Hi all
I’ve started Keto today. My aim isn’t necessarily to lose weight, more to lose fat so trying to eat about 2000 calories a day. If I limit carbs to 30g and I really don’t want to go over 120g of protein, that gives me 600 cals. That leaves 1400 calories to get from fat which is 155g. That seems a huge amount of fat? Is anybody else eating this amount of fat and if so where do you get that quantity from?
Thanks.
Ian
Welcome Ian,
At one point I would simply have:
Breakfast: Bacon (2 or 3) and eggs (2) cooked in one tablespoon butter. Coffee with cream.
Lunch: Avocado, canned Salmon, Sardines or Mackeral, with feta cheese. 2nd Coffee
Dinner: Just an ordinary sized steak with steamed veggies like broccoli and cauliflower. Add one tablespoon butter on top. Or chicken or fish.
As you can see this isn’t a very weird menu at all.
It adds up to something like: 20g net carbs, 80-120g protein, the rest 100+ g fat.
Just avoid sugar like the plague and and instead of any bread, rice and pasta eat veggies and make them non boring by jazzing up with butter, olive oil, coconut oil or whatever.
Track everything with an app.
It’s simple:
Or you can
I have a jar of lard. And quite a few smoked lard tablets.
I also have a few kilos of butter in my fridge.
Unless you replace lost fat with muscle, you will lose weight, which isn’t a terrible thing.
Keto isn’t so much about counting calories. It’s more about changing the behavior of our hormones and doing that enables us to lose fat. With that being said, hunger is your best guide as far as what amounts of what you should eat. While keeping carbs under 20 (30 is ok to induce ketosis, 20 will likely give you better results), we should eat protein and fat until we are full. The point is to not undereat or overeat. If we can do this, our body will learn to burn fat for fuel, instead of carbs and you should see results in the mirror. It might take a few weeks or a few months, depending on how well your horomones cooperate.
My first month of keto I was usually eating around 160 grams of fat per day and it was fairly easy by eating fatty cuts of meat, eggs, cheese, sour cream, pork rinds, nuts, heavy cream and being generous with butter and non-vegetable oils when I cooked.
Thanks for the welcomes and the introduction.
Day 1 is now over. It was a bit of a struggle and we should have prepared more but everything logged in MFP and macros come to:
1940 cal - 24g carbs - 168g fat - 71g protein
which works out percentage wise as:
5% © - 78% (f) - 15% §
But, while I appreciate what you’ve said about Keto, if my TDEE requires 2400 to stay at the same weight, then taking today as an example I will lose weight so I need to increase the calorie intake. And as I go to the gym three times a week I feel I really need to increase that protein intake. The easiest way to do that would seem to be chicken.
My understanding would be that eating a maintenance level of calories (wherever they come from) would keep my WEIGHT constant but using fat as a fuel, my body FAT would reduce?
Not as simple as that?
Like CarlKeller said, unless you gain lean muscle while you’re losing body fat, you’re going to lose weight, as fat has mass. I wouldn’t get too caught up in the calorie-thing, but as long as you’re feeding your body adequate protein and aren’t in a big continual deficit, you won’t need to worry about losing the lean muscle mass you already have.
Your body will burn its own fat regularly once it’s fat adapted (when essentially a “flip” switches and your body’s first instinct when it has no more food is to burn its stored fat, this happens around 4-9 weeks into Keto) and as long as insulin levels are low. So during the adaptation period, the most important thing is to get habits formed. Get used to eating high fat and moderate protein, keeping your carbs low, and also learning when to eat. You’ll find most people tend to naturally lean towards only eating once or twice a day, but the most important thing is learning to only eat when you’re hungry.
Am I the only one who never tracks any food with an app? 5 years low carb, the only time I tracked anything was when I was testing whether protein affected my blood sugar, then I manually added up calories and protein.
Never even heard of a “macro” until I started coming here.
I think after five years one would be able to estimate everything quite easily. The app is only required as training wheels in the first couple of weeks maybe month or three.
It seems a lot of people feel the need for validation, to measure something, check something, and Don’t want to wait a couple weeks or months to find out something is wrong. Like eating too many carbs
Hi Ian
I reread your post and you never mentioned your weight now? Why are you concerned about keeping your weight steady as your body has a sense of what it needs to do in reaction to your eating habits. I think you should realize that your muscle growth will be directly influenced by your work out habits. And what you body does with your keto choices is to change your metabolism to burning fat instead of carbs. It will meet in the middle somewhere and you will up your training if you want more body mass. But to do something synchronized like I think you’re suggesting will be nearly impossible in my opinion. Good luck on your endeavors. 
Cronometer.com has an option to allow our data to be used for the Mercola Study and the Grassroots Health study. I feel like offering my data might better help keto’s maintstream reputation.
You don’t have to try to get any specific amount of fat, just make sure you’re not intentionally limiting it. If you’re hungry or feeling low on energy fat is your friend but your fat macro isn’t a goal.
The brain is an amazing thing, but it can also be a complete PITA for things like proofreading
The key to a well-formulated ketogenic diet is to keep your carbohydrate intake at a level that will lower your insulin level. The rest is simply keeping protein at a good level and filling in the remainder of calories by replacing carbohydrate with fat. We say “eat fat to satiety,” which means to eat when you’re hungry, to stop eating when you stop being hungry, and not to eat again until you’re hungry again—ignore the clock, in other words.
In the first two or three weeks, you may seem to be eating a lot of food. Don’t worry about it. At some point, the lowered insulin will allow the peptide YY from your stomach and the leptin from your fat tissue to start registering again in your brain, and your appetite will become an accurate guide to however many calories your body needs on any given day. If you have a lot of excess fat to lose, you may notice a surprising moment when all of a sudden you really stop being hungry. (For me, it happened in the middle of a meal, and it was a stunning surprise.)
You may or may not lose weight on a ketogenic diet, but you probably can expect some body recomposition. Giving your body enough energy by eating to satiety lets your body set your appetitie to a level at which it can burn off excess fat, while making use of all the calories you eat to heal your metabolism, reverse your insulin resistance, clear up your visceral fat, get your mitochondria going again and get them burning fat instead of glucose, and so forth. You may well put on muscle and increase your bone density, even while losing excess fat.
No, there are a lot of us who don’t, we just don’t ask questions about it.
I can see it now: “What app should I use if I don’t want to track my food?” “What do I do to not count macros?” “How do I know how many macros I’m not counting?” “I got hungry again six or seven hours after my previous meal—am I doing something wrong?” “What macro-ignoring strategy do you use?” and so forth, lol! 
Honestly, this is a really stupid question.
It’s obviously MFP, because you’ve got no idea if it’s even in the ballpark.
HTH
Are you turning into one of those spelling nazis that you told me about two days ago?
