Hi Guys! cheers me up just hear you’se guys laugh!
I have a calorie question. My understanding of the macro nutrients, protein, carbohydrates and fat is that protein and fat are structural elements in our bodies, but carbohydrates are not.
As an analogy , imagine building a shed, using 2x4’s(protein) and insulation(fat) According to the calorie counters, protein has 4 calories/gram, fat has 9 calories/gram, and carbohydrates has 4 calories/gram.
I don’t understand,
See if I were to use all my protein and fat as energy, that would be equivalent to setting my lumber and insulation on fire! Which makes it difficult to build a shed (or a body)
I can see all 4 calories of carbs being used as fuel, but only a proportion of protein and fat being used as fuel. So what sense does it make to determine energy needs using calories, when hopefully we are not getting all the energy out of our ingesting fat, and protein, but are also using fat and protein to repair/build our bodies? This isn’t life and death, but it sure is a puzzle to me, and maybe to you! Thanks. keto on!
My Calorie conundrum
The reason that it’s a puzzle is that your analogy is pretty much wrong. You are extrapolating the idea that you maintain muscle mass, you need to eat some protein (though it is very little for most people e.g. 0.6g/Kg of Lean Body Mass). As I understand it you use some amino acids and enzymes you get from protein for muscle maintenance as you digest it and liberate the energy (calories) so you can do both with the same macro substrate (not burning the timber).
Fat may be insulation on the body in reality but of course it doesn’t really come from eating fat. Most people’s excess fat came from converting carbs to fat via insulin. Fat you eat is energy, pure and simple as long as you are keto. If you are high insulin, the body will try to store it just like the fat you made out of carbs but otherwise, it is just calories. You don’t need it to replenish “fat stores”, nor do you need much in the way of stores (5-15%).
You need no calories from Carbs since the main effect of eating carbs in not to give you energy but to raise insulin with all it’s concomitant negative impacts.
Thanks Capnbob
Well yep, it was a pretty poor analogy! And it is bit of geeky question.
I am not sure I understand the protein part. I thought protein was ‘changed’ in the liver to glucose, and then transported to different parts of our body. I don’t understand how energy can be created from protein without destroying its rebuilding capacity in the body (like collagen)
This is where my anaology really broke down. I didn’t really want to say insulation, but I was trying to differentiate between protein and fat as building materials. If you eat to much fat in keto, you will store it. fat/cholesterol is a building block in our body, we need it for the construction of every cell, for myleination of nerves, for hormones. So some of that fat must be used by the body build/repair the body. So to me that means if we, for example, ingest 100 grams of fat (900 calories), maybe only 90 grams will be used for energy, and 10 for the body.
That is GNG, and CAN happen but isn’t the usual, primary or only thing that happens to protein. It happens if there isn’t a better substrate for making glucose. Liver will also make it out of fat.
Not really true. It might happen in a high insulin environment but healthy metabolism people who massively overeat fat don’t store any of it (lots of n=1 experiments out there). Again, the fat you eat is NOT the fat you become. Same with cholesterol - 75% of your serum cholesterol is made NOT eaten and thus you probably don’t really NEED to eat any.
I don’t know enough about metabolism science to answer everything but the fundamental concept you seem to be applying, that processing a macro can only have one outcome or must create exclusive shares of the basic resource doesn’t seem to be true. That is why the burning analogy may not really work or that you need to think of the ash/embers left are also useful to the body (not just trashed).
That’s not necessarily true, either. Quite a few experiments with eating huge amounts of excess fat have resulted in no weight gain, (look up body-builder/spokesmodel Jason Wittrock on YouTube and watch his 21-day 4000-calorie challenge) and sometimes even weight LOSS. In addition, @DaveKeto Dave Feldman has discovered that if you eat a bunch of excess fat calories the three days before you take a standard blood cholesterol panel, your cholesterol numbers will PLUMMET (see the cholesterol drop experiment on his website HERE). The cholesterol delivery system to bring energy to the cells is a complex and amazing thing.
So, are we saying that it’s not possible to overeat fat? And the body will use up all ingested fat however much you ingest?
No - not for everyone. There are many versions of n=1s who have done this with a healthy metabolism (lean/fit) but @KetoInThe.UK just did a fat overeating experiment (and she doesn’t believe her metabolism is healthy (BF 47%)) and lost weight overeating pure fat for 5 days.
This is unlikely to be the total mechanism, though there is probably some rise in BMR. Most of it is probably 
'd out!
I would like to understand where the extra fat goes too cause in the aforementioned test well… there wasn’t that much pooping going around 
Yes, I watched your very good video and you mentioned there was just one event which wasn’t good… not sure how that might relate.
Just thinking out loud but in your experiment, you probably only out-ate your TDEE but about 4000-5000kcal over the week and because it was so calorie dense but volume limited, that it is possible that between gut dysfunction (due to the shock of the pure fat diet) and the limited physical volume (most of which was water) that one wouldn’t expect a big bowel movement to get rid of excess fat OR necessarily any BM within the window of the experiment, since apparently we can store up to 10lbs of food in our alimentary system in various stages of digestion. Since you probably only consumed a little under 300g of non-water food volume from the cream per day (even when mixed with SF jelly and nut milk) so you didn’t necessarily have a need to evacuate due to volume.
What this experiment did to your gut, temporarily, is another unknown which also makes it harder to know what the hell went on.
Anyway, just some thoughts… keep up the great work educating us with n=1’s.
PS - one of the more interesting things from the video was the contradictory impact of cortisol that seemed to be able to overwhelm the basic mechanics of keto. I know it isn’t definitive but if your theory is correct, that is a fascinating effect per se and in its scale. I am having work stress and poor sleep recently and had relatively massive swings (2-4lbs per day) in mostly water weight even when the diet hasn’t varied that much. I never would have thought that cortisol could have these impacts but I am beginning to think it could be a major contributor. Thanks again!
Protein is disassembled into its constituent amino acids in the digestive tract, and these amino acids go into the “labile pool” of amino acids. Some will get reassembled into proteins that the body needs for building tissues, some will be used by the liver to create the glucose certain organs need for energy (gluconeogenesis), some will remain in the labile pool.
Carbohydrate molecules are cleaved in the digestive tract into their constituent glucose molecules and absorbed into the bloodstream. Too high a level of glucose in the blood is a metabolic emergency that must be dealt with as rapidly as possible. The pancreas secretes insulin to tell muscles and fat cells to clear the glucose from the blood by burning it or storing it as triglycerides, respectively. Any sucrose among that carbohydrate is cleaved into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the fructose is sent to the liver to be metabolized. Too much fructose, delivered too fast, promotes de novo lipogenesis and leads to fatty liver disease, among other problems.
Fat is a high-energy molecule, and in the presence of insulin, it is sent to the adipose tissue for storage. In the absence of insulin, however, it goes to the muscles and other cells to be metabolized in the mitochondria. A healthy mitochondrion can make use of quite a lot of fat, which is a good reason to keep insulin low. Fatty acids, being insoluble in water, are transported through the blood in lipoproteins to the cells that need the energy.
Cholesterol is one of the building-blocks of cell walls, as well as the substrate for many important hormones (one of which is testosterone). It, too, is transported to the cells inside lipoproteins, but it is not released until the lipoproteins have first delivered their cargo of triglycerides.
This is the normal pattern. Yes, protein can be burned for energy, and fat can be turned into sugar, and so on, but these processes are inefficient, so the body resorts to them only when necessary.
IMO, and with nearly 20 years of practice, is that eating lot’s of fat (over the 60% macro level) will not cause you to gain fat. But, in lipolitically adapted people, (especially myself) in can prevent additional fat loss.
In the beginning, when restoration of hormonal balance is the priority, it’s fine. Once hormonal normalization is achieved, a 35% protein macro combined with a 60% fat one works well when trying to lose additional fat. Even at 35%, little protein will be converted to glucose, with your body drawing on stored fat instead. Protein causes only about a 10% insulin secretion compared to carbs. Merely eat that macro to satiety, then make sure you’re hungry by the nest time you eat.
The reasoning behind this is that when you consume high levels of fat, more glycerol is available for gluconeogenesis. That’s what happens when the fat molecule is broken, and is what the glycerol is for. Protein, on the other hand, is primarily used for other bodily functions, with conversion to glucose only in situations when other substrates are not available. If you’re converting protein to glucose, you may not be eating enough. So, excess glycerol production from dietary fat (and associated fatty acids) certainly may prevent the burning of stored body fat.
sure thing it/s here http://po.st/3000cal but note that I just noticed the cortisol issue, don’t quite have a solution other than “sleep!”
My understanding is that LDL plummets because if you’re eating a lot of fat, you’re getting most of your energy from chylomicrons from ingested fat and so your liver doesn’t need to produce as many LDL lipoproteins. That’s what I sem to recall from Dave Feldman interview.
Yes, thank you. I think the point I was trying to make (indirectly) is that calorie counting is not very useful. It is a damn poor guide because: fat is a structural element in the body and an energy source. 2 protein is a structural element in the body and secondarily an energy source, 3. carbohydrates are just generally an energy source. So counting the calories in protein, fat and carbs and thinking this is my energy for the day is very misleading.