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

#347

I agree, I could never put my fork down when it came to pasta and I was hungry after a few hours. My body was horrible on SAD…I just looked at a potato and I was 4 kg heavier.

(Doug) #348

I don’t think I will ever be free of thoughts/cravings for carbohydrates. I don’t remember being very young and eating, but certainly since age 10 or so - spaghetti, pizza, biscuits… I used to make a huge bowl of soup, like a mixing bowl, and dump 2 or 3 whole packs of saltine crackers into it, so 80 or 120 crackers.

When I’m full of keto food, I’m fine, it’s not any kind of a bothersome deal. When I’m hungry, however - it’s always there, lurking in the background. It’s good for me to talk about it - keep it at bay, keep it in its place. The mental/psychological aspects here control almost everything for me.

#349

I feel the same way, that is why I can’t have any snackable foods, such as nuts and other items I could just grab and eat - salty snacking was my issue before and it sneaks up on me. As longs as I keep keto plain and simple, I’m fine, but give me some nuts, olives, cheese…

#350

I’m not sure why you continue to misinterpret what people are saying, even after it’s been clarified for you. Repeatedly. People who insist that energy intake (aka, calories) is relevant are not saying that you must “count calories.” Energy intake is relevant whether or not you choose to track it. And it is relevant (people have been literally starving to death for millennia to prove it). But just because people are saying it is relevant (“matters”), does not mean we believe that it is the only thing or that it operates in a vacuum.

Keto isn’t magic. It is totally possibly to overeat on a keto diet. And if you do that, you will gain weight. It is also possible to maintain one’s weight on keto, while eating that way to address other health problems. If you agree that it is possible to maintain your weight on keto (as many people here are trying to do), then you must agree that something else must happen besides ketosis for someone to lose weight. That something is eating at an energy deficit so that your body seeks out your fat stores to make up the balance of it’s energy needs. The trick, of course, is understanding how that deficit works in conjunction with the other biological and chemical processes that happen in our bodies.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #351

Richard’s talk starts at 3h10m:

(John) #352

Does anybody know how many of the biggest loser contestants where in the study. Every time I see the then and nows from the winners they almost all have kept the bulk of the weight off. I just wonder if the people that got kicked out during the first half of the show are in the studies. If so is it possible that the ones that are there the longest seem to keep the weight off because they got to a lower set point.

#353
(John) #354

this was the video that made me ask. the study seems to be based on all contestants including ones that didnt even make it past week 1. I am just curious what the graph would look like if they did lets say the top 4 from each season. also curious if this was just from 1 season because you can only do a 6 year study on contestants from the same season.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #355

I wondered because I actually heard the opposite. Seems to be 50/50 at best the highest year. Interestingly the articles focus on the successful keeping really active! Big CO surprise there. The first is titled

“Here’s How the ‘Biggest Loser’ Contestants Have Kept the Weight Off”

They even go into metabolic slowdown and mention the word hormone once. :grin:

Overall not sustainable like KETO. :cowboy_hat_face:

#356

Thank you :slight_smile:

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #357

This is the six-year follow up study of 14 of the 16 contestants who were measured at the time of their participation in the show: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.21538

(Mame) #358

I think the above is one of the keys to success and although it is easy for some it can be incredibly difficult for others. If one is eating for emotional reasons or from habit it can be very hard to stop eating when your physical body is done. I know many say ‘you can’t overeat pork chops’ to which I say ‘some of us can!’

(PJ) #359

Calories –

Mastication can affect what you absorb
Stomach and bile digestion can affect what you absorb
Upper intestine biome, health and integrity can affect what you absorb
Lower intestine biome, health and integrity can affect what you absorb
The biome in the lower intestine CREATES nutrients including fatty acids which can ADD calories to the system

Jonny Bowden described in a book I read, putting people on the metabolic cart to measure “how many calories they burned” with a given exercise. He said there was a radical difference between how even people of the same size doing the same exercise responded, in terms of calories ‘burned.’

Studies on food contents vs. USDA labeling suggests there is a margin of error from small to fairly huge (like 40%). (Sorry I can’t recall the reference for that.)

In short, there is no possible way that we can know exactly how many calories we ingest anyway. We can at best “ballpark” it by doing our best to track what “the food on the plate has.” That will directly relate to what we “get out of it” but it won’t be that number. It will be greater, or lesser, or a combination of both, who knows what it comes out to.

Your nutrient repletion of minerals, and vitamins, matter to your body’s processing also. Not just processing food, but processing energy.

The body self-adjusts when the metabolism is healthy. It’s a complex calculus one has to figure, between those simple things I mentioned AND a whole slew of hormones and related chemicals, created or processed by a myriad of cells and systems in the body, all of which affect energy creation, and burning, and fat creation, and burning, and appetite, and so on.

So what I’m finally getting to here, is that unless we under-eat greatly, or over-eat greatly, we really have no specific idea what our “caloric balance” is.

You could eat 300 calories “under” what you think your TDEE is, and make more than that in fatty acids in your bowel thanks to the broccoli and blackberries you ate. You could eat 300 calories “over” what you think your TDEE is, and lose more than that in a whole cascade of hormones thanks to what you did at work two days ago, the great sex you had yesterday, and for all I know the position of the stars.

For that matter, your body might actually lose weight only when you reach a certain fulfillment point, of nutrients or intake, because it now feels safe doing it. Meaning it might be more prone to lose fat with somewhat more intake rather than less – this is often the (confusing for many!) case.

There is no way to prove that one IS below TDEE (even if a person has that number precisely right to begin with), or is above it. So arguments about caloric intake seem to me, to be kind of pointless.

Keto for any given person is a good example of “you will know the tree by its fruit.” It brings home that infamously obvious (but overlooked) saying:

If what you’re doing isn’t working, DO SOMETHING ELSE.

(The measure of ‘working’ is obviously another topic, and the measure of what the ‘else’ might be is also, of course.)

We can raise or lower our intake. But we cannot raise our lower our calories without raising or lowering our NUTRIENTS. And I personally suspect that for the body, that’s what it’s all about. I don’t think you gain weight or fail to lose it because of ‘calories’, what the hell kind of abstract “yeah you can burn it to ash in a machine” is that anyway? For the body it means “you had more fat” or protein or carbs. And you had more fat of a certain kind vs. another. It has whatever effect it has.

You do your best, you evaluate the results, you make adjustments, you keep moving on. All the real meat for debate about CICO is buried in the black box of internal body operations, which are labyrinthine in complexity and we cannot see in detail. So in the end it just comes down to doing something that seems right, and then adjusting based on results. And sometimes it’ll be that more calories or more carbs vs. less of those helped person X do better, or feel better.

I think keto as advice to fellow dieters or new people, is best served by helping people understand that they are an N=1 experiment, that there are no hard rules aside from carb count and “don’t starve yourself” and take minerals when you’re losing water, and that whatever they choose to do, IT MAY REQUIRE ADJUSTMENT – maybe many times – maybe not at first but later.

Not because of calories, probably, but because we’re individuals and every day that our body changes, all the variables change.

(John) #360

So calories dont matter and our bodies are all different but sometimes we should advise to eat more. Why shouldn’t we sometimes advise to eat less then?

(bulkbiker) #361

We do … its called fasting…either intermittent or extended… what it isn’t is “eating fewer calories” . it’s not eating at all and is a far more effective therapy than restricting what you eat “a bit”.

(PJ) #362

One can. But ketosis by its nature reduces appetite, and (protein+fat)-carbs by its nature reduces appetite, so under-eating is usually vastly more of a problem for people new to keto than over-eating.

You have to almost TRY to over-eat on keto to make it happen, unless your primary food groups are bacon and mayo.

Edited to add: also, our culture associates ‘diet’ with ‘starving yourself’ so many people have a hard time wrapping their mind around the fact that keto should be nothing like that. That is yet another reason why I usually encourage people not to eat too little, but seldom worry about encouraging people not to eat too much.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #363

@RightNOW Thanks PJ, awesome posts!

:cowboy_hat_face:

(Susan) #364

This is perfect and I totally agree. Feast well on eating days and Fast well on fasting days, for sure.

(John) #365

Well I never said to tell people to starve themselves only that its possible to overeat on keto. Maybe not as much of a problem when there is still a decent amount of weight to lose but it seems like the closer people get to their goal weight the harder it is to keep losing. Maybe you are the exception but most people are not

(John) #366

I think there is enough info both ways in this thread so until the next calories dont matter thread I’m moving on. Good conversation all