No appetite starting keto?

(Sophia Laurin) #1

I have been on keto for about a week , I have some symptoms of keto flu which are lessened by electrolytes . But one thing I am having a hard time with is lack of appetite and being bothered by fatty mouth feel in many of the foods I eat . Anyone else experience this ?

#2

Appetites wax & wane - it’s perfectly normal.

(mole person) #3

What are the sorts of foods that are bothering you?

(Sophia Laurin) #4

Everything fatty bothers me ! I think I’m not used to it , for example I love avocado . And can’t stand it on this diet unless it’s in a shake . I tried to make cauliflower mash . Also a texture issue for me . I feel hyper aware of the fat I’m ingesting . I think I’ll be roasting my veggies and keeping it simple with a lot of butter or oil . The only time I have felt satisfied and good after eating is when I eat chicken wings which aren’t ideal for health . Or coffee with heavy cream .

Mentally I feel like a million bucks . I love how this dietary change is making me feel . Hopefully I can get my tastebuds on board with more firm textured foods .

(Carl Keller) #5

My taste buds woke up after a few weeks of keto. Things I didn’t like in the past, I now enjoy. I believe processed foods really do a number on our sense of taste . Hopefully you will find more things that you now like. I encourage you to try new things. You don’t have limit yourself to things like cauliflower if it’s not doing it for you.

(mole person) #6

What’s wrong with chicken wings? They are great on this diet!

You don’t need to go crazy with added fats on this diet unless you are starving and need to add a lot of extra fat to become satiated. The most important thing is to keep your carbs low, preferably under 20 net carbs. That will ensure you are in ketosis. After that pick proteins that you like. Fattier is better, but they don’t all have to be. You like wings, that’s great, they have skin and that is fatty. How about salmon? If you can’t stand fatty meats right now, have a leaner one but have a salad with olive oil and some high fat cheese with it. Roasted veggies with butter or oil is perfect. I like to melt some chedder on mine too.

Fat is in this diet so you don’t starve. It’s our main energy source once we restrict the carbs. But we have fat on our bodies, and as long as you aren’t hungry there is no reason to eat more fat than you want.

Just don’t leave the table hungry. This is not a diet of calorie restriction, and skimping on fat because you’re hoping it will make you lose body fat faster is a losing game. You’ll end up with a slowed metabolism, and lose fat slower if at all.

#7

the fatty mouthfeel bothered me too, at first. i started drinking cold sparkling water with lemon, which made me feel like i was washing the feeling away. i also started eating within a few hours a day (IF 20/4) and that helped too. it doesn’t bother me anymore, so my advice is to just wait it out.

(Carl Keller) #8

Good call Ilana, I forgot to address this! :smiley:

(Sophia Laurin) #9

Thanks Carl ! What are a few of some of your favourite dishes ?

(Carl Keller) #10

I’m prettty simple: single item whole foods with a bit of seasoning. Ribeyes, chicken wings, pork or beef roast, bacon, eggs, burgers, salads, just about any green vegetable.

You are quite welcome. :slight_smile:

(Sophia Laurin) #11

That’s great advice! Thank you !
How many meals a day/ calorie range are you in ? I work out , mostly cardio about 5 days a week if that helps .

(Sophia Laurin) #12

i like the simplicity , there are so many recipes that try and replicate eating the carbs and maybe keeping it simple is the way to go !

(mole person) #13

I’ll tell you a bit about myself. I was never very overweight. I put on about 15 lbs over my 40’s that I couldn’t shed (I’d never been willing or able to calorie restrict). Then, suddenly on turning 50, I hit pre-menopause and another 10 lbs added itself to my small frame virtually overnight. I hated it but didn’t know what to do. Then I heard a Gary Taubes podcast and decided to try the ketogenic diet.

When I started eating ketogenically I lost the first ten pounds with relative ease. I skipped breakfast and didn’t eat till noon but that had always been my practice anyhow. But after 10 lbs I stalled out completely.

I started intermittent feeding after that. I started with16/8 but quickly after that went OMAD. OMAD is one meal a day, essentially all your food in a single meal with no additional snacking anywhere. I wasn’t a perfect OMADer, as I drank coffee with cream many times a day, but that move was enough to start the fat losses again. And I really enjoyed the freedom and simplicity.

I did eventually stall again about 5 lbs from my current weight of 108 lbs. But by then I’d loosened up a bit. I was having too much coffee with cream, and was tending to have some chocolate and sometimes Chocolate+nut butter at night while watching TV. I decided to count my macros and saw that the cream and dessert were pushing my carbs much higher then they should be. I started drinking my coffee black and skipping the dessert and the final pounds melted away.

In fact, if I do this faithfully I keep dropping below my current weight so I’ve tended to let up on strictness when I’m around my goal weight. I’ll often eat a second meal, and I’ll have 1 or 2 coffees with added cream and a bit of a treat again in the evening. If my weight goes back up a few pounds I just dial those things back for a week or two. It’s easy again, just like it was before forty, I just have to stick to keto which I love now anyhow.

In answer to your question about calories, I took the keto promise to heart from the beginning and never counted them. The only time I got an idea of what they were was when I was checking my macros before I lost the last 5 pounds. I was eating around 1200 at the time, but it varied a lot.

I work out too, and I think it’s great and very healthy for all sorts of reasons but it doesn’t help much with fat losses. One thing I do recommend if you work out is take your measurements. They will prove a better indication of your fat losses than scale weight for someone who is putting on lean mass.

I wrote all this to give an indication of how fat loss goes on this diet. It’s not going to be “do x and get to goal” you have to find what gets you going and then reevaluate when you stall. But this diet allows you to do that.

Once you’re fat adapted eating one meal a day just isn’t hard. And eventually (in my case, after about a year) one can go the entire day without ever thinking about eating until dinner (or whatever OMAD time is).

With respect to simplicity I’m a huge proponent. The foods that mimic the carby treats we loved before are almost always the carbiest things one can have on this diet. I pretty much buy nothing with a label, and the few things that I do, I’m aware that they are the very things that trip me up on occasion.

(Sophia Laurin) #14

Thanks for sharing so much Information! It gives me a bit of insight for mine though it is very differently. I’m 32 years old . I was in the military , extremely physically fit and very little body fat . I had my daughter and had complications with my pregnancy and gained 100 pounds, some of it water . Turns out I have PCOS which made a lot of sense because when I was pregnant I had very little appetite and wasn’t overeating. I started to have issues with my cycle. I wound up losing most of the weight and suddenly my cholesterol drastically went up and I gained 30 pounds in the blink of an eye . I trained , intermittent fasted , cut gluten , I don’t eat processed food and it was absolutely futile .my doctor had recommended this for a long time , I was really skeptial but I was really tired of the weight and also feeling terrible all the time !!

I think I have about 50 pounds to lose . In a matter of a week I feel like I have deflated . I’ve been reading about the diet but I just want to do it right the first time and I’m nervous to make mistakes . Listening to my body seems to help , there is a lot of mixed information out there . In fact I was reading on another threat that if you have a lot of body fat that you shouldn’t be adding the extra fat into your meals .

Since you also train , does BCAA or any other supplement effect ketosis (no sugar of course )

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #15

We’re still figuring it out, including the experts. You will also read that you should be careful of too much protein, that “too much protein is not even a thing,” and so forth. Oh, and my favorite: I have learned from these forums both that coffee helps the body maintain ketosis, and that coffee kicks us out of ketosis. Go figure!

I personally am not a fan of calorie-counting—one of the things that makes the ketogenic diet possible for me is the ability to ignore calories by eating to satiety. Being careful of added fat makes sense only if you are going to eat to a target, and not trust your body. I found that very soon after my going keto, the hormones that signal satiety suddenly started working again, and I learned the difference between “being full” and “being satisfied,” two very different things.

People are afraid that if we eat too much fat, our body won’t metabolize its stored fat, but my experience is that when I eat to satiety, my body sets my appetite to a level which allows it to burn both the fat from my body and the fat from my food. (This is in the context of low carbohydrate, of course.) I don’t know how many calories that is, but the body has mechanisms, developed during 2,000,000 years of evolution, to determine the correct level.

Even on keto, if we don’t get enough calories (and fat calories stimulate insulin production the least), the body still won’t release the excess stored fat, because it thinks there’s a famine going on. So the moral of the story is don’t force yourself to eat fat, but don’t shun it, either. But there’s some wiggle room, since the body has mechanisms to compensate for both the lack of food and the abundance of it.

(mole person) #16

Reading and listening to podcasts is the best thing you can do. The more deeply you understand how the diet works on your metabolism the less you can make mistakes, because it all just makes sense. But, to me at least, you sound very serious, and in general that is a good indication of how successful someone will be.

You don’t have to worry too much about making mistakes, everyone makes them. The diet isn’t so sensitive that you will go back to square one as some people sometimes fear. Making a mistake and learning from it is all to the good. If you have any questions just ask here. There is a wealth of knowledge on this forum and the people are very nice here.

This is just partly true, but also partly false. One the standard american diet we get most of our energy from carbohydrates. But carbohydrates keep our insulin high which prevents us from burning fats. So on the ketogenic diet we teach our bodies to burn fat instead by depriving it of carbohydrates. But since carbs were our energy source, when you cut it out, if you also cut out fat, you have nothing left for energy since you are only supposed to be eating enough protein to support your lean tissue.

So at least at the beginning of this diet it’s important to eat plenty of fats. Your body sees there is lots of food and starts changing it’s metabolism to be good at burning fat. Now you do have fat on your body and eventually your body is going to stop caring where it gets its fat from. When that happens you can start having a bit less fat in your food so that instead your body will take fat from your cells instead of your mouth.

But, you don’t want to rush this. Just keep eating ketogenically. So <20 net carbs, moderate protein, and add fat to every meal until you’re full. But you never need to eat to fill some fat macro. Just make sure you leave each meal satiated and over the next few weeks you will see your hunger starts to decline. When that happens, just eat less fat. You can let your body tell you how much it needs.

The only people who really need to eat to fill a fat macro are people like me. Once you have no body fat left that you want to burn off as fuel that’s when it’s time to begin eating the entire fat macro. But before I got to my goal, I never worried about how much fat I ate. I thought about how much carbs, and even how much protein to a lesser extent, but fat i just used to pad my meals so that I wouldn’t be hungry.

This is important though, don’t restrict fat hoping to lose weight faster. This will lead to the same metabolic slowdown that all the other calorie restricting diets result in.

I hope this helps.

(Sophia Laurin) #17

Thanks girl ! That makes a lot of sense ! You’re right this forum is very supportive :blush: