Hi all, first post here. I’ve been LCHF for a few weeks now, and the idea that we perhaps need to reduce the amount of fat that we are actually consuming has been told to me, so that our body actually uses the fat we have stored as it’s fuel rather than all of that good fat that we are consuming first and foremost. My macros are showing my carbs as being below 20 everyday, and my fat is usually sky high also because I like to flavour my foods with cheeses and butter, but don’t feel that any weight has actually been shifted (even though yes I understand that I may need to wait for this to happen).
So I’m just wondering is when is there actually too much fat in our diet? Do I need to pull back on the added fats to my meals if I want to try and shift some weight?
The concept behind keto is that you eat to fat to satiety. So, that eliminate the need to track and limit fat.
Since your goal is to lose weight, you are doing the right thing by starting out with keeping your carbs at 20 gram limit. The other thing is to keep your protein levels moderate, too. The general amount is to eat 1 gram protein per kg of lean body mass. This means that you need to find out what your lean body mass is – have you figured out what that is yet? And then with fat there is no limit…you can eat fat to satiety.
If you provide us with a list of your typical daily meals and snacks, we can help you further with more advice.
If you want to loose fat you need to burn it. You do that by cutting carbs to get into ketosis, by cutting fat to use up your body-fat and by exercise to increase your number of mitochondria (which have a limited ability to burn fat thus you need as many as possibly).
Fab thank you everyone. I guess I didn’t write my question very clearly! But yes, I wanted to know that to initially lose weight, it’s best to not only cut carbs which I have done successfully, but I may need to not get so excited in eating so much fat with my meals. Painful, as I love dairy so much lol! It can be so confusing as from the outset of looking into LCHF it seems that it’s Reduce Carbs! Eat as much healthy fat as you can! But this is not so much the case…
And regarding lean body mass, no, I’ve not yet worked out what this is. I’m 38, 168cm, and weigh 72kg. How do I do that from here?
I beg to differ. In the keto way of eating, you can eat fat to satiety and lose weight.
The problem is how people interpret eating fat to satiety. For example, if someone eats almonds (for its fat content) to satiety, they would also be ingesting carbs.
A good strategy is adding lots of fat to your meal. Like pouring melted butter on your dish. This way, you add fat, and not much else in terms of carbs and protein. This helps you reach the point of satiety.
The strategy of reducing dietary fat to burn body fat does not make sense, as it will negatively influence hunger, metabolism and hormonal balance. Dietary restrictions cause metabolic rates to slow down. Don’t restrict the dietary fat. Eat fat to satiety. Keep carbs limited to 20 grams, and moderate protein levels. That’s all the work you need to do in terms of tracking macros.
You may also want to explore other things that may provoke insulinogenic response. For example, someone who snacks all day will potentially have higher insulin levels. If I eat breakfast-snack-lunch-snack-dinner-snack everyday, I guarantee that i will gain weight, even eating keto. That’s because I provoke insulin levels. I eat only when I am hungry. Skipping meals is very common for me.
Another thing you may want to look into is artificial sweeteners. While some people do perfectly well, other (like me) do not. Again, for some people, it provokes insulinogenic activity.
Sorry, Sascha. This is not really correct, and can lead people to the same CICO insanity of trying to restrict foods, exercise a lot, and then destroy their metabolism.
I used to follow this terrible advice, and it reduced my metabolic rates to very low levels. It caused serious harm. It’s the same old “eat less, move more” advice that is flawed.
In keto, eating fat to satiety is needed to allow the body to become fat adapted and maintain low insulinogenic activity.
I too am now eating only twice a day easily, but I am having 3 coffees with pure cream per day - I am unsure whether or not caffeine is causing an insulin spike for me.
Breakfast is generally a 2 or 3 egg omelette with cream, some cooked tomato, and avocado. Dinner is usually a protein (either plain or cooked with some kind of dairy sauce), either broccoli or cauli with melted butter or cheese, and lately I’ve been having some cooked cabbage as well.
I’m not eating anything with sweeteners, no fruits, no nuts. Tried stripping my diet back as best as possible, just upping the fat content by way of dairy I think. And this is where I was wondering if I may be consuming too much. I don’t ever eat until I’m stuffed, but until comfortable. I think!
Calorie restriction is fine as long as you have your insulin low enough, see the fasting subforum.
Fat adaption is the result of cutting carbs, not eating more fat. And to help your mitochondria to supply you with enough energy from fat you simply need more of them, thus you need to exercise.
Fasting is an entirely different process than calorie restriction. Seems the same on the surface, it most definately is NOT. Special processes are fired up with total lack of energy input, such as autophagy, HGH release, and targeted visceral fat burning.
So, @13nay. Let’s talk about fat adaptation and fat loss on the ketogenic diet. Try to set aside CICO for a moment (don’t be a CICOpath!)
First, proper fat adaptation is key here. You are on week two. That is VERY early. You are NOT fully fat adapted yet, meaning, your body is not burning fat efficiently yet (either table fat or body fat.) You need more time. At minimum 6 weeks before your body is making enough enzymes and many other processes to burn fat for fuel efficiently.
So give yourself a break. Go ahead and eat your fatty foods, especially right now. It will give your body the signal that fat is the primary food offered now, and those fat burning engines will start firing on all cylinders.
Another thing, being female, our hormones may interfere and delay any weight loss. It happens to a lot of us. You’re going to need to be patient. Use this time to get your electrolytes balanced, your insulin down, and your fat burning engines fine tuned. Don’t waste your time going down the calories in, calories out road. It’s a failed paradigm and the reason much of society (the USA for certain) are not successful dieting(CICO) and keeping it off.
Have you listened to the 2KetoDudes podcasts? They are not only about reversing T2DM, the podcasts delve into the specifics of keto, with all the corresponding science attached, and not a CICOpath in sight.
Welcome to keto land, and I wish for you the greatest success!
Fasting is not magical. You get autophagy every night, you get HGH every night, you get fat burning every night, all without fasting.
The effects are amplified but not different.
You are looking for miracles, if you eat “fat to satiety”, whatever the F*** that means, and think exercise is the devil, then you will not burn bodyfat, regardless of how fat adapted you are.
Look like Jimmy Moore or Ted Naiman, high fat vs PSMF, your choice.
You sound angry, show me the science.
“Fat to satiety” is a thing, and I’m sorry you have not figured it out personally. That must be frustrating.
@13nay
Here’s a bit of science to get you started. Follow the links within this write-up. Remember, high insulin and fat storage does not only apply to T2DM (Type 2 diabetics), but to everyone.
@Sascha_Heid
Fat shaming will not be tolerated here, neither will disrespectful talk like this: [quote=“Sascha_Heid, post:13, topic:13595, full:true”]
Dont tell me you believe the fat you eat will magically come out of your butt undigested.
[/quote]
@Sascha_Heid thank you so much for your info. Definitely NOT CICO follower, for years, nor scared of healthy fat foods. Yes I started listening to 2 keto dudes today! Awesome! I’ll check the links. I’m happy with what I’ve been eating so far, and how much, so I’ll just keep it up!
Comparing Jimmy Moore to Ted Naiman is ridiculous as Jimmy is not a body builder or strength trainer. Compare Danny Vega (doesn’t shy away from the fat) to Ted Naiman as the both lift weights but have different dietary protocols. That’s a better comparison as both are of similar age, exercise in similar fashion, and try to maintaun body composition.
There is more than one dietary / exercise protocol to lose weight, and not all of us want to gain and maintain lean body mass or muscle.
If you believe reducing energy stored is a matter of reducing the fat on your plate and doing more exercise, then why even bother to be in ketosis - just “suck it up buttercup” eat less of everything and get off the couch and you’ll lose weight. Just takes a little discipline.
… or at least that is the premise of TV Show “The Biggest Loser”. It is also what all the contestants, and the trainers and most of the audience of that show believe. It was also what metabolic researcher Kevin Hall of the NIH believed until he studied a class of contestants and followed them for 6 years and what he found truly shocked him.
I went into the details of the study in this post …
The TL;DR version is that satiety is an important signal that you ignore at your peril. If you stop eating SHORT of satiation then you are giving your body a signal that it doesn’t have ready access to energy … it will make cuts, it will increase hunger, it will increase lethargy, it will lower your metabolic rate. That is what the biggest loser participants do … and then because there are hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line they “suck it up” and … their resting metabolic rates drop from 2600 to under 2000 and 6 years later when they have regained all their lost weight their RMR is an additional 100 kCal/day lower still. Why? Because they reduced the energy on their plate hoping that would increase the amount they burned.
The other thing I will observe from this study (because I’ll come back to it) is the participants started with a HOMA:IR of 2.5 - meaning they were 2.5x as insulin resiustant as a 35 year old man with no metabolic disease, by the end of the show they had a HOMA:IR of 3.6 (3.6x more IR than a sensitive 35 year old) - so they had done significant metabolic damage to themselves. And you can see this reflected in their fasting insulin, at the start they had a fasting insulin of 10.4 mIU/L and by the end of the 6 month follow up their fasted insulin was 12.1 mIU/l. Why? because they had become significantly more insulin resistant and had to make so much insulin just to cover their basal load of glucose.
BTW these participants were still eating their high protein low calorie diet 6 year later (according to their Respiratory quotients) and still exercising at close to the level they were at the conclusion of the competition … and they all gained most of their weight back. Why? Because their metabolic rates plummeted. It had nothing to do with them restricting the fat on their plate.
Fat to satiety is the definition of the fueling strategy of a well formulated ketogenic diet - the technical definition is an ad libitum diet.
Dr Phinney: “The primary driver here is satiety”
Actually you breath out all the fat you absorb, or you take it to your grave. The question you have to ask yourself is what would make you turn MORE fat into CO2, given that Kevin Hall has already shown that caloric restriction and exercise would make you turn LESS fat into CO2.
The answer can be found in a series of overfeeding studies done by researcher Ethan Sims in Vermont where he tried to overfeed volunteer prisoners as many calories as he could stuff into them, in order to force them to gain 25% of their body fat. With extreme difficulty most of the participants were eventually able to gain a quarter of their body fat, but one guy would not budge past 11% no matter how much fatty carby food they fed him. The took his caloric load up from 2000kCal/day to over 10,000 kCal/day and he could not add any more body fat. So that guy was able to increase his metabolic rate 5x in response to energy being available.
When they stopped the study everyone went back to their original weight very quickly because their metabolic rates were so high, and then as they got to their normal weight their metabolic rates dropped back to normal … all except 2 guys who saw their metabolic rate drop as soon as the overfeeding stopped and they had trouble losing all the weight they gained.
So what makes these 2 hard losers different? Both of them had a family history of type 2 Diabetes. They likely were easily able to raise insulin and had a hard time getting it off.
How about the guy who couldn’t get past 11%? Well that hard gainer was unable to get his insulin up high enough.
Want to burn more energy, lower insulin. Want to store more, raise insulin.
That’s a pretty ignorant comment.
Ted has mentioned that he has a fasted insulin below 2 mIU/L - even when he was fluffy, he admits he was eating a hard core seventh day Adventist high grain vegetarian diet and couldn’t gain weight - and photos of him show he was thin and fat, not big and fat. He is a hard gainer. Ted probably couldn’t fast more than 18 hours, and would be weak as a kitten at the end of an extended fast.
I don’t know what Jimmy’s fasted insulin is, but I do know mine. Mine a year ago was 29.3 mIU/L, today it is 13.7 mIU/L. In case you aren’t sure what that means - this is a chart from Ted’s low carb cruise 2016 presentation on how much energy a person can get from body fat based on their insulin level - I have just added mIU/l units along the top of the chart.
See where someone with a fasted insulin is at 2 mIU/L? Someone like Ted who has a low fasted insulin has access to 100% of the possible energy from his body fat.
See where I am at 13.7 mIU/L? I have access to 0%. To get into a normal range I have to fast for 5 days then do a 3 hour cycle.
But here’s 2 things about that
Ted couldn’t do that - just can’t store the energy to do something like that
Time spent at a lower level of insulin is slowly reducing my fasted insulin. My HOMA:IR 15 months ago was 6.9, it is currently 3.1.
So in a choice between Ted’s body and mine I would chose mine every day because I have more options.
Besides who wants to be on a really high protein diet if you outgass volatile byproducts of protein metabolism from the surface of your lungs including ammonia, hydrogen sulphide (rotten egg gas) and methyl amine (rotten fish).
Wasting protein for energy offsets using fat for energy which is the whole point of a well formulated ketogenic diet. And once you get to more than 3.3g/kg LBM you start getting into the range of Ammonium intoxication, and rabbit starvation.
So that is not for me.
But y’know if a PSMF gets you into ketosis and it is meeting your goals then good luck to you.
What a great discussion. I am saving this one so I can come back to it. Love, love the science that backs up what I’m experiencing in my daily life. Thank you.
