So don’t eat fat calories just to eat it
But don’t eat too few calories or you screw up your RMR
But just eat to satiation
Except if satiation is too few calories
This is a catch-22 cycle that must be brain-crunching especially for new people.
The underlying question I think most people would have, after wading through the minutae, is: “For me, what is my RMR, and once I have that approximate magical number, how many calories UNDER that can I eat, without reducing my RMR – yet still lose at least some fat?”
(For simplicity we will assume that the Cosmic Nexus of Menopause is within the Great RMR Mystery.)
(An aside: This idea that people should just eat intuitively is hilarious. I’m sure it probably works for some normal people. Lots of people who come to keto eating do it because they are not normal and often haven’t been for eons – their appetite, as well as their metabolism, is totally deranged. There needs to be some better guideline than “satiety” for people who either are almost never satiated until they’re so overstuffed they’re vomiting, or who have so little appetite that satiation at 600 calories every few days seems ok.)
So, protein. One guy says 120g protein is a fair middling amount for a normal person. Also says you should eat 70% fat. 120*4=480 calories. Since even spices and garlic and such have carbs, we’ll allot 5% carbs. That leaves 70% exactly. If 120g is 25% protein then the diet has 1920 calories a day, of which 1344 are for fats. 1,344 calories is ~150 grams fat (rounding). That is A LOT OF fat. Now maybe everyone else chews on gigantic strips of fat surrounding every piece of meat they have, or eats 20 strips of bacon a day, but holy crap, I love fats but getting that many down my throat regularly is a massive PITA. So far I only manage it with garlic cheese spread, and while I’m on that topic, if it wasn’t for cheese my ‘high fat’ diet would be completely screwed.
But if I weren’t “intentionally and deliberately” eating more fat, in order that I would have enough calories, I would be undereating. At least, we assume, since I still weigh 380 and while much lighter than I began, that’s still more than my refrigerator. And it was great to lose weight while eating minimal calories and decent protein, except I’m pretty sure I lost more hair than fat, and I’d frakkin like it back again.
And what is under eating, anyway. I know people living on 1200 calories a day and keto and they cannot seem to lose weight. Is that because they under-ate for all that time and now there is “nowhere lower to go.” Ah, ok, so keep the calories up to a decent number because as noted above, the body can only pull so much from your own fat at once, so exogenous fat makes up the difference. Great. What difference is that, precisely? 50 calories? 1000 calories? Does someone have any kind of number? I mean sure we’d have to have an RMR to begin with but say we do (I ‘kind of’ do). How much under that can one eat without causing problem adaptations in the metabolic rate?
Or maybe it’s just not about calories. Maybe it’s always about nutrients and if we lived on mostly ruminants and a randomly unpredictable assortment of additions – some of which are slightly carby, just not insanely so and always brief – maybe that’s the ticket.
Perhaps it should be some consolation that as black-box-mystery as women in menopause seem to be (I’m 54 in Sep and clearly in the early stages of it), apparently ‘metabolism’ is nearly as mysterious for the world at large.
