Noob trying IF with too many unanswered questions

[flybyjohn]

Thank you all for the advise and encouragement. I know the Keto is supposed to be a new way of life, not just a diet. I just am not sure right now if I want to make it much more than a way to lose the weight I need to in the three short months that I am aiming for. Maybe I will change my mind down the road but right now the goal is to just use anything and everything at my disposal to get to were I want to be by the end of March. My 36" pants were getting tight at the end of 2019 so I decided to get back on the wagon and lose some weight to get ready for early spring time hiking in the mountains.

If it is still too early to start IF then I can wait a little longer. I just wanted to use anything that would give me an advantage. From what I read, the longer you go in between meals, the more effective the body fat burning will be, especially if you exercise at the end of a fast.

Why do you do IF if you don’t eat really much to begin with and it lowers your energy intake? For its other benefits? Lack of hunger?

I started the IF just for the reason of using every tool I had available to lose the most weight as quickly as possible. I was eating 2000 cal a day from the start of Keto. It wasn’t hard because breakfast alone gave me nearly 1000 calories. When I started IF, I just found out that the dinner that I had the night before left me pretty satisfied and I wasn’t starving in the morning and I could easily hold off until 2:30 to 3:00 to eat. I would eat something like a sausage link or a cheesy snack at 2:30 and was pretty good until dinner where I would eat the rest of my calories with my family. I would be very satisfied at about 1600 calories or less for the day and was just looking for something else I could eat just to add more calories. So I decided to just stop when I was full and even though the calories were lower than my plan 2000, they still seem to get me through to the next day at 2:30 without me feeling really hungry. I guess eating all the calories together within that 4 hour window kind of filled me up faster than if I were to eat them all day long. The one day I did eat all 2000 calories in that 4 hours, I kind of felt sick to my stomach.

Again, I thank you all for the advice, I need all I can get.

[pamplemousse]

Besides getting a little dizzy sometimes when I get up from sitting down I feel pretty good.

Welcome, I am glad that you are trying keto to improve your health!

First, I just want to address the dizziness. I am not an expert or a health professional, but that sounds to me like you need to get a better handle on your electrolytes. Have you increased your salt intake?

As for the metabolism: eating fewer calories for a long period of time will slow your metabolism. Becoming smaller also decreases your metabolism, naturally. Things that increase your metabolism are increased caloric intake and building muscle. With your walking and hiking, and a better quality of foods, you might add muscle.

If you are eating fewer calories for a while, you might experience days where you are naturally hungrier and want to eat more within your window. I do not think that it would be a bad thing if you did (within reason).

I hope that helps.

[flybyjohn]

What do you have in your pack? I carry beef sticks, tuna in a pouch and some other stuff with me for eating cause I am never ‘sure’ if I might go down into low energy land. So I make sure I have what I need at all times with me on any hike.

Fangs, right now I have a hill that is 975’ climb from the starting point, about 2.6 miles round trip. It is right behind my house so an easy hill to just jog, hike up for practice. I usually just go without pack because it only takes about 55 minutes round trip. Sometimes I make it to several peaks and extend it to a bit more than an hour and sometimes I just ditch the trail and go straight up to the top. It is training for my spring hikes in the mountains looking for elk sheds. I will put on 12-14 miles a day starting mid march and try to get out 3 times a week. I have never been on keto before on these hikes so I usually had high calorie/carb snack bars like Cliff bars. I would burn about 7500 calories a day on those hikes. I will have to look for some good keto friendly snack foods for the future hikes.

[flybyjohn]

Thanks Pamplemousse, That is something that I keep forgetting to do. I have not really increased my salt intake and after a workout, I do thing that my muscles are telling me I need more salt. will start adding some more salt into my diet and I also thing I probably should be taking some supplements as well.

[Fangs]

Love it. I am so into mountain hikes and I thrive on them. That is a short hike cause I do like 6-7 mile hikes up the straight mountain trail to say a waterfall and stairs and more and just love it. I am a nature gal for sure but what you are doing is definitely a monster plus in your life. Great exercise, great mental clarity of enjoying it all in nature and just ‘moving’ to move and be taxing but what one needs is true nutrition to get just that in good form

Always take a pack. All times. Put in the old knife you need for survivial :), bear spray (might or might not apply LOL) and always bring food on any hike. You are keto so you have options more than me being a carnivore plan person, but regardless of that depending on how are appetite is ‘this day’ and this ‘time thru the day’ we can go down faster than one would think so any and all trips bring protein. Forget those Cliff bars etc. Even if ya shove a homemade cheeseburger into your pocket from home into your pocket at least 1/2 way thru this hike adventure you can ‘eat’ cause ya want it, if not, don’t eat

Yea I am one of prepared types cause I hike long and hard thru my days and I am a hiker thru and thru but once changing thru the hikes I realized I could get buy easily, but the ‘what if’ I get ‘whatever delayed’ comes into play since I do big hikes out there in no mans land.

Hey from what you do finding elk sheds I think at all times you need to make it more ‘about you’ and ‘survival at times on any hike’ and what food ya might require vs. just going for it and getting caught out there.

ahh, sorry me being a hiker like this I carry a pack at all times, even my hubby says, you bringing a pack for 4 mile round trip easy hike? and I am like, darn right I am!! and believe me he always uses something from my pack, my extra water or whatever and I say, SEE! LOL

I love this chat…but remember those ‘keto snacky foods’ are processed and a lot of times ‘mislabeld’ due to ‘they can get by’ with saying that labeling for manufacturers, so always go ‘real food’ by you

fun chat

[gingersmommy]

Again, I thank you all for the advice, I need all I can get.

I honestly don’t mean to be harsh, however, you seem to be discounting the suggestions that have been given by people who have successfully adopted this way of eating for a long time and know the science behind it. There are many learned members here who regularly post scientific facts regarding keto - how it’s done, metabolic process, sugar/carb addiction, cholesterol, diabetes, etc. I encourage you to check out dietdoctor.com. The content available to non-members is almost identical to that of members, without any obligation or giving out your personal information. They present the science in layman’s term. If you have time, check out the videos there. They are understandable and make sense.

Please know that I want so much for you to do well and discover what others have here. Keto can be one of the most enjoyable and easy things you can do. It results in weight loss and better metabolic and physical health.

I just feel a little sad when I see your responses that you are shooting yourself in the foot by hanging onto old preconceived notions you have from a long time of conventional dieting (most of us did).

Good luck, God bless, keep learning and continue posting!

[Bobt]

I started experimenting with fasting last spring. Mostly OMAD and a three day once. The main thing I got from fasting was finally developing a mindset that food should be based more on an as needed basis rather than eating out of habit. I usually OMAD during the week and try to up my calories on weekends to keep my body guessing.

[Shinita]

I want to see a waterfall but there are none here… Just very tiny ones a bit farther… I am a bit miserable when every game and many movies have waterfalls… Oh well.

Hiking is great, too bad I mostly just go for little walks nowadays (but I use my bicycle much more). I never did long ones, at most 8-10 hours only, in a comfortable pace. Before fat adaptation I needed some food but now I don’t. I love to be prepared, to be safe but if I reach the finish before evening, I won’t get really hungry.
But I never don’t burn 7500 kcal a day (I don’t know my numbers but they are surely way lower), John probably need way more food I do! And not everyone handles fasting and exercise the same way. I badly need a well-fasted state for hiking…

John, you can take whatever you can bring and eat cold. I would take eggs, smoked meat (probably fried), cheese. It was nuts before and when I was a high-carber, nuts and raisins. And whatever my go-to food was those times but I barely ate while hiking, I had my big meal afterwards. It’s obviously quite individual.

[Shinita]

I understand you better now.
If a tool works very well, you don’t need to add more, eating way too little can easily be a problem. It doesn’t work in a way that the less you eat, the more you lose, without a problem. There is an optimal fat-loss, if it’s too quick, that probably means significant muscle loss, metabolism slowing and it may backfire in interesting ways.
I would be very glad with 2000 kcal and unless I saw the fat-loss is quite slow, I wouldn’t go lower. It’s safer that way.
We all need some patience when losing fat.

Do IF if you feel better than way (it can be useful anyway but doing two new things easily can be too much. it’s personal though and keto sometimes automatically causes IF and vice versa, probably even very soon in some cases. so if it feels best, do it). If you aren’t hungry in the morning, it’s logical not to have breakfast and eating a bit too little for a few days isn’t necessarily a problem but longer term you need your food. At least occasionally eat more at the moment. It’s automatic for me. When I undereat for 2+ days, I become hungrier and eat more for a day or two, even if it means my eating window becomes bigger due to me unable to eat big enough meals at the moment. It’s not automatic for everyone, of course, be careful.

[flybyjohn]

I just feel a little sad when I see your responses that you are shooting yourself in the foot by hanging onto old preconceived notions you have from a long time of conventional dieting (most of us did).

I am sorry if I came off that way. I guess I don’t understand what comments I made that is going against the advise I got from all the good folks on this forum. You had asked me a question and I was just letting you know the reason I started the IF and why I was only eating the calories I was. I did take your suggestion and state that I would hold off on the IF for a while longer in that same post.

The comments that I have got so far are all good and I plan to incorporate most of them. I do need to get stronger and increase my endurance though and so I do have to train to get in shape for both my health and to keep from killing myself when I am 6 miles from a road and have 2 feet of snow to walk through. Snow shoes take a lot of energy to move around in.

The one thing that is science no matter how calories are burned by the body is that a calorie deficit will give you weight loss and a calorie excess will give you weight gain. Keto does not change this. If you lose weight on a normal keto diet plan without adding any exercise to your normal routine, then you are eating fewer total calories and/or your body increased its metabolism or rate of burning calories per hour. Having the same routine day in and day out, our bodies will come to an equilibrium whether that is on the Keto diet or any other diet. This is the point where our bodies are consuming the same calories as we are expending.

By changing to the keto diet, I understand that my body is changing its metabolism and there are many other hormonal and body functions changing as well while my body adapts to the new way of eating. I just don’t see any harm in having somewhat of a calorie deficit (albeit I don’t know exactly what that deficit is because my body is changing) while my body adapts to the new diet.

I am going to stick to the 2000 calorie a day max as my initial plan called for and continue to train. I feel great now and much better than I did 3 weeks ago.

Thanks gingersmommy, for the advise, I did not mean to make you think that I was dismissing it.

[amwassil]

The one thing that is science no matter how calories are burned by the body is that a calorie deficit will give you weight loss and a calorie excess will give you weight gain. Keto does not change this.

Actually, the science of thermodynamics applies rigorously only to a closed system. Like a lab calorimeter, where you put in a gram of stuff, heat it until it’s gone, measure the heat expended to do so. We are open not closed systems, which means there are inputs/outputs that are not precisely measurable and result in ‘messy’ non-zero-sum results.

For example. Maybe that particular cut of meat has a few more or less calories per gram than the published number. Animals don’t live in a calorimeter. Their metabolisms may be healthy or not, you don’t know. Maybe your metabolism is 80% efficient extracting energy from what you eat, not 100% per the published tables. The different macros are processed by different hormones in very different pathways. If you have any hormonal problems, then the processing does different things, including stuff it should not do, like store fat and glucose in your abdominal fat cells instead of burning it.

For example, if your insulin/glucagon ratio is haywire calories won’t much matter. If insulin is high, you are going to store energy. If glucagon is high you are going to burn energy. Independent of how many calories of energy you consume. We all know folks who gain weight just by ‘looking at food’ and those who can eat whatever they want whenever they want and never gain an oz. I was like the second until I got to 60 years old.

My dad was a perfect example. Before he had his thyroid nuked, he could eat anything, whenever he pleased and never gained an oz. After his thyroid was nuked he would gain weight, and did so for the rest of his life, eating anything no matter how little. His insulin/glucagon ratio was always haywire, but his thyroid managed to keep him in catabolic mode so he stayed low in weight and otherwise relatively healthy. Once the thyroid was gone, anabolic mode took over and he stored everything that entered his mouth. Calories were pretty much irrelevant. The insulin imbalance led to obesity, insulin resistance, pre-diabetes and finally diabetes. It also led to CVD - he had his first heart attack at the age of 63 and quadrupal bi-pass surgery before he was 65. He lived with a pacemaker for more than 20 years and was on statins for the same period.

He finally got some small control by reduing carbs, not calories. Not even keto or close to it, just reduced carbs. It was enough to get him out of anabolic storage mode and back into catabolic burn mode for the last couple years of his life.

I suspect I’m a lot like my dad. The difference is I still have my thyroid. I very likely share the same insulin/glucagon haywiredness that he did, which is why I struggle to maintain weight, not lose it.

Don’t get too dogmatic over thermodynamics. Thermodynamics in an open system is way more complicated than you imagine.

[gingersmommy]

Again, John, whatever way you feel is best for you, I wish you an easy road and much success. The beauty of keto is that we can proceed with what works best for us.

[Fangs]

I want to see a waterfall but there are none here… Just very tiny ones a bit farther… I am a bit miserable when every game and many movies have waterfalls… Oh well.

ahhh, just that around me I am in the foothills of the mountain range and I can get tough steep mountain trails and plenty of cute waterfalls to hike. I am a hiker gal most definitely You just keep on walking no matter where ya go, you see great things!!

[Fangs]

train to get in shape for both my health and to keep from killing myself when I am 6 miles from a road and have 2 feet of snow to walk through. Snow shoes take a lot of energy to move around in.

ugh ugh I used cross country skis. I tell ya those snow shoes are killers LOL they will build endurance fast and efficient. You be careful out there trekking in the deep snow Cool!!

[flybyjohn]

Fair point amwassil, but I guess I just assumed Metabolism (noun: the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life) included all the body functions, working correctly or not. Basically the rate at which your body consumes food to maintain life.

Basically to lose weight, you need to eat less fuel than your body can burn, no mater what your metabolism is. This may not be possible with a severely malfunctioning metabolism. I realize that we don’t know the exact calories we feed ourselves and we don’t know how many calories we actually burn to maintain (which can change any time). If we have a fairly normal and healthy system and we use a counter that uses our heart rate to measure used calories and we can estimate pretty close to what we feed ourselves, we can make a guess at if we are eating too much or too little. If we are eating too much then the scale will start to rise and if we eat too little then the scale will start to drop if we eat just right then the scale will stay the same, until something in our body changes.

Now the dynamic part. What we eat and how we eat it (interval fasting) may change the rate at which we burn fuel. So say by eating a little more of the right foods at the right time, our body picks up its rate of burn and so we can eat more and maintain or reduce our weight. I realize our body is always a dynamic organism but for the most part, probably 90+% of the time, if you eat a lot too much and do nothing but sit on the couch, you will start to gain body fat and if you eat a little less and do some physical activity, you will start to lose body fat. The first I am not interested in and the second is where I am trying to go.

So I say that I am trying for a 1500 cal. deficit per day. Do I know for sure that it is 1500 calories, no but it is a number that I can write down and measure. I weight myself every morning dry, and stick to the foods that are on my diet plan. I exercise and then try to hit my goal calorie deficit. I keep a log of how my progress is going and I can adjust my nutrition or exercise as needed. For myself, it would be hard to just eat anything anytime I wanted and not overdo it. Heck, I have eaten over 8000 calories some days just because I didn’t realize how many calories are in certain foods. It wasn’t hard to buy a box of donuts and have over half of them gone on the way home. So I need to measure and plan for my success. I haven’t ever gained weight when I was trying to lose it, I just gain it when I got lazy and stopped measuring it. Maybe when I reach my goal weight, I wont have to measure anymore on the keto to maintain, but I still love breads and pastries and don’t want to exclude them from my diet forever but we will see what the future holds.

[flybyjohn]

shinita,

Here is a little one that My wife, daughter and myself hiked to a couple years ago. That is me ready for a plunge. That is some really cold water. You get numb in about 5 minutes and can hardly walk in ten.

[amwassil]

@flybyjohn Here’s how I dealt with this. I did not start keto specifically to lose weight, but I thought why not lose the 25-30 pounds that make me feel clunky while I’m at it. Knowing nothing and assuming I had a daily caloric requirement of about 1800-2000 calories (I was 71 years old and not particularly active since it was mid-winter, and testosterone had been declining for years presumably), I decided to eat to a ‘slight caloric deficit’ of 1500 calories per day.

This worked and I lost a couple pounds or so per week for two months. Then I decided that was enough and started to up my weekly calories every couple of weeks. Still lost weight, only a little more slowly. Repeated. For a couple more months before the weight loss finally stopped. By then I was eating 2500 calories per day and my weight had stabilized at 150 pounds. I had lost 30-35 pounds, more than I had wanted to, but what the heck.

At 2500 calories per day, I maintained 150 pounds for a year. Then I got a full-time job at Walmart and within a couple weeks started losing weight again. I dropped to 145 before stopping the loss by upping my daily calories to 2700. Maintained that for about 6 months, then started to experiment with raw ginger root. Started to lose again and dropped to a low of 141 before stabilizing at 145 and 2800 calories per day. That’s where I’m at now, a year later. A process of trial and error.

Importantly, I never felt hungry while losing weight on keto. I think that’s a key experience. When you impose an energy deficit (I prefer to talk about energy rather than calories because calories tends to be a loaded word) your metabolism can pick up the slack from body fat. So you lose weight (hopefully mostly fat and not protein) as long as total energy expended does not exceed total energy available from both plate and body. Since there’s a limit to how much fat you can metabolize from your body daily, that sets a limit on how much deficit you can impose without causing overall metabolic slowdown. Also, there are many other processes going on that utilize energy and nutrients extracted from food. Most are very difficult to measure but must still be accounted for to avoid problems.

So, yes, I take calories into account. But I know that the different macros are metabolized very differently. A ‘calorie’ is not a ‘calorie’. I also know that testosterone, for men, and estrogen, for women, have significant influence on how energy is utilized. I also suspect, that I have haywire insulin/glucagon tilted towards glucagon and catabolism but kept under control by my thyroid. That also affects how I utilize energy. In another couple of topics a few of us are discussing stearic acid, the longest long chain fatty acid and its affects on metabolism, which from sources we’ve looked at so far seems to increase fat burn. Complications.

Since each of us is unique in many ways and have to live with a metabolism that may or may not be firing on all cylinders, I think everything must be customized. Sure, there are commonalities but I think the unique reactions and processes dominate.

[flybyjohn]

Thanks amwassil, That really shows that our bodies are changing and require a variety of energy needs, depending on what we eat and what we do. It is amazing how at 150 lbs you stabilized with 2500 “energy units”. I am surprised and it is proof that a calorie is not a calorie. Maybe this Keto thing is something to stick to long term.

[amwassil]

John, you may be interested in my macros for 2800 ‘eu’ per day:

259 grams fat / 100 grams protein / 18 grams carbs

The fat is a min, the carbs a max and the protein a target.

[Shinita]

Yay for the waterfall! Definitely not for the cold water, I only go into the nearby pond when the weather have been extremely hot for a week!