Newbie: feeling sick from all the fat

(Becky) #1

It’s been a month, almost totally kept to Keto (except for one social occasion) - I used MyFitnessPal for a couple of weeks to check my macros and have otherwise just removed all starchy foods, fruit etc. However. I’m starting to feel really greasy and nauseous from the fat. Has anyone else has this? I wondered what “healthy” fresh tasting fats I might be able to eat?

My meals include: salad (avo, pepper, spinach, cucumber, avo oil and mustard dressing) with cheese, ham, Pate, egg or olive tapenade; steak/sea bass/ lamb with cauliflower, spinach, broccoli (sometimes as cauli cheese); bacon, sausage, halloumi, mushrooms; occassional Greek yoghurt, 3 strawbs and nuts breakfast. I’m using butter, mayo, cream, coconut oil, avo oil etc.

I’m not used to so much fat and I’m pretty sure that’s what is making me feel sick. I had Keto flu about 3 days in, felt drunk and tired. I’m sure this is something different.

Any thoughts?

Thanks all, total newbie and total 2keto dube fan

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #2

Try avoiding the industrial seed oils (also known as “vegetable” oils). They contain a high ratio of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which can be nauseating.

Instead, cook with butter, bacon grease, lard, or tallow, which are very low in polyunsaturates and are mostly saturated and monounsaturated fats. That will most likely settle your stomcah.

P.S.–If you must use oil, use one of the fruit oils (avocado, coconut, or olive). They still contain more polyunsaturates than the solid fats, but not nearly as much as the seed oils.

(Becky) #3

Thank you Paul. I only use butter, avocado oil, coconut oil and olive oil. Are these okay? Do you think this is what might be making me feel sick?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #4

Dr. Phinney, one of the main researchers into the ketogenic way of eating, says that in his clinical experience, nausea on keto is usually the result of too much oil. He uses a lot of olive oil, himself, but I suppose too much could be a problem. There is also a lot of individual variation involved, here. He might be less sensitive, and you might be more sensitive.

Try this: use more butter to cook with, and save the oils for making mayonnaise and salad dressings. Then re-evaluate in a couple of weeks’ time. If that didn’t solve the problem, then you’ll have to do some more investigation to get at the cause. But I suspect you’ll find out pretty quickly.

(Bob M) #5

You can also just reduce fat. And if you’re using “butter, mayo, cream, coconut oil, avo oil etc.”, it can be tough to diagnose what’s making you ill. You can try to switch to more real meats, see what happens. If that’s OK, add back in the fat (if you feel the need), and see what happens.

For instance, if you eat meat and add something fatty (eg, mayo) to it, just eat the meat without the mayo. I usually just eat meat, though I will add a ranch dressing every once in a while.

#6

I only had nausea in my first carnivore days as it was odd to have fat without carbs (vegetables) balancing it out… It was just my total fat intake. I simply ate less fat for a while, it was very temporal.

But the type of fat may matter too. I try to minimize added fat since long and I am almost always below 10g nowadays, zero isn’t a challenge. Added fats feel different (and can’t satiate me well anyway). I can’t handle too much fat tissue without enough meat either (bacon is way too fatty for me but I can balance it out with eggs if needed. Way, way more eggs than bacon. But I stillI miss the meat so I simply don’t eat bacon if I have better options).

But my fatty protein sources are fine. Eggs, cheese, the not too lean, not too fatty meat I eat? Perfect. Unless I fry my eggs in more than minimal fat. If I want to eat more fat (maybe because I have a lot of leaner protein that day), I eat more egg yolks or the really fatty meat I like (sausage, pork ribs - the latter is too fatty but I can cut off some fat to use when I eat leaner meat). These are fatty enough for me, I have perfect macros with 65% fat too.

When I still ate some vegetables, my fried vegetables were very fatty but as the volume and weight was mostly vegetables and they were somewhat juicy so it worked (except it kept me from losing fat).
And I could eat a lot of chocolate without problems too… I actually had a cute 254g fat keto day and it didn’t feel particularly fatty, I dreamed about more… But too fatty scrambled eggs? Hell no. And I hate mayonnaise unless it has more eggs than fat and it probably isn’t called mayo anymore…

So it’s individual what feels bad for you and even being used to eating 200+ g fat all your life can’t help if the fat becomes a too big percentage of your food, regarding weight and volume and you are sensitive to that for some reason. I experienced that and changed my ways a bit.

Try to change your fat sources, hopefully you will figure out what works for you. Eating more protein and less fat may be a solution, it doesn’t work for everyone though.

(Becky) #7

Wow, thank you everyone. Your replies are so helpful. I’m going to go with reducing the added fats (mayo, homemade salad dressing) and stick to the “natural” fats (eggs, rib eye). I’ll keep you posted. Your comments made me realise I’ve gone completely overboard on fat.

(bulkbiker) #8

I’d agree with the others… I rarely add fat just eat the fats that come with the meat the way nature intended. I use my gas grill a lot (almost every day) and never add fats to cook with.

(Allie) #9

So eat less fat?

Seems an awful lot of carbs in that list of foods though…

#10

It’s all about amounts… But the carbier items (especially if they aren’t in really tiny amounts) probably don’t happen on the same day though I saw people eating carbier dishes all day on keto, that was weird. Even if all the items in the breakfast has carbs, it may be a very small one, some people can do that.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #11

Fat isn’t magical, it is merely a source of calories that doesn’t raise your insulin excessively, the way carbohydrate does. All you need is enough fat to satisfy your hunger, eating more than that is absurd. If you stick to saturated and monounsaturated fats and don’t eat past the point of satisfying your hunger, you should be fine.

(Bob M) #12

Though it also tastes pretty good. Say you make home-made buffalo wings. What about adding some ranch or blue cheese dressing? I personally rarely eat wings without one of those.

And this is where I take issue with the whole P:E concept. Under this concept, you’re automatically gaining weight if you’re eating wings with dressing. I take issue with that and in fact think it’s BS. If it WERE true, I wouldn’t have been able to lose 40+ pounds while eating low P:E. And I shouldn’t be made to feel bad because I like to have something that tastes good on my wings.

Now, do you need to eat low P:E to become ripped like Ted Naiman? That’s unclear to me.

More importantly, is there a relationship between the amount of fat or protein we eat and satiety? I think there is, particularly for TYPE (NOT amount) of fat, and I feel it’s better to concentrate on more protein than eating more fat.

However, after trying super high fat a la Jimmy Moore’s Keto Clarity, then low fat, high protein as per low P:E, then high saturated fat as per Fire in a Bottle, to me, there is a lot of grey area in terms of fat intake.

I seem to have no problems getting satiety from high protein, low fat, but also getting satiety from eating a LOT of saturated fat. But many of my meals are between those two extremes, and the effect there is less clear about satiety.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #13

It’s a very good question. Perhaps the good Dr. Naiman is a genetic freak outlier, and what works for him won’t work the rest of us. Who knows?

I do think, however, that Dr. Naiman is going a bit overboard with this concept. He has a history of running past the data.

(Khara) #14

You gotta admit though, given the results he’s gotten, he’s a walking billboard for his own nutritional experiments and beliefs. I’ve been loosely following him for a number of years. He used to be squishy slender and now he’s ripped. He physically looks like he must be doing something extreme/overboard but listening to him in interviews, he doesn’t sound extreme at all.

P:E logically sits fairly well with me. Similarly, it also resonated with me the first time I finally heard the idea “if you’ve got the fat on your body, you don’t need to be adding fat to eat ketogenically”. Not that there’s no success with eating added fats but I think a lot of folks have experienced a slow down in results and did need to reduce the fat at some point. It kind of seems to me that the people who need to be adding fats on a ketogenic diet are the athletes or already low body fat folks. For myself and anyone else not yet there, it’s currently sounding most logical to me to focus mostly on just whole food fats (a nice steak) for most meals. Sure, add some sauces now and then, enjoy life, but sauces (added fats) don’t need to be a rule.

I remember early on all the fat that was being touted. Fat bombs, BP coffee. I thought I had to be doing that to eat keto. It’s just not the case. I did have success. Even got skinny. But I was a squishy skinny. Maybe continued fasting would’ve helped. I’m not sure. I’m recently restarting. My brain is in a different place. It feels more logical to me this time to just focus on the whole foods. Starting with the protein. Top my veggies with butter, but just to the extent that it tastes good. No intentional piling on of extra fat. I think for the OP if I was feeling sick or greasy I’d listen to that and lessen the fat. Going through the process of getting back to where we can listen to our bodies and respond to signals I think is a part of the healing.

#15

Can’t disagree with that.

(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.) #16

May I ask what the P:E concept is?

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #17

The layman’s explanation (and probably more than you want to know):

http://www.burnfatnotsugar.com/p2e/AboutP2E.html

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #18

The idea is ultimately based on the work of Raubenheimer and Simpson, whose studies indicate that mammals have a pretty good instinct for getting the correct amount of protein (in the case of human beings it seems to average about 15% of calories). They also showed that if the diet is protein-poor, the animal will eat more food until the need for protein is satisfied; if the diet is protein-rich, the animal will eat less. This is the basis of the Protein:Energy ratio idea.

In human beings, this seems to work up to a point, but once the need for protein is satisfied, hunger may still not be. At that point, other sources of energy are required, and we recommend eating fat over carbohydrate, because of its minimal effect on insulin levels.

A further issue is that people’s protein needs seem to be widely variable from individual to individual (and possibly over time in the same individual, but I don’t know if that’s ever been studied). The study that determined our minimum need for protein (0.6 grams/kg/day) showed a lot of divergent data points. The average nitrogen need per day worked out to 0.6 g/kg of protein, but the need was much lower than that for some people and much higher than that for others in the study.

So it would seem that the key is to figure out how much protein feels right for you and then to fill in with fat to satisfy the rest of your hunger. We know from testimony in posts on this site that some people are happy with relatively less protein and a lot of fat, whereas others need more protein and less fat in order to be satisfied. Everyone needs to do some experimenting to find what works best in their individual circumstances.

(Bob M) #19

I find it to be – tricky. The problem occurs, too, that calories matter to some extent for satiety. For instance, today for “lunch” (my first meal of the day), I had 3/4 pound of lean sliced deli ham and 1 pork breakfast sausage. I knew after eating that, it wasn’t enough. So, I added a can of tuna in water to it.

6 hours later, I’m getting a bit hungry. Higher protein does seem to work, but I find if I don’t eat enough calories, I get hungry earlier that if I had something with a bit more fat (or I could add more protein calories).

And then there’s the type of fats – egad, that’s a tough one.

Was in a Twitter thread with two other males, and we all tried the higher sat fat idea of Fire In a Bottle. We all gained weight and we all went back to lower fat.

But I did find I got quite a bit of satiety if I ate enough sat fat, but if you’re keeping away from most starches (wheat, sweet potato, etc.), it’s tough to get that much sat fat. So, I turned to dairy to get my sat fat, but dairy has its own issues, including possible inflammation.

Did I mess things up by eating dairy? Too many variables…

On the Twitter thread, there was some discussion of whether people with low PUFA content have a lowered effect from high sat fat. It’s hard to tell, because there’s no test to see what the content of your fat cells is…

And I wonder if body type has something to do with it. I am more muscular now than in a long time, and of course Ted Naiman is very muscular. Maybe those (mainly men, but could be women too) people with more musculature do better with lower fat, higher protein?

Too many questions, not enough answers.

#20

I’d be willing to bet money on this being a factor. I haven’t always been as muscular as I am currently (depends very much on which sports I’m doing) but I have always been able to put on muscle fairly easily. I definitely prefer and do better on higher protein/lower (not low) fat. FWIW I’m female.