I dont understand how my body will use my stored fats if I continue to put plenty of fats in.
How will my body use stored fats if I keep eating fat?
Rclause
(Scott)
#3
I would focus on getting into ketosis first. Then getting fat adapted should follow. If you don’t start losing weight at that point you can start reducing calories a bit.
CatGirl
(Janelle)
#4
I know - it’s confusing. I think the answer is to eat fatty-ish foods but don’t add a ton extra. Bulletproof coffee and a bunch of fat bombs may not work for you. Or they might - different things works for different people.
Alley
#5
you are 100% correct, as some of the comments say get fat adapted. To fat burning you need to not eat more fat than your body needs for fuel.
Mnketo46
(Frank)
#6
Get the carbs down below 20g net. Eat until satisfied. After some time, yes this takes time for most. This is not a light switch. This is a physiological change that your body is going through. If you’re like most of us here, your body has “forgotten” how to use fat (dietary and adipose) efficiently. By lowering the carb count, your body will “remember” how to utilize fats for fuel. It is at that point in the future that your hunger will tend to decrease. Listen to it! That’s when your body is getting the extra fuel it needs from the love handles and not the rib eye. Listen to all the podcasts, watch YouTube , and read as much as you can tolerate. There will be conflicting information depending on the source, but there will be an overall theme that will start to materialize and this will become second nature to you.
JohnH
(John)
#8
It’s only confusing because you see a particular piece of advice without context.
There are three reasons for a high fat intake:
-
When you first start out, and have replaced the carb calories in your daily food intake with fat calories. This is when you are forcing your body to switch to burning fat as the primary fuel instead of glucose.
-
To avoid feeling extremely hungry and as a result, quitting and going back to your prior way of eating. This is the “eat to satiety” advice.
-
To avoid creating such a large caloric deficit that your metabolism slows down significantly.
The first two reasons are only applicable during the initial fat adaptation stages, which may last for the first 3 to 6 weeks (longer for some). Once the initial stages of fat adaptation are complete, your body burns fat more easily and so you don’t necessarily need to provide so much from your food.
For many (but apparently not all), you develop a natural reduction in hunger / appetite signals, or at least more conscious control over whether you choose to respond to them. This means that “satiety” often comes at a lower level of intake.
The third reason does tend to stick around, so you need to reduce fat consumption only enough to keep a deficit where you will burn stored fat, but not so much that you dramatically slow your base metabolic rate.
So the seemingly conflicting advice you see is based on the context of where you are in the process.
If you have been on a ketogenic diet for 3 months and are fully fat adapted, then yes, you need an energy deficit primarily from fat intake (while keeping carbs and protein intake relatively steady) to keep using up your stored fat.
If you are in week 2, then no, you should not significantly reduce fat intake until your satiety (hunger) signaling allows you to do so.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#9
Even while eating very little carbohydrate, you need to give your body enough energy to convince it that it is safe to part with some of its energy store. Fat is the macronutrient that stimulates insulin secretion the least, which makes it the perfect thing to use as a replacement for the carbohydrate you are no longer eating.
For some reason, deliberately restricting calories puts the body into famine mode, in which it shuts down processes or cuts them back as much as it can, hunkering down until better times arrive. Giving your body all the calories it needs, on the other hand, lets it run at peak efficiency and perhaps even waste some energy.
How do you know how much to eat? Simple—eat to satiety. This means eating enough food so that you stop being hungry, and not eating again until you are hungry again, usually quite a few hours later. In the beginning of a ketogenic way of eating, you may eat what seems like an awful lot of food—don’t worry about it. As your insulin level drops, your brain will start recognising again the satiety hormones your stomach and fat cells secrete, and will cut off your appetite at an appropriate level. If you have excess fat to lose, your appetite level will cause you to eat an amount of food that will allow your body to metabolize both the fat you eat, and the excess stored fat. No need to count calories, your body will tell you when you’ve given it enough. But the key is to eat enough food for your body to feel safe doing so. You will naturally and automatically eat at a proper caloric deficit, without ever having to starve yourself.
Happyheart
(Wendy)
#10
Have you listened to the Dudes latest episode? Episode 147 was quite facinating and might give a bit of clarity to the whole how does what I eat effect how my body uses the energy given.
My opinion is that you should choose the healthy fats (animal fats, avocado oil, olive oil, eggs, butter, ghee,cheese, and other dairy foods if you tolerate them), shun the vegetable oils and other man made processed junk and just eat when hungry and not just to reach a certain macro percentage.
This has worked quite well for me. I don’t fear fats and eat them with great enjoyment. I’ve never forced down or eaten any to hit a goal either.
Alex99
#11
When you eat 20g carbs per day for a while your body clicks on the burn-fat-for-fuel-switch, any fat you eat gets burned for fuel.
Yes it’s a switch.
Then any fat you eat is burned as fat. It turns out the body still needs a bit more fuel than you just ate which it gets from storage (from the waistline).
So it is ironic - eat more fat - burn fat - you end up wearing less fat.
But if you are on the relatively new (in historic terms) S.A.D “Standard American Diet” where you eat a lot of carbs and try to avoid fat - then what happens is the body deals with this new flood of carbohydrates by converting it to fat. Avoid fat but make fat and then store the fat.
On top of all the raw sugar in modern diets, people didn’t eat this way 60 years ago! We also have more carbohydrates than ever. Carbs are converted to glucose (sugar).
Your blood can only carry one teaspoon worth of glucose at a time, let me repeat, one lousy, tiny, small teaspoon - but that brown sugary drink has 10 of those in every can. What happens to the other 9?
Your body tries to deal with the excess glucose, some is stored in muscles, some is stored in the liver and the rest is converted to fat. Newly made fat. You avoid fat but then your body goes and makes it.
Insulin does not only get the carbs converted to fat it also BLOCKS all other fat burning. No fat burning while this crisis is going on, which is every day. Tomorrow you store a bit more around the belly, the day after a bit more and so we all get fat and then fatter.
TL;DR
Eat typical food found in modern supermarkets which is high in carbohydrates and sugar and generally low in fat - you end up making fat and then becoming fat.
Eat very little carbs (like we do on a keto diet) - you click the burn-fat-for-fuel-switch and then you burn fat like it is going out of style. You loose weight.
atomicspacebunny
(Bunny)
#12
The short answer: Most importantly if you don’t eat enough fat you will trap dietary cholesterol (with high carbs or low carbs) and endogenously manufactured (liver and other body cells) LDL cholesterol so it can saturate your blood stream? i.e. radial arterial calcification Note: Vitamin K and D deficiencies are also co-factors in this? as well as Advanced glycation end products AGE’s
Other reasons:
[4] How to Cut Fat on a Ketogenic or Low Carb Diet (and Why You Might Want To) - Tuit Nutrition - Amy Berger