Can we please stop repeating the “You have to eat at a deficit to lose weight on KETO” lie?

[amwassil]

FWIW 74 year old male here, fairly fit, moderately active, full-time job that requires standing and walking on shift. 2800 calories per day to maintain. I think that’s somewhat more than what’s expected.

[MarkGossage]

Interestingly though he reported working out far less than normal due to the requirements to make the daily videos and his newly born son.
So I guess his daily calories in wasn’t even compensated for by extra exercise which made them even more “excess”.

[barns]

nobody got fat in 21 days.It took most people years if not decades. these short experiments are a waste of time. All they do is make people think you can eat as much as you want on a keto diet and not gain weight. If there is something that needs to stop being repeated its these short so called experiments.

[David_Stilley]

If there is something that needs to stop being repeated its these short so called experiments.

So I take it you aren’t at all impressed when someone eats 2-3x the normal amount of food for three weeks with no weight gain? You would think that might add a couple of pounds at least. Anybody who thinks they could do this indefinitely surely would gain weight. But I would think three weeks would have resulted in some gain…. Call me impressed.

[anon54735292]

these short experiments are a waste of time. All they do is make people think you can eat as much as you want on a keto diet and not gain weight. If there is something that needs to stop being repeated its these short so called experiments.

FWIW my own two longer experiments (around 4 months) have shown that I can gain a few kgs on keto if I eat a LOT of food - I have to eat beyond satiety. After about 4 months my metabolism adapts to the higher intake & I stop gaining weight. If at that point I return to just eating to satiety I imagine my weight will drift down to my set point again (maybe not ) but I tend to be sick of eating at that point so eat less (at a ‘deficit’) & easily return to my set point within a month. Much depends on genetics & how adaptable your metabolism is in either direction.

[barns]

I guess maybe I dont see the point of it. I think most people that have been keto for some time would agree that if its done for a long period of time there would be weight gain but where i have the problem is that when people are new to this way of eating and are online researching it they find videos that imply that you can just keep eating all the fat you want and dont have to worry about weight gain. Its just not true. In fact they usually do have a tiny bit of weight gain and then say it is actually muscle gain. So now people might think not only will I lose weight but im gunna get yoked without any effort

[David_Stilley]

No accounting for naive people. Anybody who would base their keto efforts around something like this is misguided. However to me it demonstrates that where your macro nutrients come from is more important than a misguided notion about restricting calories to loose weight. I added about 500 kcals to what I was eating and have dropped a couple of pounds in the last three days. I won’t be adding 4000 kcals though.

[gabe]

We’ve had this debate a million times over on these forums. You most certainly have to be expending more energy than you consume in order to lose fat.

That’s quite different from supporting the “calories in calories out” model which says that sugar calories have the same effect as fat calories. I am quite tired, though, of seeing people here claim that you can magically consume infinite amounts of food and still lose fat. No, you can’t, and nobody credible claims that you can – not Taubes, and certainly not Phinney.

I’m sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but “low carbohydrate” does not mean “keto breaks the laws of physics.”

None of what I’ve said above, however, is incompatible with, for example, what @PaulL said above, such as that one person in a study can eat 3000 calories while others are eating far less and the first guy loses as much weight as the others. Again, not all calories are equal, but calories/energy intake do/does matter.

If you want to drive yourself crazy, you can read this same topic being litigated in the following two threads:

Can someone tell me if my thoughts are correct on CICO

I got to thinking (can you smell the smoke) while I was logging my food into My Fitness Pal about how many calories I had eaten and the great CICO debate. Is the reason they really don’t matter is because when I consume something high in sugar/carbs, the body produces insulin and thus stores it as excess body fat. Bit when I eat very little carbs and almost no suger, but healthy fats no insulin spike occur’s and the fat is not stored. Am I thinking right or out in left field?

Stop telling newbies to eat more fat!

If you’re normal weight, your macros might be 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% carbs. If you have a lot of fat to lose, you’re unlikely to be eating 75% fat calories. Your protein will probably be MUCH higher as a percentage of your total calories, and your fats will be substantially lower as a percentage of total energy. Phinney and others have said precisely this, time and time again. That’s because you’re burning body fat for fuel. It’s fine to tell newbies not to be afraid of fat, but they all se…

[barns]

well said and yep same topic different title

[gabe]

I obviously type Dave Feldman’s name to much as Sam Feltham turned into Feldman

Smash The Fat Fitness & Fat Loss Boot Camps – 12 Jun 13

Why I Didn’t Get Fat From Eating 5,000 Calories A Day Of A High Fat Diet -…

When I was 13 my Mother challenged my doctor to get a swollen gland biopsied from me, that he said was probably just puberty playing with my hormones. After the biopsy it turned out that it was a cancer called Hodgkins disease

I checked out the link, and it’s interesting enough, but imho it’s fanciful. Here’s what he says he ate to get to 5000 calories:
Breakfast – Scrambled eggs with salmon and green beans
Snack – Walnuts
Lunch – Mackerel with green beans
Snack – Pecans
Dinner – Topside beef steak with green beans
Snack – Almonds

I’d love to know how big the portions were that he got to 5000 calories with this. I can’t see this topping 3000 calories at most, and a guy his size would have been stuffed before hitting anything like 5000. I call bullshit, unless he was crushing the weights and maybe doing a substantial amount of HIIT or even steady-state cardio!

[David_Stilley]

So @gabe and @barns, How is your belief serving you? You’ve been at this at least a year longer than I have. I have lost over 25% of my body mass in a year and am very close to maintenance. I still have some extra fat but I really need to increase muscle and not really loose weight now, just lower body fat %. How do you judge what your body needs and eat at just the right deficit to not hit the metabolic brakes and still loose weight?

[barns]

Well I would be lying if I said I am a roll model keto person because like most people I struggle. I dont have any medical issues that forces me to stay on 365 so I fall off the wagon sometimes but I do go long times of being solid through the year. That being said when I eat pretty generic keto it is pretty easy not to overeat because I get burned out on the same old stuff and the scale moves a little at a time. The problem is there are so many good recipes out there that I find it easy to way over eat just cause its so good. Yes its possible to have that I ate way to much feeling. When I do that to often the needle and my belly go the wrong way.

[gabe]

How do you judge what your body needs and eat at just the right deficit to not hit the metabolic brakes and still loose weight?

I’ve been at this for over 3 years. I lost over 10kg in the first 10 weeks and I’ve been relatively weight stable ever since, precisely as Phinney and Taubes and Westman say.

I think you meant your question to be rhetorical, but it isn’t. The answer is satiety. When I was losing fat, my body was satiated on less food. When my body reached its homeostatic weight, I started to become satiated on more energy because my body’s hormonal signaling told it to stop burning body fat.

This is kind of low carb 101! Per Phinney:

https://www.ketogenicforums.com/uploads/default/original/3X/e/b/eb4f5301cff78eb5ca8e88f66b669ad68a166e4b.jpeg

For more reading: https://blog.virtahealth.com/well-formulated-ketogenic-diet/

[David_Stilley]

@gabe That’s great Gabe, so you’ve been in maintenance about three years?

I can maybe see how sometimes discussions can get confusing when people have different concepts of a single word. In this case I believe you are talking about appetite guided deficit naturally occurring. The “eat at a deficit to loose rule” implies intentional restriction of how much you eat. Not eating a bit less fat once you’re fat adapted and following your appetite. What you are doing is what I am a believer in.

[FrankoBear]

In this case I believe you are talking about appetite guided deficit naturally occurring.

A low carbohydrate ketogenic diet results in hormonal appetite/ hunger control first. One resulting effect (a side effect if eating keto for another reason) is weight loss that when looked at is correlated to eating an energy deficit?

A horse and cart scenario? Put the hunger control first and the weight loss gets pulled along.

Thus, going back to the title of the thread, do not focus on eating at a calorie deficit in pursuing weight loss on a keto diet, but seek to not feel hungry, to recognise appetite control through a well formulated ketogenic diet, and the weight loss is something that follows.

[anon54735292]

In this case I believe you are talking about appetite guided deficit naturally occurring. The “eat at a deficit to loose rule” implies intentional restriction of how much you eat.

FWIW (again ) I can eat at an intentional & fairly steep deficit BUT still be satiated if I up my protein/drop my fat low - this is what I do for a mini-cut. After about 4 weeks I’ll notice a drop in my NEAT which I take as a sign that my metabolism is adapting even though I’m not hungry as such so that’s when I pull the pin. When I go back to eating my usual (still pretty high) amount of protein but add more calories in fat I’m neither more or less satiated but my weight stabilises. I’ve done this fairly half-arsed bulk/mini-cut cycle twice & maybe things would go differently for me on a third round but I’m pretty bored with it now so I’ll never know

[David_Stilley]

do not focus on eating at a calorie deficit in pursuing weight loss on a keto diet, but seek to not feel hungry, to recognise appetite control through a well formulated ketogenic diet, and the weight loss is something that follows.

Yes. There are some who claim that natural regulation never occurs, and satiety isn’t ever reached until they’re stuffed. That keto has no regulating effect on it’s own and they find it easy to eat way too much good keto foods. They tend to limit their food to lose weight so I guess it doesn’t work for everybody. I don’t cook a lot of big complex stuff like a pan of lasagna often. I cook a reasonable amount of food. But when I do make something with potential carb overdose possibilities I stick with the serving. I wasn’t a big binge eater before keto though, mostly I chose poorly and ate big portions. I never got past 250 lbs at my biggest and I didn’t stay there long. I did lazy keto the first six months, just rough tracking estimates for carbs in my head. When I feel I am at a maintenance level I will move away from tracking to see if I am totally guided by my metabolism and stay stable with body fat percentage.

[MarkGossage]

You miss the point… this was to examine the statement in the title of this thread about caloric deficit…
if CICO works then you should be able to calculate exactly what the weight change would be after 3 weeks of following the overeating. That it doesn’t prove true disproves the hypothesis. That’s it.

The sneaky changes from “calories” to “energy” that many use don’t make the facts any different.
There are many things that influence weight loss and the quantity of “calories” or “energy” that we take in certainly isn’t the main one.

No-one eats “calories” we eat food… that food can be satiating or hunger inducing.
The absolute quantities can vary between people with very different results but the blanket “law” has been disproven so many times that these conversations are getting very dull…

[MooBoom]

Well I’ve just spent the past 3 weeks fasting every second day, completely. Nil by mouth except water and black coffee for 36hrs thereabouts. Effectively slashing my calorie intake by half. And guess what? My weight bounced around THE SAME GODDAMN kilo for most of that time. I started eating more calories, and BAM the scales moved downward again.

If CICO was all there was to it, losing weight would be a cut and dried cinch. Clearly it’s not. Weight loss is way more complicated AND individual, so bottom line, everyone needs to figure out what the heck works for them on their own journey.

[anon54735292]

If CICO was all there was to it, losing weight would be a cut and dried cinch. Clearly it’s not. Weight loss is way more complicated AND individual, so bottom line, everyone needs to figure out what the heck works for them on their own journey.

the blanket “law” has been disproven so many times that these conversations are getting very dull…

Amen I thinks it’s great & possibly helpful that people share the info on what works for them but these threads often run so long I do wonder how many people read through the whole thing anyway.

EDIT TO ADD: I heard a saying today - ‘success leaves clues’ & I think the same can be said of failure. The CICO model doesn’t work long term. Short term? Sure & that’s how I use it. Long term it’s proved to be a failure.