is yet another reason that CICO doesn’t count: if, as a new or a research-minded-turn-yourself-into-a-science-project type (Hello!), you are setting, monitoring, and minding your macros, you do not need to worry about computing or tracking your total calories. And that is because carbohydrates contribute 4 kCal per gram of weight, protein contributes 4 kCal per gram of weight, and fat contributes 9 kCal per gram of weight. So, if you eat 50g protein, that’s 50X4 = 200 kCal of protein; 20g carbs, that’s 20X4 = 80 kCal of carbs; and 80g fat, that’s 80X9 = 720 kCal of fat, for a total of 200 + 80 + 720 = 1,100 kCal total. By setting macros and tracking your consumption against them - say 20g carbs, but you only eat 15g, then it’s 15X4 = 60, for example - you can easily figure what the total calorie consumption has been. When this became obvious to me, it underscored the point that the mathematical approach of calories in-calories out works beautifully looking from the outside in, but when the metabolism is looking from the inside out, it don’t mean diddly. If you want to track calories, set your macros to guide your eating and then just multiply out the grams of each macronutrient eaten by its kcal value per gram, and add them up. Easy-peasy, but really just math homework rather than anything meaningful. The healing is in the macros.

(Lonnie Hedley) #32

In short, I think what you’re saying is macros > calories.

(Angelique Jury) #33

@theabroma that makes so much sense. I’m definitely going to see how that works. :blush::blush::blush:

(Dan Dan) #34

Keto is about being ‘Fat Adapted’ using ‘Fat as fuel’ rather than ‘Carbs’ ergo the ‘Low Carb High Fat’. Calories only matter if its the wrong kind.

Examples of wrong calories:

  1. Restricting Calories (‘Low Calorie’) - Keto is not ‘Calorie Restricted’. Eat until you are ‘Satiated’

  2. Restricting Fat - Keto uses ‘Fat as Fuel’. ‘High Dietary Fat’ is necessary to become ‘Fat Adapted’.

  3. High Carbs - Keto is ‘Low Net Carb’. 'High Dietary Carbs will delay or prevent ‘Fat adaptation’.

  4. Lean Protein - Keto is ‘Moderate Protein’. Lean meat is high in Protein and low in fat. ‘Fatty Meat is Moderate in Protein and Moderate to High in Fat’ and preferable.

Keep it Simple :smile:

“May the Force (fat adaption) be with you”

IF/EF Keto WOE is Self-Discovery :wink:

Good luck and much success in your journey in IF/EF Keto WOE :grin:

(Angelique Jury) #35

And am i correct in saying fibre in food should be subtracted from total carbs to get my net?
Also i was told today that i mustn’t hv soild fats… only liquid. Any truth to this?

(Lonnie Hedley) #36

Net carbs = total carb - fiber - sugar alcohols (if any)

Solid vs liquid fat? Like fat on meat? No, eat that fat.

(Angelique Jury) #37

Solid fat like on meat, butters, creams, etc

(Rob) #38

The fundamental issue when starting Keto is to get fat adapted and get off carbs and those cravings (which may never fully go away) :pensive:

To do that you should eat all the calories your body wants while your metabolic changes are happening. I found that I had to eat above my BMR and snack in the beginning to avoid the hunger pangs etc. but once I was fat adapted (4 weeks later) then the appetite subsided and I would eat half my BMR in one or 2 meals a day while my body used its fat reserves and weight fell off.

Let the changes happen and don’t worry about calories (except for NOT restricting - no need for starvation responses :grin:).

(Lonnie Hedley) #39

Yeah, eat that fat. Maybe just see fat eat fat? Mmm, fat!

(Dan Dan) #40

Yes your correct :smile:

Not true :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Solid fat is very good :bacon: :heart_eyes: