Your protein intake is within the range that we generally recommend, 1.0-1.5 g/kg lean body mass/day, assuming your lean mass is about 70% of your current weight. Your HbA1C is close to normal, so that is all to the good. If you have the full results of a recent blood test, it would be interesting to know what your inflammatory markers look like (such things as white blood cells, C-reactive protein, ferritin, etc.). Not to mention what your lipids are doing. Has your HOMA-IR score been calculated? That is supposed to be a fairly good indicator of our level of insulin resistance.
Dr. Stephen Phinney has said, in a number of lectures available online, that the first thing he tells patients who are feeling stuck is to cut back on the carbohydrate. If that doesn’t work, he tells them to eat more fat. The reasoning is this: first, the glucose in the carbohydrate we eat is the main stimulus for an insulin response. Therefore, when we are highly insulin-resistant, the less carbohydrate we eat, the better. Sugar (sucrose) should be avoided altogether, not only because of its glucose content, but also because the fructose can exacerbate insulin resistance in the liver (see Dr. Robert Lustig’s famous lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” several recordings of which are available on YouTube).
Protein has an effect on insulin, but the degree depends on the dietary context. Too much protein can elevate insulin significantly, when eaten as part of a high-carbohydrate diet, but when carbohydrate intake is sufficiently low, additional protein is matched by a corresponding increase in glucagon secretion, so that the insulin/glucagon ratio remains low. It is this ratio, according to recent research, that determines whether we are in ketosis or not. In any case, a certain amount of protein is essential to the human diet, so the insulin response is what it is. Fat is the wild card in diet. It’s effect on insulin secretion is minimal, the bare minimum necessary for us to survive (insulin is essential to survival; we just need to avoid chronically elevated levels of it). This makes fat the ideal source of calories to replace the calories we are no longer getting from carbohydrate.
So, back to your situation. You may have to cut your carbohydrate intake even below its current level, in order to get your serum glucose and insulin to decrease. Your protein intake looks good, and you probably don’t need to alter it. We are supposed to have an instinct for how much protein to eat, so if you are feeling good eating that amount, then don’t worry about it. While it is not strictly necessary from the point of getting into ketosis, we do recommend avoiding vegetable oils (actually they are all seed oils), because of their excessive percentage of polyunsaturated fats, which can be inflammatory (systemic inflammation seems to be part of insulin resistance, somehow). Stick to sources of monunsaturated and saturated fats, such as butter/ghee, tallow, lard, and bacon grease. Fruit oils (avocado, coconut, and olive) have an acceptable fatty acid profile, as well.
The one concern in what you describe is your caloric intake. We strongly advise against eating to a specific level of calories, because that risks triggering the body’s famine reflex, in which it will cut energy expenditure to meet intake and hold on to stored fat reserves to get us through the hard times (fasting, interestingly, triggers a different response). The key is to eat enough that the body feels secure about shedding excess stored fat. And the simplest way to be sure to eat enough food is to add fat to each meal until our hunger is satisfied. Too much vegetable oil will nauseate you, so stick to the healthier fats I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
When we eat to satiety, the body’s hunger and satiation hormones work in concert to set our appetite to a level that lets us metabolise both the fat in our diet and the excess fat stored in our adipose tissue. If you do this, you will find that some days you will be very hungry, and other days not so much. This is normal, and over time the match between your energy intake (both from diet and from fat stores) will pretty accurately match your energy expenditure. On a bountiful diet, the metabolic rate actually increases, and the body finds ways of spending energy (and even wasting it, if necessary). Eating to satiety should let you go for hours between meals without hunger pangs. If you should need a snack, make sure it’s low-carb and high-fat, and eat more at your meals. Over time, you are likely to find yourself automatically eating only once or twice a day, because you simply don’t want more. And the less often we eat, the lower our insulin levels for most of the day.
Okay, that’s enough to hit you with in one go. But you should now have enough background to make intelligent tweaks to your diet. Let us know how you get on, okay?