Do you have to eat all the calories and fat

[Amy36]

I am new here. I downloaded the keto tracker on my phone. There is no way I can eat all the recommended calories, protien, and fat they are saying I need to eat. Can someone please tell me the recomended calories, fat, and protien someone should eat? I have no problem staying under 20 carbs.

[David_Stilley]

No you don’t have to follow phone app advice. You should eat to satiety and not force food. Also don’t limit calories, in fact you should ignore that number unless you suspect you’re under eating. Which maybe you are because that’s what you’re used to doing possibly? Usually keto apps lowball how much you should be eating to have a healthy metabolic rate. You burn more fat in that state. Try this, just keep carbs under 20g.

Keto Is This Easy

Keto is this easy (aka Keto for beginners) Quick Version This is for Phase One—the starter phase. It’s still not complicated later, but this is the really easy-to-explain version which will help you no end. Eat under 20g of carbs a day (usually 20g net when starting, but for some people 20g total carbs works better). Don’t worry about the scale. All it tells you is weight, it tells you nothing about body composition, even the “smart” scales. Eat plenty of good food—fat and protein—whil…

[Momof5]

Welcome to the forum, Amy =).

Eating enough food is important, but follow David’s advice above too! As long as you are keeping your carbs at 20 grams or less and eating enough food then you should be fine =).

[SlowBurnMary]

It’'s normal to have several weeks of slow digestion due to changeover in your enzymes as your system switches to running on fat.

Also, natural satiety + strong digestion is a new thing that happens with LCHF/keto eventually.

It can help to take a pro-enzyme digestive like Ginger capsules w/ your meals, or a concentrated enzyme like bromelain/papain enzymes (from pineapple/pork (they’re more expensive though, and they act so fast that some folks become dependent on them).

It can also help lighten the digestive load the first few weeks to eat one or two liquid meals in the form of soups or smoothies (containing quality protein (like grassfed dehydrated natural whey protein, or several egg yolks and cottage cheese along with other tasty flavors. One of the cornerstone LCHF/keto books, Protein Power, involves some degree of liquid meals in the early weeks - within a structured program of phases. The book The New Atkins For A New You is also really helpful and reassuring about how to eat and how to enhance your enjoyment.

[ajbennett]

Welcome!

As long as you’re keeping your carbs very low (below 20g is the usual starting point), you should eat fat and protein to satiety.

Allow yourself to be guided by your natural appetite rather than what an app suggests you “should” be eating. When you’re hungry, eat until you are satisfied. When you’re not hungry, don’t eat just because “it’s lunch” or “it’s dinner”.

[Shinita]

No, you don’t have to eat according to some calculated (guesstimated) numbers that may or may not have much to do with the actual needs of your body.
And anyway, eating more on some days and less on another is perfectly normal too.
Many people here eat according to their hunger and satiation, not numbers. Not even all of us track (I can’t even track all the time, I haven’t any idea about the fat content of my lamb).

You need to eat quite low-carb, at least adequate protein and some fat, enough calories but I can’t possibly know your numbers and there is a huge wriggle room anyway. Adequate protein is fine, I mean, enough for the needs for your body, that was adequate means but I need high protein for satiation and that isn’t a problem at all. Some people eat high protein because they need the energy but eating tons of added fat doesn’t sit well with them.
There aren’t zillion strict rules here, find your sweet spot.

You are new, don’t worry about calories (it’s a good idea later as well but now it’s even more important, keto may be challenging enough even if you enjoy it from day 1). Get used to keto, eat good and enough food, be nicely satiated If it doesn’t work, you may change something later but why overcomplicating things right away and possibly forcing ourselves being hungry a lot?

[PaulL]

Now that you are no longer getting calories from carbohydrate, where is your caloric intake going to come from? We recommend eating more fat, because fat has the least effect on insulin levels, and ketogenic eating is all about trying to keep serum insulin as low as possible.

You need a reasonable amount of protein, enough to replenish your nitrogen balance and to build healthy muscle and bone, but you don’t need to go hog-wild (so to speak). A reasonable amount of protein is somewhere in the range of 1.0-2.0 grams a day per kilogram of lean body mass (i.e., muscle and bone weight, exclusive of fat weight). Most people don’t need to think about how much protein they are eating, since we seem to eat the right amount pretty much by instinct.

The body responds negatively to not getting enough calories, even in the context of a low-carb diet. It shuts down or reduces non-essential functions, such as the reproductive system and hair and nail growth. It attempts to reduce metabolic expenditure to compensate for the low level of energy coming in. It holds on to its reserve of stored fat, in order to get us safely through the famine.

By the same token, an abundance of calories causes the body to ramp up the metabolism, revving up the non-essential processes again, and releasing our store of excess fat to be metabolised. The body can even waste energy and excrete excess calories. So the idea is to get enough calories, to free the body to heal and to shed our excess fat. (Or, for that matter, to build up our body, if we start out undernourished and underweight.) The key mechanism is to follow our appetite.

Appetite signaling is disrupted when we eat too much carbohydrate (this is why people on the standard American diet are always hungry), but it generally gets restored to proper function when we cut our carbohydrate intake low enough. At that point, our appetite becomes a safe guide to eating enough calories, and if we eat only when hungry, stop eating when we stop being hungry, and don’t eat again until we get hungry again, we will find ourselves getting enough calories but not too much.

[Teb_Tengri]

I use heavy cream and spoonfuls of coconut oil to round out calories. It really doesn’t take much.

[IvyKCKO]

I thought grass fed whey protein spikes insulin?

[IvyKCKO]

What is the difference between this and 16:8 5 days a week+OMAD 2 days a week? I realize both work for me, but which do I choose, or do I try to naturally do both at the same tiem?