How far am I from keto?

newbies

#21

And it’s still insanely sugary and usually out in keto if your carb limit is low… Except a few of them. Apples are way too sugary but it’s all about amounts. I ate banana every day as a beginner ketoer and it gave me a fragment of the carbs I got from vegs… I ate 10g frozen banana, it was perfect for me. A whole banana just couldn’t fit especially back then when I had many carb sources.
If you eat carby stuff, you hardly can figure out your intake without tracking. With tracking, you will see and can decide if it’s worth it to eat a tiny amount of high-carb food or you are better without.
But you can’t calculate your own ketosis carb limit, of course or that you need to use net or total carbs… You can try and see (or not. I definitely don’t feel if I am in ketosis as I feel the same and water weight changes easily go away too).

Nowadays I am not even sure animal carbs count in my case. It doesn’t seem so… But even with them, I am very rarely over my personal carb limit (it seems to be somewhere around 45g but it probably changes a bit with my activity…? never noticed it but it sounds logical). But I don’t care about ketosis much as it doesn’t give me benefits. I care about feeling right and getting other benefits so I go lower with my non-animal carbs where that happens. Just ketosis isn’t enough for all of us just like ketosis isn’t needed for all of us to feel quite fine. I loved and needed my low-carb years but they stopped being really good for me while I actually could go lower.

So it’s complicated.

By the way, fruit is the absolute worst diet food to me. It’s one thing such dense sugar doesn’t feel good in bigger amounts (smaller is like 10-20g apple, I can handle that just fine. sometimes I eat 30g) but it always made me super hungry. (Too bad I adore fruits…)
Nothing can make me super hungry nowadays (except a small meal, maybe) but it still triggers overeating. Of course it’s very individual, I heard about people who could only get satiated by eating much fruit, I can’t imagine how their bodies work :smiley: Satiation has no rules, apparently.
But I think normal people like all my family never can get satiated by fruits, in the contrary… Too much calories and especially sugar for something non-substantial natural candy that just makes me wanna eat… Probably worse than weed for my family members but I never even saw weed so I don’t know that :smiley: But it’s VERY effective, generating huge hunger when I would be satiated for 5-6 more hours without… At least before my fat adaptation. Now it generates a very huge need for some fatty protein like sausage to mitigate the problems created by a bunch of sugar. It can’t fully neutralize it but helps.

You may try lower-carb days when you barely eat fruits (or a bit more of some low-carb ones. I liked raspberries, that was my other important keto fruit, the one I could eat in somewhat bigger amounts but it’s so flavorful that 10-20g was more than enough most of the time. now my main fruit is lemon but I go for almost zero plant carbs as that feels best…)… I know how impossible giving up fruit can be for some of us. I tried out carnivore a few years ago, my body loved it, it’s the thing that gives me benefit… But giving up my fruits? Won’t happen any time soon, probably never. BUT I can postpone eating them for some months I suppose, I never did it before but I definitely eat them in small amounts and not at all for weeks at a time. It’s not the same as truly giving them up, faaaaar from it. Some of us need to do thing gradually and with off times. It’s still way better than just giving it up and eating carbs all the time.
And maybe you find a different, very low-carb woe so amazing that you will be willing to give up things for it. Or you may change, that’s my route. If I desire any kind of fruit, I eat it, as much as I want (and consider a not horrible idea, sugar poisoning isn’t fun, in very extreme cases even my belly start to hurt and I am a hedonist so it’s unacceptable) - but I lost a very, very big part of my interest and basically all my need for fruit. (And anyway, most of my joy from my own fruits came through other means, not eating the fruit. I have a quite nice fruit garden and someone who can eat the vast majority of the fruit instead of me.)
Sometimes we see a change as something extreme and unacceptable but when we do it (going cold turkey or gradually/partially), it becomes not even super hard but definitely worth to do it.

Whatever you will do, good luck!


#22

This is the kinda person that turns people off from keto

@Shinita Thank you for a more thought filled answer. For me fruits are a great diet food. Very low calorie for how filling they are and full of vitamins. Fruits are mostly water by weight, especially berries.

If I could do something like a medium carrot, a large onion, a bell pepper, 12g carb from milk, snap peas, berries, olives, avocado, cauliflower, broccoli per day that is very doable for me. My insulin resistance is probably pretty low due to my workout level and low refined sugar intake, I’ll try that for a week and see if I hit ketosis. For me this wouldn’t be an enormous change and will still let me most of what I want, I can live without apple and banana and definitely without noodles


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #23

Whether that’s low enough to get you into ketosis would depend, as I posted earlier, on how insulin-sensitive or -resistant you are. Do you have any ketone urine test strips? They are a quick and easy way to see if your liver is producing ketones. (They often stop working as the kidneys get better at returning ketones to the blood stream, but they are very handy in the beginning.)

Given that the human body evolved mostly eating meat, with fruit and vegetables eaten (if at all) only in season, there is no actual need for carbohydrate in the diet. The fruits and vegetables available to us today have all been bred to be very different from, and far more sugar-laden than, those our ancestors ate. Moreover, what little glucose the body actually needs can be manufactured endogenously. There is no need for dietary glucose (i.e., carbohydrate).

Taste, however, is another matter. If you can’t see yourself going without fruits or vegetables, a ketogenic diet is perhaps not for you. But only you can decide that. A lot of our current beliefs about what is “good for us” have been shaped by advertising, not by our actual needs.


#24

Just like meat, eggs, all sugary drinks, potatoes… Many food is mostly water. It doesn’t make them all a good diet food. But as I wrote, it’s individual if fruits are fine and in which amounts. If they work for you, good. But if you want to keep your carbs quite low, be careful. Fruits are super easy to eat in bigger amounts if you ask me (or my SO, he is the big fruit eater in the family, I just LOVE fruits to bits) and really big amounts can’t fit anyone’s healthy diet I think. Due to the fructose but sometimes the calories are a problem too even if it’s not the case for you.
(I couldn’t do even fried cauliflower on keto as my minimum amount was 40g net carbs… I could do banana and onions. Portions are individual too, after all.)

Carrot is quite carby just like onion and peas but they all are very flavorful. I ate several such high-carb vegs on keto (using a 40g net carb limit but I did vegetarian keto so whatever I ate, I usually ate carbs), they were worth it… But I kept the amount low-ish as one just can’t eat a whole carrot, a big onion, other vegs, nuts, fruits and the animal carbs and fit into 40g net carbs, it’s not so much. 20g, the usual safe limit is even lower. But you see what you can afford if you track as I already wrote.


#25

Many fruits are 90 percent water by weight. Meat is at most 60 percent water by weight, and meat is great for you.

I assume you guys could at least easily agree and see why there’s a world of difference between fruits and say, hard candy. I could put down thousands of calories of hard candy and not be even a little satiated. Much harder to do on fruit. Even harder to do on something like carrots. You could gorge yourself on carrots until you’re ready to puke and it’s a couple hundred calories at most.

Snap peas are not too bad either since they have way more fiber than normal peas, especially since we eat the pod.

I’m gonna try just taking noodles and apple and banana out of my diet and use the keto test strips like @PaulL mentioned after several days and see if I’m producing ketones.

I’m certainly no keto fanatic, and I think outside of the goal of keto and producing ketones that fruit is great for you and a great part of a healthy diet. But I’m curious on how keto would be and my normal diet is way closer to keto than the normal person’s average diet, so for me it would be way less of a change, therefore I’m gonna try it.

Also these numbers are curious to me, because there’s a huge difference of 20g carbs on a 1500 calorie diet versus a 4000 calorie diet.

Since insulin resistance matters the type of carb should matter too, since different carbs give different insulin level spikes, as well as fiber mattering and I eat a ton of fiber


#26

The more I research the more I think I’m gonna do something like this from @lfod14 in another thread said

" Completely depends on each person and what their goals are, just getting a number tells you nothing. People usually start at 20g, some people stay there forever. Active people can get away with more. I do a Targeted/Cyclic Keto hybrid and take in carbs pre/post workout so my numbers are much higher."


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #27

The main difference between fruit and candy is the presence of fibre, which somewhat slows the absorption of the fructose (which is present both by itself and as half of each sucrose molecule) to a rate that will not overwhelm our liver.

Candy lacks fibre, so both the glucose and the fructose hit in bulk, the glucose provoking an immediate large insulin response, and the fructose hitting the liver in a quantity that overwhelms the metabolic pathway that handles it (it also handles alcohol and the branched-chain amino acids). Repeatedly overwhelming this metabolic pathway leads to de novo lipogenesis, fatty liver disease, steatohepatitis, cirrhosis, and possibly death.

Fructose also has a similar effect to ethanol on the nucleus accumbens (the brain’s addiction centre). It lacks ethanol’s short-term toxic effects, but share its long-term ones. It is as addictive to a segment of the population as alcohol is to a different segment of the population (though the two populations do overlap somewhat).

So whole fruit, in moderation, will not be too detrimental to your body, but candy definitely will. But notice that only whole fruit is at all beneficial. Fruit juice, and fruit mashed up in a smoothy, or cooked to pulp, lacks the fibre that impedes the rate of absorption of the fructose and glucose. Consider how many apples it would take to give you the equivalent of a glass of apple juice, and you will see what I mean. You’d be very unlikely to eat that many apples in one sitting, as compared to being able to down a whole glass of juice in only a few swallows.

Welcome to the rabbit hole! A lot of the dietary advice that passes for conventional wisdom these days is inaccurate, contradicted by the data, or actually harmful. Part of the problem is systemic, in that nutrition research is difficult, if not virtually impossible, to do to a rigorous standard (can you imagine the expense and effort of putting two populations on different diets for twenty or thirty years, not to mention the impossibility of doing double-blind trials, or the ethical questions that arise?). But another part of the problem is corruption by commercial interests. For instance, it recently came out, from the publication of internal Sugar Foundation memos, that the sugar industry paid leading nutrition scientists in the 1950’s and 1960’s to blame fat for metabolic disease, and to play down the risks of eating sugar. Many of those researchers and their cronies are still in positions of influence in the U.S. government and in academia.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #28

I should probably add that there is nothing stopping you from eating what you want. We are just presenting understandings derived from data and from personal experience. You have to decide what your goals are, and how important a particular food is to you, and then you are ready to experiment to see whether or not eating that food helps you achieve your goals. If it does help (or at least doesn’t hinder) you, then great; but if it hinders you from achieving your goal, you will have to re-evaluate, weighing the relative importance of eating the food and achieving the goal.

Sorry to to be more helpful. Please don’t be upset if we don’t confirm certain cherished beliefs. We are trying hard to listen only to the data and to the results of our personal experimentation. In some areas there is a lot of individual variability to take into account, whereas other things seem to be pretty standard for everyone.


(Robin) #29

My only caveat is that the more carbs you consume, the more they create cravings. For most of us. (Always exceptions) My number one favorite thing about keto and now carni is a total lack of cravings and truthfully food is now like brushing my teeth… just something I need to do.
So, yes, I have lost some of the pure joy of eating, but I’ll swap that for lack of cravings any day.


#30

I won’t go and change things just say that I messed it up, normal sugar has fructose too :smiley: Sometimes I forget about these things.

Well that’s why we have @PaulL, he knows his stuff :smiley:

Only a special though common type of candy has only (mostly? who knows what food industry put into things nowadays) glucose.

No…? They are similar sugars except the fruits have fructose too and that’s worse than glucose? Glucose is a natural energy source of our body, many people can eat it galore without problems… As far as I know, very much fructose is bad for everyone … But I guess I will see what @PaulL wrote, I just jumped to comment without reading the later comments.

Well okay I consider fruits better than hard candy but it’s soft candy of Nature. Without added stuff (beyond making them insanely sugary so they become sugar water just with fibers, that actually matters to many, my body doesn’t seem to care). And fruits are way more tempting so eating 1-3 kg of it is pretty easy while I would be hard pressed to eat one hard candy (but I probably can eat a packet of Timtams if that counts? :D).
Of course it’s about our differences again so I stop that. But I would be very wary about consuming much fructose. But you want to eat little fruit, right. That is fine if your body thinks so too. I just can’t consider fruit some healthy, good thing at all. (I can’t consider them bad, per se, I LOVE them but they aren’t good for me so I am a bit torn.)

Indeed but carbs make me hungry so I need to eat A LOT of fatty protein to balance out those carrots so I overeat. You may not to do it, okay, most ketoers eat vegs and it’s fine, even better than without them for so many. But they can’t eat much carrot and stay in ketosis.
Even for me, not the calories of my carbs are the problem on my carby days (well, not the sugar calories. I can eat almost any amount of starches). But all the fat they inevitably bring and I easily regularly overeat fat without them. It’s an important thing, we always should consider what the food does to the person, even very very low-cal items can ruin one’s plans regarding fat-loss, I experienced that. I can’t lose fat with vegs for sure. Carbs mess with me.

That doesn’t matter, they have lots of sugar too… Tricky on keto. No wonder I lost peas when I went keto, I just couldn’t fit them into my 40g net carb limit. I only used a little in soups as I used very little there, the same with carrots.

Probably @PaulL wrote it smarter later but regarding ketosis, it’s never the percentage of calories going to carbs, it’s a number (well, range, possibly with other things, it’s not a fixed number even for the same person) in grams. Just because I eat a ton, I can’t afford 50 or 100g carbs and staying in ketosis, it’s not how things work. And even if I eat only 500 kcal on a day, 20g carbs won’t get me out of ketosis.
Protein is similar, the percentage typically doesn’t matter. We have a need in grams. (Percentage actually may matter when it comes to swallowing our food, I can’t eat too lean protein and don’t like it too fatty either, there are therapeutic keto styles etc.)

Fibers can do good but it can’t neutralize all the problem of consuming “much” sugar.

Oh TKD, CKD, yes, maybe that may be an option for you. I couldn’t eat high-carb low-fat ever so CKD is out for me and with my activity I don’t need carbs after a workout (and I need to be well-fasted for a proper workout). But many people do them successfully (and who knows, maybe I will need extra carbs later when my workouts get more serious?) so if some of them sounds good for you, it probably worths a shot :wink:


(Sebastian Danko) #31

I do not think with 200g of protein you will be in ketosis. Im at 3200maintenance calories (81kg) and I need to be bellow 100-110g of protein to be in ketosis.


(Allie) #32

Well I am and I eat way more protein than that… gluconeogenesis is known to be demand driven, protein doesn’t stop ketosis unless you’re one of the unlucky few who have to moderate their intake and if you are, bad luck, but you cannot assume your experience to be applicable to everyone else.


#33

Another thing that some of us don’t care about ketosis. I just want to feel right and it happens with extreme low plant carbs and 120-250g protein… 100g is so super low I can’t do it if I use all my willpower I can allocate when it’s about food (okay, that’s not very much). I am always higher except on the occasional very low-cal day. But it doesn’t seem to matter.
I got fat adapted just fine with high protein in 7 weeks so I suspect ketosis wasn’t a problem :wink:

I heard the story about many people and high protein doesn’t seem to have a problem for most of them. Some are different, sure but they are in the minority.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #34

If someone is not eating carbohydrate and is still walking around, then their liver is producing ketones. What measurement a ketone meter would come up with is a different matter.

Ketogenesis and gluconeogenesis both take place in conditions of low serum insulin, so if you have one, you have the other. There are other regulating factors to gluconeogenesis, but low insulin and relatively high glucagon are the main requirements for both processes, and that happens only in conditions of low carbohydrate intake.


(Chuck) #35

I haven’t ever had an issue with my blood sugar other than it being low at times when I was on a high carb diet. Like I said on the high carb diet I craved sugary foods and other carbs, since I have been on the low carb lifestyle I don’t have and cravings or do I have any spells with feeling dizzy like I would if I didn’t get a car fix every few hours. My blood sugar use to be on or just below low normal but now it is in the middle of normal. As for as my blood pressure until the first of this year I had been on BP medicine since I was 29, I am medication free. My BP use to run 135/90 with medication now it runs 115/70 with no medication.