Noob trying IF with too many unanswered questions

[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!