And how do you track your staticness, this is not a word, of your metabolism if you don’t track what you eat?
Better, how do you control that?
Like I said, track what you can easily control.
And yes, I know caloric restriction causes your BMR to drop. At what rate though? If you don’t take diet breaks, longest I will go in caloric deficit is 12 weeks, than your dropping BMR is more attributed to weighing less and needing less than your metabolism slowing to screeching halt in a 12 week period.
People certainly freak out too much about weight loss stalls. Women especially need to understand how the phases of our menstrual cycle influence our scale weight, insulin sensitivity and cravings. Everyone who watches the scale needs to understand how much fluctuation can be due to hydration, poop or inflammation, and there’s a huge number of causes of inflammation that one might not be conscious of.
I disagree that weight loss is a necessary byproduct of hormones rebalancing though, one can have balanced hormones & great biomarkers and still overeat ones energy needs for emotional or addictive/learned response reasons, and other reasons too. If someone’s been stalled for 6+ weeks, isn’t reaching their goal and has ruled out scale weight factors like above, then it’s appropriate to look at reducing energy intake or increasing energy output or both. And maybe that’s by introducing fasting, exercise, cutting out certain foods, maybe it’s just tedious portion size control/accounting, maybe it’s by drinking a glass of water before a meal, chewing food longer and eating slower, making a conscious effort to listen to satiety signalling, avoiding trigger foods, learning to deal with stressful situations in a different way, learning new ways to find pleasure that can substitute for food-pleasure, maybe other ways.
…and yes sometimes someone is already at too extreme of a calorie deficit and has tanked their metabolism and needs to back off & eat more for a bit to rev things back up, too.
I certainly am hoping to find this at some point myself.
I believe I could easily eat my self to homeostasis and stay around 20-25 percent bf. However, I don’t want to be that high in BF. I want to live in the 15-18 percent BF range.
Once I get to my goal weight, I plan to implement the hunger and satiety intuitive eating model, but I will be hard pressed to not “track” my intake loosely from here on.
Meaning food scale will be put up, but the tracking and understanding how the “amount” of food, or calories whatever we are calling it, is effecting my weight gains/losses.
That’s why I ONLY weigh after both 
In which case their metabolism would adjust up and burn off the excess. It’s like Robert Lustig said about kids and cookies.
Give a skinny kid (metabolically healthy) a cookie and they run around the playground to burn the excess energy.
Give a fat kid (metabolically deranged) a cookie and they want another cookie.
This is also where the “what” you eat versus “how much” comes into play.
If you’re starting from a metabolically healthy place, it would be difficult to over eat fat, but it’s quite easy to over eat sugar, because the sugar causes a release of insulin and switches you from burning mode to storage mode. Back in the day, it wasn’t a big deal. Eating fruit at harvest time would help the body store energy for the winter. Fast forward a millennia, and we’re eating the sugar ALL the time in nearly everything we eat, and that insulin switch gets stuck in storage mode.
That brings us back around to the CICO problem, particularly in regards to metabolic derangement. Say though some kind of Gandalf style magic, you are able to determine that you burn exactly 1000 calories a day and that number won’t change.
If you eat 1000 calories, but your insulin switch is stuck on, your body grabs 200 of those 1000 calories and converts it to fat, and sticks it in the fat warehouse just like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So now, your body only has 800 of the calories to work with instead of the 1000, so what happens? You get hungry. You eat another 200 calories to make up for the 200 that went to storage. But now insulin grabs some of those calories to store too, so you’re still at a deficit… yet gaining weight.
So let’s say so push through the hunger and don’t supplement the 200 calories that were lost to storage? Keep it up and your metabolic rate will lower. I know, we said it was magically locked at 1000, but if the body continually only has 800 calories to work with, it will adjust down.
Problem solved right? You’re not hungry anymore. Maybe you feel a little cool since body temp and blood circulation is one of the main adjustments your body will make. Except you’re still taking in the 1000 calories you THOUGHT you needed, and storing 200 EVERY day.
In this scenario (which is exactly what anyone with T2D and/or pre-diabetes has unknowingly experienced), what keto does is allow the insulin switch to start working again. As to that fasting, and the switch stays off, and allows the body to access the fat warehouse.
****Side note, I’ve been brainstorming for a good Keto based restaurant name, and I think we found it: Fat Warehouse
Back to the CICO issue, that change from 1000 BMR to 800 BMR isn’t something an online calculator can figure out.
Only for some people, and only for a time period, and only to a certain extent. People can and do gain bodyfat on keto.
For you, maybe. Ask my empty bag of macadamias what it thinks about that. (and yes I am metabolically healthy)
Plenty of people are very insulin sensitive and metabolically flexible and have no problem accessing energy in fat storage, even when eating carbs regularly. To your main point I agree. This is why I continuously review and change up my own diet, so I can have periods of energy deficit (whether by fasting or PSMF or whatnot) mixed up with periods of eating at TDEE/diet breaks, along with keeping an eye on my BMR and TDEE by measuring basal temperature, resting heart rate and hormone levels.
But being fat-adapted and insulin sensitive doesn’t address other reasons for overeating. Many of us who stall on keto may find those issues are the hardest to deal with, and need to be dealt with in order to reach our health goals.
Right, they AREN’T metabolically deranged…yet.
I said fat. Macadamia nuts are high in fat, but they also have sugar/starch.
Now can we please address the “Fat Warehouse” concept? I think it could be a national chain.
1 oz has 21g fat, 2g protein, 4g carbs(2g fiber) so 2g net. Are you only talking about eating 100% pure fat (e.g. sipping MCT oil)?
LOL re Fat Warehouse. I think the market for keto is still fairly niche and the optics are not great at least for my taste. I mean, I won’t shop in Dress Barn either, but some people do.
I don’t subscribe to CICO, because it didn’t work that way for me in the past. But since I started keto in mid May, I’ve been tracking my macros in Cronometer, so I have a record of calories in and daily caloric deficit. Here’s what I found since May 31 when I began tracking.
Calories in since May 31:
45,253 calories = 12.92 lbs
Caloric deficit since May 31:
58,217 calories = 16.63 lbs
Weight
May 31 283.5
June 28 267.2
Total Loss 16.3 lbs
I’m a bit surprised the total loss corresponds so well to the deficit. It may just be a coincidence. I’m curious how this might look in the next 30 days as my loss may slow down.
I ate very similar the first two weeks on keto when I wasn’t keeping records and lost 18 lbs the first two weeks vs 16 lbs the past four weeks. I certainly wasn’t generating that high of a caloric deficit, and as we know, much of that loss was water.
Just goes to show there are a lot of variables and unknowns when it comes to weight loss.
I’m buying more and more into the idea that some foods cause a gorge instinct in people. I think nuts are one of them. Something to do with combinations of fat, salt, and sweet. I can put away a huge amount of the Blue Diamond Habanero BBQ almonds, but I wouldn’t be able to do the same with plain unsalted almonds.
It is certainly quite a coincidence! How are you measuring your calorie output to know the deficit?
Ellie, I use Cronometer.com. You can create and update your profile so it can track your basal metabolic rate, along with calories burned from exercise, plus calories consumed, as well as set it to give you macro baselines for keto. It will calculate all this, along with the daily calorie deficit. It’s a great way to manage your eating on keto – or any other WoE for that matter.
But all it can ever calculate is a theoretical estimate based on assumed averages. It can’t track your metabolic rate, only a model number based on your height and weight.
As I mentioned in my previous motorbike post, the BMR and output is not measurable in any meaningful way, and may vary daily and is affected by the food you take in and the particular hormonal effect. I admit that the similarity of the numbers is amusing in your case, but as I can see you are, I would be sceptical.
Personally I’ve tracked my calories in/calories out and weight for long periods using cronometer for calories-in, fitbit for calories-out and a bluetooth scale, and it does match pretty well over the long run for me as well. I don’t calorie-restrict beforehand or eat fat to satiety but go by reasonable portion size, nutrient density, plate composition and meal timing, prioritizing protein and nutrient-dense foods.
