Dietary fat Vs body fat... please explain

(Paulene ) #1

Calling those in the know!

Please explain to me, in layman’s terms, why I would need to eat a high level of dietary fat if I am fat adapted and have a high level of body fat.

#2

I’m with you.

Here’s how I see keto – “Minimal carbs. Adequate proteins. Fats as needed (for satiety).”

  • Carbs need to be low to stay in ketosis.
  • Proteins need is primarily based on lean body mass. Being consistently low is bad, because the body can find other sources for the proteins it needs (such as muscle tissue).
  • Fats need ideally would be based on hunger, because the body can use stored body fat to satisfy some of the fats need. Except for a few EFAs (Essential Fatty Acids), which the body can’t synthesize, so they have to be ingested.

So, after determining my macros (in grams), the proteins macro would be a lower limit, while the carbs and fats macros would be upper limits.

One other reason one would want hunger to be the guiding force is that if someone is trying to lose weight on a diet that always leaves them hungry, it won’t be sustainable. For me, that’s one of the great things about keto – I’m no longer ravenously hungry all the time, because carbs and insulin are no longer conspiring together and creating a false sense of hunger.

On any other diet, in nearly 5 decades of trying to lose weight, hunger and deprivation led to cheats, cheats led to binges, and binges led right back to old eating habits. And (worse than) old results.

#3

I find dietary fat to be the regulator you can use when fat adapted. However, it kind of goes against your instincts - when on a stall, it’s good to let the body catch up for a while, so increasing fat will help persuade it that we are not in famine, and give it a chance to recoup, avoiding a lowered metabolism. Once that went on for a while, one can lower the fat intake again, and the loss will pick up.

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

You don’t necessarily. Your metabolism can burn your own body fat, but only a certain daily amount, which is individual and to some extent dependent upon how much you have to work with. Apparently, the more you have the more you can burn. For most of us, the total is in the neighbourhood of several hundred calories per day. Whatever the specific number of calories, it’s lower than your BMR (base metabolic rate). Your BMR is the lowest amount of energy you need to stay alive. It’s affected by many factors, including how much lean mass you have, which is essentially everything other than water and fat. Lean mass contains protein, which requires a lot more energy to maintain and operate than other stuff.

So minimally you need to eat enough fat to cover the difference between whatever your metabolism can consume of your own body fat and your BMR. Of course, unless you’re in a catatonic state 24/7 you need to eat more to fuel your daily activities as well.

Now it gets a little complicated.Being in ketosis and fat adapted changes many things about how you metabolize food. It’s the reason eating fat burns fat. Especially eating saturated fats. Eating a high fat diet increases your metabolism, which in turn increases your need to consume more fuel, ie fats. This is why you can eat more on keto and not gain and even lose.

As @OgreZed says, hunger is a key signal. And I think this is mostly a trial and error thing. If you want to lose fat, you have to eat a little less fat and let your metabolism make up the difference from your body fat. So you eat until your weight stabilizes for a couple of weeks or so, then slowly reduce the amount you eat to the point where you start losing weight. Stop. Keto enables you to lose fat without feeling hungry all the time by balancing the amount you eat with the amount you have available from body fat to generate the energy you require. As long as your metabolism can make up the difference with your body fat, you will not feel hungry. If you start to feel hungry, other than just before a meal, you need to eat more. And, yes, you can eat more than you need and store it as new fat. That’s how our Pleistocene ancestors survived the days, weeks or months of not eating between successful hunts.

In my humble opinion.

(Jane) #5

You don’t want to eat so much fat you don’t burn your own.

BUT!!! You can also tank your metabolism by restricting fats. I eat half what my husband eats and weigh within 10 lbs of him (he is 6” taller than me). Eating saturated fats fuels your body to burn fats and incoming carbs

(Allie) #6

You don’t.
High levels are needed to teach the body how to use fat as fuel, once it knows that, you can reduce if that suits you.

(Bunny) #7

Also beware of DNL: De novo Lipogenesis; it takes a gawd awful lot of processes to turn carbohydrates into fat or lipid droplet to be stored as triglyceride or fat in fat cells (again). While fat adapted.

On a much deeper level this is what’s actually happening and I think people really are unaware of it:

When you start a ketogenic diet; it is falsely assumed every little carb they eat is being stored as fat, nope not true, just the fact your in ketosis and fat adapted (27 weeks) is a very big deal to your body and it would take in-excess of 1,000 grams of carbohydrates over a certain number of days to make that happen (again), to where your storing carbs directly into the fat cell and a good percentage of that 1,000 grams will be burned up trying to store it.

If your gaining fat weight on a ketogenic diet and fat adapted at 27 weeks, it is coming from the fat your eating and not from what the little carbohydrates your eating.

(Paulene ) #8

I’m still losing but at a slow steady rate.

I’m probably going to consume that many carbs over the next few days to try shake this keto rash. :disappointed_relieved: Hopefully it wont take too long to readapt to fat burning after that.

#9

You don’t necessarily need very much fat. I definitely don’t, well, it depends on what “very much” means but I probably would be okay with low-fat (in grams, the percentage wouldn’t be very low, of course) high-protein, I mean, my body would get its energy from my food and my body fat. I can’t stop eating a decent amount of food longer term without problems as I don’t have enough fat for that as far as I know (and I would feel awful anyway). But my fat, my protein intake and a little fat could probably do the trick (I would feel awful with so little fat, I love fat but I would lose something, at least).
If someone has more to lose, body fat may be enough without lots of energy from food. If someone has very little to lose or who are not okay with high protein, dietary fat provides the necessary energy so it must be somewhat higher but I don’t know what people call high fat. Is it a percentage? Is it grams? Is it individual?
I’ve heard about people doing keto with surprisingly little fat while losing. Not particularly many calories, high protein… I know little about it but I can imagine it can work for some. And totally not for others but it’s low-fat, not just not high.

(Paulene ) #10

So you think that hunger would only come after you have burned dietary fat then whatever body fat it can metabolise?
I really haven’t felt hungry since starting keto in October (except possibly after a 5-day fast… but even then I’m not sure if it was hunger or just psychologically making up for lost time!). So, perhaps I should cut fat back until the point at which I start to receive hunger messages, which I would then satisfy with a bit of fat. - sort of trying to stay just above hunger threshold.

#11

You didn’t ask me and @amwassil is surely way more knowledgeable than me but I can assure you hunger doesn’t work like this for everyone.
Keto helps with it and ideally it would work like this but hunger is an odd thing.
Some people get hungry after exercise to the point that they stall even if they just eat when hungry. I usually eat too much if I have too tiny meals or eat at the wrong time. It matters what exactly we eat. Dairy, sweeteners, lots of total carbs, vegetables, fruits, they can mess up things. Forget the big amount of energy we can get from our bodyfat while still have not very little to lose, we might not losing any fat if we don’t eat right. Keto works for so many but some of us need extra rules.

If you don’t go too low with your calories yet and you don’t even feel hunger normally, you can drop your fat intake and see what happens. It sounds a valid idea.

(Jack Bennett) #12

I keep hearing the number ~30 kcal/lb/day for body fat. (I think one 2KD podcast quoted the number as 31.2 which felt a bit overly exact to me.)

This suggests that a person with 100 lb of body fat could deliver 3000 kcal/day. Or a person with 50 lb of body fat could deliver 1500 kcal/day.

Some of that is going to be used up in carrying around that extra weight, but the fundamental idea is that the more body fat you have, the more of a “buffer” you have to power your body with fat. Conversely, the lower the body fat you have, the less of a buffer you have.

Anecdotally, this seems to play out: as people get leaner, they may have to add in fat calories and may find fasting harder than when they were carrying around a lot of extra fat.

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

‘Hunger’ is the stop sign. :stop_sign: :raised_hand_with_fingers_splayed:

As pointed out, hunger is not necessarily reliable (it’s not reliable for me, for example). I think a much more reliable signal is weight loss/gain. As I suggested, reduce the amount you’re eating (either by counting calories or not) until you start to lose weight. As long as you remain in ketosis and have body fat, you will not feel hungry at that point. But that’s where you want to be: slow but steady body fat burn. Your metabolism is making up the slight energy intake deficit with your body fat. It will continue to do so without sending a hunger signal unless (1) you increase your activity beyond what can be met by plate fat + body fat; or, (2) you run out of body fat.

#14

But … if hunger is an issue for a way of eating, it’s probably not going to be a sustainable way of eating.

(Bunny) #15

Hunger should never be an issue once you reach your goal.

Are we dieting in such a way to get metabolically fit (autophagy) or lose body fat?

Are we fasting to get metabolically fit (autophagy) or lose body fat?

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[1] “…During the fasted state, the switch is “on,” theoretically upregulating autophagy and survival pathways in neurons, whereas during the fed state, the switch is “off,” emphasizing remodeling and growth pathways. Thus, unlike calorie restriction, fasting capitalizes on each sequential bioenergetic challenge by “setting the stage” for a relatively stress-free cell recovery phase; in other words, it is the switching—the intermittency—that may provide the advantage for neuron metabolism. Indeed, chronicity can be harmful, regardless of a fed or fasted metabolic state—for example, acute mTOR activation promotes muscle hypertrophy, whereas chronic activation produces atrophy [58–60], and intermittent AMPK activation enhances neuroplasticity, but sustained AMPK activation impairs it [61]. …More

Dr. Phinney shows some really scary clinical data and markers showing metabolic damage years after fasting too much reduces basal metabolic rate BMR/RMR/TEE/REE by 20–25% long-term especially loss of skeletal muscle[1]. BMR/RMR/TEE/REE does speed up when you fast but only for two days then drops sharply…

Keep in mind I’m talking about TOO MUCH AUTOPHAGY?

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Dr. Stephen Phinney - 'Metabolic Effects of Fasting: A Two-Edged Sword’

#16

Not necessarily, maybe some tweaking is needed. Hunger is an issue for me unless I eat properly (it seems that is carnivore to me, at least dirty). And hunger isn’t a binary thing anyway, I have multiple hunger signs, certain things can trigger it without a real need, some people probably can’t say if it’s true hunger… Even if we know what is a valid sign, our other urges compliate things, we aren’t all perfect beings who only eat when hungry and stop when not hungry (if we can feel that, I need carnivore for a clear stop sign) and do it without too many food.

If we want to lose fat, that’s very different from maintenance. Not everyone can have a sustainable diet without hunger even when losing. I personally don’t accept hunger but I had to accept not losing on normal keto. I suspect our past often has a huge impact on our body and mind and it’s pretty stubborn sometimes. Maybe we cling to some “keto-friendly” item that makes us irrealistically hungry…

(Doug) #17

Jack, it’s 31.5 ± 9%. They want you to pay for the damn thing now… :neutral_face:

(Jack Bennett) #18

Thanks for the link - it’s good to have an estimate of the measurement error. It looks like that would place it anywhere from 28.5 to 34.5.

For simplicity, I’ll probably use 32±3 going forward (aka “30-ish” if I’m doing quick mental math)

#19

I didn’t see the details in the abstract, but I think this is based on frequent meals, high carb and restricted calories- I.e. the worst possible way of eating if you’re trying to keep your insulin low. I’m fairly lean and can access way more bodyfat than this, and I’m not the only one.

I wish this myth would stop making the rounds; it’s just not applicable to fat burners. (Though it does explain the poor results and absolute misery of common diets.)

#20

Because it’s your energy source, even when fat adapted you can’t release and burn stored fat as quickly as you can dietary fat. Our bodies do whats easiest for it, which is why it’ll always burn carbs over fat, alcohol over carbs and protein last.