Can I become fat adapted without being in ketosis all the time? new at this

(Seth S.) #1

Hi! I’m 2 weeks in, and I’ve consistently avoided most starches and sugars, but a lot of days I don’t think I’m below 20g of net carbs – probably more like 30 or 40. So I guess I’m essentially doing low carb instead of ketogenic? My question is - do I need to worry about cutting even more and reaching a ketogenic state most of the time, or can I become fat-adapted on just a very-low-carb diet?

(Kellie) #2

You can be in ketosis under 50 g of carbs . It’s just a good rule to do 20 because all people can be in ketosis by restricting to 20 g a day but there are people who can have up to the 50g and still be in ketosis, you may be one of the lucky ones. Fat adaption takes 6-8 weeks of consistent state of ketosis though, it’s a transition that your body internally goes though and it’s a process.

(Seth S.) #3

thanks! I realized as I’ve gotten better at this that I often go over with nuts (almonds or walnuts) - I’m still at a point where I’m hungry so much of the time, and nuts are something I can have on the go. Anyway. Ok thanks again!

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #4

If you’re hungry between meals, eat more at meals. The idea is to be able to go quite a long time between meals without eating (it’s part of keeping insulin low). At first, “enough” might feel like an awful lot, but once your satiety signaling starts to work again, your appetite will probably drop markedly.

Fat stimulates insulin much less than protein does, and protein stimulates it at half the rate carbohydrate does, so it’s a good source of low-insulin calories. Saturated fat will help increase your HDL (and may or may not affect your LDL), and monounsaturated fat will be burned for energy. Butter, tallow, and lard are all about half saturated and half monounsaturated, so they are good fats to cook with.

(Seth S.) #5

Thank you! I’m really looking forward to reaching that point where fat is super filling. Right now I could eat a jar of coconut oil and big pack of bacon and I’d still be hungry. Not that I’ve done that – fatty foods still make me really nauseated. I’ll keep ketoing on though! Hopefully eventually I won’t feel like garbage all the time!

(Brian Chandler) #6

Bingo. 100% in agreement with this. I’d also add that it can take about 3-6 months before you can regularly push yourself on physical activity again, so even if fat adapted, it can take some time for the body to be really efficient at it.

(Seth S.) #7

I guess the question I’m trying to understand now is what “fat adapted” means exactly – Kellie says it takes consistent ketosis to reach that point, but I’m curious – let’s say a person is getting 15% of their calories from (healthy) carbs – that’s too high to be in ketosis, but if, say, 60% of their calories are fat, then isn’t the body fat-adapted after a certain point, since most of its fuel is coming from fat? Apologies for the long hypothetical question. I’m a humanities major (English teacher) trying to understand science for the first time in my 40s! :):grinning:

(Ellie) #8

It is worth trying to change your thinking about carbs.
In terms of insulin response, a ‘healthy’ carb and an ‘unhealthy’ carb will elicit the same insulin response. I guess that if a carb has more fibre then it may slow the response down slightly, but if you are insulin resistant and your body over produces insulin (common if you are over weight), then it will continue to do that.
As far as I understand it (Engineer, not Biologist!) if insulin is present then fat burning is inhibited and therefore you can’t use your body fat even if you have plenty of it.
It is only when there is no insulin that you can access those reserves. Being fat adapted means that that process happens efficiently, so unless there is minimal insulin most of the time, then it won’t ever become efficient.
There are people far more scientific than me on here from a biological perspective, but that is my layman’s view.

(Brian Chandler) #9

Here’s how I’m looking at what you’re saying… .15 * 1600 (assuming break even calories for sedentary here.) = 240g of carbs. That’s way too many carbs to be in a ketogenic state. If you’re not in a ketogenic state, then your body is mostly going to put the fat into reserves or stuff’s going to get gunked up. I’m sure some is processed by the liver, but it’s not it’s main mode if not fat adapted. Also, the cells are not going to know what to do with the fat until one is adapted (that’s part of the adapted part; they’re used to using sugars.) So the flow goes like this: starting out, <=20g carbs (past this is person dependent.) That forces the body into a ketogenic state. The liver will start to adapt to the lack of carbs and increased fat to start producing ketones. While the liver is getting better at producing ketones, the cells are adapting to process the ketones. After a long period of time, both liver ketone production and cell ketone use becomes more efficient. At least that’s my understanding (not a scientist.)

I’m unsure if there is an official “fat adapted” metric or definition. I think most people use it simply to mean that they don’t have things like keto-flu and the negative side-effects of adaptation has passed. I’d love to see different terms for different stages to help in conversation. One for when keto-flu and such is gone, but the person is still having lethargy if work hard (so liver and/or cells are not done adapting.) One for full adaptation where the person can do medium intensity work for long periods, like yard work/hiking. Then maybe one for optimum adaptation (meaning the person can regularly handle long periods of strenuous exercise with occasional bouts of high-intensity. - hiking all day and then running in spurts like your hunting game.)

(Brian Chandler) #10

I forgot to add, since you mention 30-40g of carbs, you may be in a ketogenic state, it’s just not very likely in my opine, but could be - you’d have to get some blood ketone measurements to be sure. I aimed for 20g, but occasional 30g was fine starting out. The fat being there isn’t what’s putting you into a ketogenic state, it’s the body not having enough carbs to sustain the small part of the brain that absolutely requires some on top of all the cells in the body that are used to using carbs, so the body switches over to provide the brunt of cells with an alternative energy source (ketones) so that it can send the small amount of carbs to the brain that can’t use the ketones. That’s the mechanism being leveraged.

Staying at or under 20g is nice because it’s basically guaranteed to get you into a ketogenic state without a ketone reading and early on the body can’t switch back and forth easily, so it works against you to be lax on the carbs. Later you can play with carbs easier because the negative switchover affects happen less and less. Starting out, if I slipped out of ketosis, I’d be back on the pot for 3-4 days. Now, I just feel rough for about 24 hours to switch from low carb to very low carb/keto.

(Seth S.) #11

Thank you so much - that is all so helpful, and interesting. I think I’ve been staying in ketosis for the past couple of weeks. And you’re right about that number of carbs in a day – now that I’ve been doing keto for 17 days, I can’t imagine going back to eating the enormous amount I used to, or anywhere near that. But for me keto is definitely (at this moment in time) medium-term solution - I would love to have a very low carb lifestyle after this that’s not ketogenic but also isn’t exceeding more than 100 or so grams of carbs in a day.

But that’s not important – I change my mind on everything twenty times a day, so I’m not carving anything in stone! – I was just trying to get my head around differences between the keto and the non-keto-but-still-low-carb ways of eating.

Thanks again!

(Brian Chandler) #12

No problem. :slight_smile: Glad you got something out of it. I’ll eventually cycle out some myself, but for now I’m using VLCHF as a tool to manage (and hopefully reverse) my diabetes and staying off excess meds. My gut tells me the ideal is probably ketogenic diet for part(s) of the year and then mediterranean or somewhat paleo for the other part(s) (so maybe some berries, fibrous carbs, etc.) I won’t be able try that though until I’ve increased muscle mass a lot to increase the amount of (hopefully non-resistant) insulin receptors.

Oh, if going nuts, you can use Swerve to make some hot chocolate or custard-based ice cream here and there. Sucrolose/Stevia is probably the best available for things like coffee. All three will barely affect glucose/insulin, if at all. If wanting to stick with real sugar and you know you had a very very low carb day, you can enjoy a small square of 70+% dark chocolate. They’re usually about 4g. :wink:

(Nicole Silvia) #13

Apparently you can.

Based on what I’ve learned so far, becoming fat adapted just means that your body using fat instead of carbs as energy becomes the new norm. Your body gets more used to it the longer it’s doing it.

I am convinced that intentional ketosis through diet as a baseline is all that really matters. You can enhance it with exercise, fasting, being super strict, but the main idea is that your new life revolves around burning fat molecules over anything else. That is the most basic and important point.

Find your carb limit for being in ketosis and try to stay there as much as possible for as long as possible. Gradually reduce your calories as your hunger will naturally become less and less. Eventually you can and should IF and then you’ll be a star.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #14

Strictly speaking, “LCHF” and “ketogenic” mean the same thing: eating in a way that minimizes insulin secretion, so as to heal metabolic disorders. If you eat less carbohydrate than your personal threshold, you are going to be in ketosis, and if you stay in ketosis, you will eventually become fat-adapted.

In popular usage, “LCHF” implies eating a bit more carbohydrate, “ketogenic” eating less. On these forums, we consider a ketogenic diet to contain less than 20 grams a day of carbohydrate, because at that level virtually everyone will get into ketosis, except possibly someone who has sustained a great deal of metabolic damage and who may need to eat even less carbohydrate.

We enter ketosis almost immediately, once our carbohydrate intake is low enough, but what we call “fat-adaptation” takes longer. The problem with going low-carb is that years of excessive carbohydrate intake causes oxidative damage to the cells’ mitochondria, the organelles that produce the energy each cell needs. Some of these mitochondria are still healthy enough to metabolize fat, but others of them are too badly damaged, so we have this initial period of being in ketosis but not yet being able to make efficient use of the ketone bodies. The mitochondria during this period are either healing or producing new mitochondria, and once there are enough healthy mitochondria in our tissues, we can metabolize not only the ketone bodies produced by the liver, but also the fatty acids from our food and from our excess fat stores.

During adaptation, athletes generally experience a slump in performance; one of the ways to tell that we are fat-adapted is when our performance returns to (or even exceeds) our pre-keto levels. Keto is best for endurance events, by the way; athletes who need explosive performance are probably not going to do as well without more carbohydrate. Another signal of fat-adaptation is a lower level of ketones, especially in the urine or the breath. This is because the body is using more of the ketone bodies, so they are no longer getting excreted in such quantity.

Judging from some of the comments recently posted, it probably bears mention that the “keto flu” is totally avoidable, and is NOT part of the adaptation process. It is caused by a lack of enough sodium in the diet, which in turn happens because the kidneys excrete sodium at a faster rate when insulin is low. If you keep your salt intake up, you will never experience the symptoms of keto flu. In addition to constipation and light-headedness, headaches are a major symptom, and I find that I can tell when I haven’t been keeping my sodium up, because I will get migraine auras. All it takes is eating a bit of salt, and the aura will go away within a minute or two. When I am paying attention to getting enough salt, I never get auras at all.

It should also be mentioned that it used to be believed that the brain required a certain amount of sugar (glucose) to survive, but it turns out that has never been scientifically proved. In the absence of glucose, the brain appears to do perfectly fine on β-hydroxybutyrate, one of the ketone bodies produced by the liver (the brain can’t use complete fatty acids, because they cannot cross the blood-brain barrier). Our red blood cells have no mitochondria, so they definitely require glucose, and the liver makes it for them from the protein we eat, if we are not eating carbohydrate (in a process called “gluconeogenesis.”)

(Seth S.) #15

Wow thank you so much for your incredible response - I appreciate the generosity! This was very helpful.

I just started my fourth week of keto and I finally really love it! I have SO much energy all the time, and most days I just have keto coffee in the morning, a light snack about 1pm (some almonds or something like that), and dinner – grassfed beef patty with green leafy veg – for dinner at 6pm. Luckily I’ve always loved a monotonous diet – it’s just that my rut used to be wheat chex cereal, pizza, and sandwiches. I like this rut much, much better.
Thanks again! Onward and upward!
Seth

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #16

That sure sounds like fat-adaptation to me! Keep on ketoing on, and you may be surprised by how much better it continues to get! :+1: