Restrict plate fat when trying to lose body fat - discussion

(Richard Morris) #19

Yeah no kidding. What does Ivor call them? “The devious wankers lurking in the long grasses”.

The well formulated Ketogenic diet is ad libidum - “Eat your fill”. We have become used in our modern world to ad libidum diets being obesogenic, but when you remove carbohydrates that isn’t necessarily the case. Without external carbs in the picture, we revert to a body fat % based on our basal (fasted) insulin.

If you want to get to a lower body fat, nothing (including willpower) is going to help you do that more than simply having the genetic potential to make less insulin.

Ted Naiman mentioned once that his fasted insulin is around 2 mIU/l (14 pmol/l) and you know how much body fat he is able to keep. Mine is currently 13.7 mIU/l (95 pmol/l), I have over 80kgs of lean mass, and around 25kg of body fat. We may both have a similar access to body fat - he because he doesn’t carry much, me because my insulin is high enough to blockade access to it.

But I have a degree of metabolic flexibility that a lean person like Ted wouldn’t have. Ted says that he can’t apparently fast for longer than about 24 hours. I suspect once his circulating lipids are down to what his body fat can replace he bonks. He does recommend that people don’t fast for longer than 18 hours - that may be why.

Personally I’m not convinced we evolved to not be able to go a day without eating. A day of energy to hunt food, let’s say 2000 kCal will require around 63.5 lbs (28 kgs) of body fat to generate. That may be why that danish experiment showed the preference for a higher BMI that it did.

My magic trick is that once I have fasted for 48 hours my insulin does drop, and I have so much energy I can cycle 3 times around lake Burley-Griffin, out to Belconnen and back, and up black mountain without worrying about fueling - over 100km on just salty water.

I’m pretty happy with where I’m at. I reckon if we were depending on chasing down large mammals for survival, guys like me would be the ones feeding the tribe, and the lean guys would be with the women and children. (BTW: just for the record @brenda would be with me on team mammoth hunter)

I’m really not interested in getting into a bikini.

But if you have the genes for it, and that’s a goal that appeals to you - I say go for it. If you have low basal insulin, then caloric restriction will push your body past it’s optimal levels of body fat for survival, and if you can stay in ketosis that will hold onto lean mass while cutting (according to Jeff Volek’s body composition studies).

If you don’t have low basal insulin, caloric restriction can fuck up your metabolism. One way to tell is if you restrict calories and start getting cold extremities then you’re likely entered into a budgetary crisis where the body is cutting back on paying the heating bills - I’d pull back the restriction a little at that point.

(Richard Morris) #20

Yeah that’s the thing though isn’t it. We have good lipids, and stellar glucose - which means we’ve disassociated obesity from the diseases that travel with it like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

I used to tell people upset that everyone around them is losing weight and they have stopped that it can feel like they are just sitting still at the bus stop while everyone else is getting on buses and going somewhere cool. But the thing is … that bus shelter is a safe place to wait for your bus, and it will come along.

More Insulin makes us more resistant. The flip side of that is the longer we can run at lower levels of insulin the less we will need to make. Body fat will drop as basal insulin levels drop. But it took several decades to get here, it’ll take a couple of years to unwind that.

The worst case is it could take 10 years. Fat cells live roughly 10 years, so in 10 years you won’t have any adipocytes that even remember being in a sick body.

(Richard Morris) #22

Yes I’d agree with that. Calorie counting is mindful eating. I think i was engaging in a little moderate caloric deficit as a function of “I ate HOW MANY CALORIES … OK I’mma have less tomorrow”

Yes. I still agree with that. It’s contextual tho. If I have plenty of fat in circulation from my body then eating to satiety should result in a caloric deficit because that energy from body fat is contributing to that side of the ledger. For someone just started keto which Carl was in the early days of our podcast - that is overwhelmingly the case.

If I don’t have much energy in circulation (because I have 8%BF or Insulin over 60 pmol/L) then that should result in hunger and satiation triggers that will cause me to eat at a caloric parity, or even a caloric surplus.

I’m not entirely sure what the trigger for going heavily into a caloric surplus is, but in evolutionary terms fruit ripening at the end of fall right before winter is a good trigger for both bears and humans to load up on extra calories - so maybe it takes carbs to really pack it on.

#23

Have you tried the feast/fast approach to fasting. Everyone I see who is trying it is getting really positive results.

Check out the podcast with Megan Ramos…

There is a great way to tell if you have a bikini body or not and it is crazy simple. If you want to wear a bikini - wear one. Boom - bikini body right there. Your body in a bikini. Simples!

This would also seem to be a great excuse to post a link to this great video. FYI - impossible to blur swear words!

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #25

:heart::green_heart::blue_heart::heavy_heart_exclamation::heart_decoration::heartpulse::sparkling_heart::boom::gift_heart::two_hearts::purple_heart::yellow_heart::heartbeat:

(Adam Kirby) #26

This is amazing, how the hell did they get so insulin sensitive after 30 weeks? Was that at the end of Biggest Loser? Was it from the absolutely insane amount of exercise they did? Then what happened after that to cause such a reversal, not being able to keep up the insanity + continuing to eat carb meals? They probably felt miserable from this lifestyle change so binged on junk food, I definitely would.

(Adam Kirby) #27

This is a great point. I have been trying to reconcile Ted’s ideas with the whole “eat fat to satiety” thing lately and I still really can’t. Is it safe to say that if your fasting insulin somehow lowers but you continue to eat exactly the same, you would burn additional body fat?

(Adam Kirby) #28

dude there are so many nuggets of gold from @richard in this thread, I fucking love it. I love learning more and more about the science behind this stuff. So it seems the real question to ask for ppl who are stalled in weight/trying for the beach body or whatever, not how to cut your calories but how to lower your basal insulin long term. Seems like a much less straightforward proposition unfortunately.

(Richard Morris) #29

Yeah I noticed that too. Remarkable isn’t it.

From a CI:CO worldview you could probably observe that Insulin resistance goes up and down with body weight and assume that body fat % drives IR up and down. Although as Gary Taubes points out the inverse is more likely, and a mechanistic explanation for that exists.

Insulin resistance is a survival adaptation to dealing with an energy glut. It makes sense that insulin sensitivity would be a survival response to an energy crisis. The problem of course is that their RMR drops and stays low.

Their exercise regime stayed high. Their RQ showed that they maintained a high protein low calorie diet … but I’ll wager they weren’t as hard core for 6 years. Seeing what happened to their insulin (and HOMA:IR) is a cautionary tale.

Weight regain is normal after weight loss from caloric reduction. I’ve seen studies showing that 97% of dieters regain everything and more after 3 years.

I’ve kept my weight gain off for 3 years on an ad libitium diet. That is magic right there.

Sure. But at some point I would expect your insulin would slowly rise a little to defend further weight loss … and then if you are eating to satiety you would naturally eat more.

#30

One theory is that anything that does not stimulate insulin keeps you in a fasted state and BPC does not stimulate insulin.

#31

What I don’t understand is why there is disagreement that CICO works for some people. No one is saying that CICO works for everyone, so why is the counter-argument that CICO works for no one?
As @richard and @CanKeto agreed upon: keto + eating to satiety can result in a “caloric deficit” which then leads to “weight loss”, so why all the pushback re: calories are garbage?
Even the anti-CICO quip “while you’re doing arithmetic, your body is doing calculus” still acknowledges there is math going on!
I accept and applaud that people have embraced the keto WOE and have lost weight without having to count calories. That is awesome!
Would it be more ketogenicforums.com friendly to refer to “food satiety units” instead of “calories”? There is so much baggage here. No, the human body is not literally identical to a bomb calorimeter, but can we not agree that the body is still subject to the laws of thermodynamics? Do we need to go all Jack Kruse-style and rewind all the way back to sunlight before we find common ground?

#32

Now we’re lean shaming?

(Richard Morris) #33

LOL Nup.

Just pointing out that in a time when food comes to you, being lean may be a viable fueling strategy.

When we had to chase it down, however - function strength and some long range tanks were more appropriate.

That is probably why as a species we conserved the mammalian hibernation reflex, AKA type 2 diabetes.

(Richard Morris) #34

keto + eating to satiety can also lead to a “caloric surplus”. If for example, you were underweight because your gut under-absorbed carbohydrates and you then transitioned from a balanced diet (60% carbs) to a keto diet you will likely put weight on until your body reaches a stasis.

At that point keto + eating to satiety should lead to a gentle hysteresis which is an oscillation up and down around a stasis point.

That is really my point, that type 2 diabetes is a disordered state where we were over-absorbing energy, sometimes for many decades. In that scenario keto gives our bodies control over fueling, and our now ordered fueling systems puts us into a caloric deficit.

But we will also reach a stasis, and then a gentle seasonal hysteresis around that point.

We can always try to subvert that control by starving, or gorging but the 1st law of thermodynamics will require a re-balancing elsewhere - and not always where you think.
If you take in too little energy, yet have high insulin you probably won’t draw down much body fat, instead you’ll likely lose lean mass and your body will make cutbacks elsewhere. If you take in too much energy, but have extremely low insulin then you won’t be able to store much of that excess energy and will fritter it away in futile cycles (extra body heat, crazy legs, etc).

Calories in vs Calories out is inadequate to predict what a body will do, because it assumes that body fat is a passive reservoir that is always filled with excess and emptied by insufficiency.

(Richard Morris) #36

The argument of the fungibility of calories (the ability to replace one for another without any change in stored energy) is not my problem with the Energy Balance hypothesis, nor is it really central to that hypothesis any more than the theory of gravity is dependent on a meter being a meter.

I really have 5 problems with the Energy balance theory;

  • It oversimplifies energy consumption
  • It assumes an impossible accuracy with energy intake
  • The assumption that body fat always releases energy
  • The math doesn’t check out
  • The moral issue

1. The problem with energy Consumption

The theory lumps all energy expenditure OTHER than discretionary exercise and the energic cost of digestion into a black box called the resting metabolic rate (RMR). This is then treated as a value that doesn’t change and used along with exercise and how much protein is in your meal to determine your “Calories Out”.

The reality is that our RMR changes based on what we just ate, how much energy is in circulation, what hormones are acting upon adipose tissue, how much activity we are doing, how hydrated we are, the status of our essential nutrition.

Experimentally we’ve seen caloric restriction drop RMR by as much as 25% (biggest loser 6 year followup), and caloric over supply increase it by as much as 400% (Ethan Sims Vermont prison overfeeding study).

2. The problem with counting calories

“Calories In” is also subject to imprecision, but even still the fancy that we can count the number of calories being consumed flies in the face of the inbuilt inaccuracy of our labeling laws, unpredictable changes in gut absorption rates, the contribution from microbiota, and the calories that exit the gut un-absorbed.

Even the most rigorous calorie counters are off by up to 20%, for a person eating 2000 calories a day that is an inaccuracy of 1/9th lb a day, or ±42 lbs a year.

3. Assuming body fat is willing to release energy

The amount of energy we can get from body fat will be constrained by how much insulin is in circulation, and the daily transaction limit for getting energy out of body fat.

If you are secreting more than about 13 mIU/l of insulin then you will have the same contribution of stored energy as someone who has almost no body fat at all. And even if you have virtually no circulating insulin, you will still be able to access only 31.5 kCal per day for each pound of body fat.

4. The problem with the math

The theory asserts that if you could accurately calculate Calories in, and Calories out then you could predict calories stored, but putting aside the impossibility of either of those as I’ve already discussed - the math doesn’t work because it’s not a simple function.

“Calories Out” changes based on “Calories In” so as soon as you think you’ve calculated caloric expenditure and turn your focus onto the caloric input - any change you make will change calories out again. The function is iterative, that is it changes every time you calculate it. Trying to use it to predict calories stored is like a dog chasing it’s tail.

5. The moral issue

But for me by far the biggest problem I have with CI:CO is that it moralizes a disease condition - it frames obesity a punishment for the sins of gluttony and sloth. It blames the victim.

That … and of course it doesn’t actually work to alter the disease state for the above reasons.

The reality is, in 99 cases out of 100, when you change the diet so obese people make less insulin by restricting sugar starch and protein - they rapidly lose weight and more importantly the biomarkers of the diseases that travel with obesity (Diabetes, CVD, Hypertension) disappear.

Did those people all of a sudden stop sinning? Or is there a simpler explanation?

Oh wait I have 6 problems with CI:CO …

It has been used by Coca Cola to sell sugar water to kids. Coke funded thousands of researchers as part of their “Energy Balance Consortium” initiative to do research “proving” the energy balance hypothesis.

(Adam Kirby) #38

Is this ALWAYS the case? Like this literally happens whatever your intake is? Or does it happen over time/in conjunction with other factors?

(Adam Kirby) #39

yeah really, is modifying your fat intake downward the same thing as counting calories? Even if you literally don’t count anything, just remove stuff from the diet?

(G. Andrew Duthie) #40

The point is that calories aren’t a useful measuring stick, for (among others) the reasons @richard laid out.

It is not a question of being purist, or excluding other views. The reality is that many here (@richard included, if not foremost) are focused on helping people with T2DM, and those with insulin resistance and other forms of deranged metabolism with high insulin. For those folks, counting calories, or focusing on anything relating to caloric measurement, is an utterly pointless exercise.

If you (or others who bring this up) are blessed to be sufficiently insulin sensitive that you can reduce calories as a means of getting to a lower body fat or lose weight, congrats, you won the genetic lottery.

The reason that CICO is routinely dismissed on these forums is that for those with metabolic derangement and high insulin, it simply DOES NOT WORK. Period. And attempting to focus on calories, or reducing energy intake when insulin is too high to allow for getting energy from one’s own body fat is likely to lead to additional metabolic issues including a lowering of resting metabolic rate.

It’s OK to disagree with the recommendations that don’t work for you. That’s why most of us who post here regularly also acknowledge that n=1 is a thing, and that metabolically, we can all be special snowflakes. But for those with insulin issues, CICO is a disaster, and it’s that group that is most in need of the advice offered here.

(G. Andrew Duthie) #42

Yes. And I explained to you why some alternate views tend to receive short shrift on the forums.

Whether you say “CICO” or “caloric deficit” doesn’t change the math.

A caloric deficit when you cannot access body fat is apt to provoke metabolic slowdown. How much and how quickly is open to debate. A caloric deficit when insulin is sufficiently low to allow access to body fat may result in the use of one’s own fuel. But that’s the point of the “to sateity” part. Keeping carbs and protein in check, while eating fat “to sateity” should lead to eating an amount that allows the body to use its own fuel at a sustainable rate.

Again, the question isn’t whether alternate views are OK. It’s who we are primarily attempting to help. The message that is repeated like a drumbeat is repeated because it has the best chance of helping the most people with insulin issues.

Your quote of @richard’s response is completely compatible with what I said. If you can access body fat (i.e. you’ve driven insulin sufficiently low to liberate FFAs and have them in circulation), then you don’t need to consume as many calories. That is not the same thing as “caloric deficit” driving the burning of fat. Caloric deficit, to the extent that it exists, is a product of lowered insulin providing access to body fat.

#44

How about “alternate energy source”?