Hi
I have now been back on KETO for one week, I always have a big loss the first week and then after that I find that I am not hungry and then I seem to stall. I have a massive salad for lunch with salmon, avocado etc and a bag of pork scratching then a couple of coffees with cream but then I dont need anything else, does anyone else have this problem?
What makes you think you need more than that?
Reduced appetite is one of the benefits of keto, listen to your body.
Weightloss is not linear. Your body will be re-composing its structures as you burn fat for energy and the scales may show the same number for weeks at a time whilst you change clothing size several times. Eat a good healthy ketogenic diet to satiation and give the process time to work. [easier said than done sometimes]
Sometimes I undereat a bit but
I am mildly curious about your food intake, I canât know from the description only but it easily may be too little. Do you eat enough protein? Maybe donât fill your stomach with lighter saladsâŚ? I donât know how your satiation works but I saw people complaining about eating too little and seemingly doing their best to get satiated with the least amount of calories, maybe subconsciously. Your food looks better than that but maybe itâs still not dense and protein rich enoughâŚ?
Your body is healing, weight loss will stop and start, itâs never a straight line.
Some may not agree, but my feeling is that in the beginning, you should eat at least 2-3 meals a day with no snacking in between. I had never eaten three meals a day before I started keto, but believe me, it wasnât a hardship (delicious), and my body said âno moreâ after doing that about three weeks. Thatâs when I naturally switched to two meals a day and it was not difficult. Until then, eating regularly helped me switch to fat burning and eliminate all my carb cravings and compulsion to overeat/binge. I think it is restorative to provide your body sufficient, regular and predictable sustenance while your metabolism switches. This is not the time to âdietâ or restrict your food. Obviously, you donât want to force feed yourself, but there was never a time when I couldnât entertain a small meal during this period. Once your body acclimates, then you can switch to TMAD or OMAD.
Breakfast and lunch do not have to be elaborate âmeals.â Scramble a 2-3 eggs in butter and have with a piece of bacon or two. Lunch can be whatever clean keto food you can pull out of the fridge that is eaten in one sitting - it doesnât have to involve a lot of prep to be a âmeal.â Maybe eat your salad then but donât make it so large as to feel stuffed. Dinner can be a piece of meat and a steamed vegetable. Again, you wonât be doing this forever and enjoy it while it lasts. I think it will help you very much.
Best.
May I conclude that youâve been âon and offâ keto? If so, before you can expect anything useful to start happening the basic requirement is to get into ketosis and stay there consistently - by which I mean 100%. Keto is a process of metabolic normalization that takes time, depending on the specific damage and degree of severity that needs fixing. Normalizing weight and body comp is only a small part of it. And generally, fat loss occurs as normalization progresses. Sure, you can force it by using keto as the low carb version of CICO - but that will only screw things up even worse.
At lunch i have a salad, majority spinach, few plum tomatoes, cucumber, red pepper, boiled egg, piece of smoked salmon, avocado and plenty of mayonnaise and himalayan salt on the salad, followed by a small bag of pork scratchings, i drink rooibos all day long and then i have a couple of coffees with cream, the when I get home from work I really arent hungry at all, dont get me wrong I could eat but I am just trying to eat when hungry
Looks like youâre filling up on salad. Many people (including me) believe that vegetables are optional on keto. Try reducing â or even eliminating â the veg. Then you might not feel so full, and youâll have more room for protein foods.
Just my quick first impressions and suggestions. Ditch the mayo, itâs loading your system with PUFAs. Yes, we need a little PUFA, especially O3, but very little overall. Likely the smoked salmon contains all you need. Iâd also ditch the spinach, tomatoes, cukes and red peppers - I know it may seem strange, but the nutritional benefits are minimal. âBut, but⌠the carbs arenât muchâŚâ No, but they punch well above their weight. Also, you donât need any of that stuff and many folks discover that eating various and/or specific veggies causes digestive/metabolic issues. You may be one of them, but you will not find out until you stop consuming them for a while. In my opinion pork scratchings are just keto junk food. Eat more salmon or another avocado if youâre still hungry, not pork scratchings. Iâd also cut back on the Rooibos. From what I know about that stuff, itâs more like medication than food. Maybe youâre drinking it in quantities that are causing you problems. If you need to fill your stomach with something drink salted water. Put some of your Himalayan salt in a quart bottle, fill with water and drink that all day instead of Rooibos and coffee. Best wishes and hope you figure out what to do.
I thought filling up on salad vegetables would be good tbh, i still have a lot to learn about this new way of eating
I still donât know the amounts but this may be a bit low on protein. Maybe not, I donât even know your protein need but it seems you satiate yourself with lots of vegs and added fat, itâs easy to get too little protein and nutrients that wayâŚ
Itâs good for some people and bad for others I suppose. Vegetables are unhealthy for some. They may trigger too easy satiation for volume eaters (or whoever else can get satiated with vegetables) and it may result in undereating. And they triggered hunger and overeating in my case, they brought their similarly not ideal friends, added fat⌠I got a lot or carbs from my vegs (always hated most green leaves) and in bigger amounts, maybe that was an important factor. But they are useless and unhelpful for me anyway.
So nope, vegetables arenât so great for everyone. I still wouldnât say you should stop eating them, just donât base your meal on them. Unless you can add enough protein as well. And maybe get your fats from your protein sources, mostly? But added fat works for many people so itâs not necessarily a problem. Maybe the mayo but I am not knowledgeable about that, I even dislike mayo very much but I could make it with my chosen fat anyway. Store-bought mayo is probably not the best but letâs not take apart your poor diet too much, not everyone is into the cleanest, most perfect keto, not even all of us need that. I donât care about everything many others do myself.
I care about enough protein (adequate to high sounds good to me) and calories (not too little, not too much). Carbs should be low, thatâs a given though some of us gets way more benefits if the carb intake is extreme low. But itâs probably not for the beginning.
This is the hardship, we are all different and need our own style. Except the ones who just do keto and it works like a charm. I had to tweak and change a lot, similarly to many others. And I am not even sensitive to anything, I just have my tastes, satiation things⌠Really good food choices are important for me.
Thank you so much, I think I need to retrain my brain as I always thought that fill your plate with veg LOL. I need to re learn I think and you have all helped so much so thank you
You will also see it expressed as âEat less, move more.â
The thinking behind a ketogenic diet is that what the body does with the food we eat is more important than how much we eat. Eating properly can encourage the body to put on and retain lean mass, while using more energy and shedding fat mass. A high-carb diet, on the other hand, stimulates hormones that put the body in fat-storage mode.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with eating as much salad as you want. I eat vegetables - plenty of it - and love it. Some people have health problems that prevents them from eating vegetables. If thatâs not the case for you - carry on!
If you are not sure whether you are eating enough - try tracking your calorie intake for a week or so. You might be surprised. Things like avocadoes, lots of mayonnaise and pork scratchings add up to quite a bit of calories (often more than people expect).
You may find you have been eating enough all along (which may indicate your satiety signals are working perfectly!).
Yep, it may be enough calories, who knows? But there is still the problem of getting enough nutrients⌠I would track my macros (and maybe more, I put my food into chronometer sometimes but something was frustratingly lacking while I felt fine and I know that our diet may change our needs, and our needs are somewhat individual too, like more vitamin C is needed for a smoker but if I donât eat plants, way less is enough) for a little while to get some idea.