Restrict plate fat when trying to lose body fat - discussion

[Brenda]

insulin resistance is present in a large number of overweight non-diabetics (and in some normal weight people) long before they lose glucose control. The T2D diagnosis means they have had high insulin for years without knowing it, because doctors do not routinely check it.

[KBG]

So…this is an older post and everyone seems to have moved on. I’ve read through it all and I get most of what everyone is trying to say. I get that we’re all coming at this from different places. We all have varying degrees of metabolic derangement and insulin resistance and what works for some doesn’t work for others. But, my brain is hung up at the very top of the thread and the intent versus the interpretations of the graphic. The graphic shows the fat loss side as having less fat. It does not show a low fat diet. A lot of people keep referring to this graphic as though it’s recommending a low fat diet for fat loss but 150 grams of fat is not low fat. I’m also not seeing where it is recommending to not eat to satiety. My interpretation is just as it shows - reduce added fats (but not to the degree of going low fat) and still eat to satiety. Whether this works or doesn’t work for particular individuals is another discussion, already covered in detail above.

[Madeleine]

Yes, that makes sense to me and I agree that the graphic doesn’t look anything like LF to me. When the body is consuming body fat, it’s still - well, consuming fat.
So the famous 382-day water fast was a water fast in terms of what he put in his mouth, but was a fat fast (average about 23 tbsp a day!) as far as his metabolism was concerned. (This is way oversimplified - we have all sorts of hormonal sensors tied to smelling, chewing, tasting food - but isn’t that basically what was going on?)

[ketosaurus]

Question: I’m not sure this has been answered. First of all I’m kind of a newbie. I started this diet because my Dr. said i was a T2D and I was not happy with that result and after he sent me to a education program they further tried to convince me I was a diabetic. They said I should change my lifestyle and diet. I decided that I could do better. I remembered in the past that I lost 30 pounds in 3 months on the Atkins diet (well at least my version of it). This time around I’m a lot more serious about it. I watched lots of YouTube Videos and off I went. I eventually found my way here.

My question is as per the topic is… I make sure my carbs are as low as i can get, my protein is whatever but my fat is nowhere near what seems to be recommended for a LCHF diet. Does fat really matter? I have been OMAD (3 weeks consistently now) and sometimes OM2D and I’m really not hungry. Is there penalty for not consuming “enough” fat? and if there is less fat circulating isn’t that more incentive for the fat cells to burn more?

more trivia: I’ve already lost 28 pounds in 2 1/2 months, reversed my diabetes markers and totally happy making my 10 pounds a month losses. Thanks in advance since i know there is a lot of expertise in this topic.

[PaulL]

I’m also not seeing where it is recommending to not eat to satiety. My interpretation is just as it shows - reduce added fats (but not to the degree of going low fat) and still eat to satiety.

This is the sort of comment that makes my brain explode. How do you cut back on fat and still eat fat to satiety?

Alternatively, how do you eat to satiety without fat? Are you talking about replacing the fat with protein or carbohydrate? If the former, protein isn’t nearly as satiating as fat, so don’t you run the risk of gluconeogenesis, the stimulation of insulin secretion, and being kicked out of ketosis? And if you add carbohydrate, don’t you run the risk of exceeding your limit, stimulating insulin secretion, and getting kicked out of ketosis?

Personally speaking, carbohydrate does not satisfy my hunger at all, so if I eat anything above a minimal amount of carbohydrate, I run the risk of bingeing and returning to the status quo ante—which is why I needed to start the keto way of eating in the first place!

Now, it is my experience that people on these forums generally have a reason for what they post, so I am assuming that there is some meaning in the phrase “reduce added fats . . . and still eat to satiety” that I am missing out on. Can anyone explain what I’m missing? All I can see is either a logical contradiction or advice contrary to what @richard laid out in about ten of his posts earlier in this thread.

[KBG]

How do you cut back on fat and still eat fat to satiety?

My interpretation of this was in reference to foods like BP coffee. Early on with Keto, before I settled in and realized what my body needed, I read myriad recommendations to put fat on everything. Butter and oil in coffee. As much fat as you can fit in eggs. Mayonnaise on bacon. The list goes on. I was eating fat beyond satiety and I don’t think I was distinct in that. Once I actually saw mention of adding fat until satiated I was able to eat reasonably, starting with adequate protein, low carb, and then listening to how I feel for how much extra fat to add. Some days this is less and some days more but usually it ends up just being butter on veggies. Very rarely do I feel a bulletproof coffee would be good and I haven’t yet needed mayo on bacon. If someday that sounds good then I think that means my body is needing it for satiety.

[VLC.MD]

I think that means my body is needing it for satiety.

Mind. Not body.
Life is 90% mental and almost 10% in your head.

[PaulL]

@KBG Khara, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense, the way you put it.

@VLC.MD

[luvketo]

So, if I am fat adapted type 2 diabetic on keto and do not have a high fasting insulin and have have 40 or so lbs to lose, theoretically even if I eat hypo caloric meals my metabolism will not slow down because my body will provide the needed fat?

[richard]

Yes, unless there is a factor that I’m not aware of that is restricting access to body fat, if your insulin is low and you have 40 lbs of body fat to lose, let’s say 65lbs total then - you can theoretically generate 2000 kCal/day. You could restrict quite a lot and not see a slow down.

Satiety is a calculus that your body does in your hypothalamus that includes all those inputs. But for some people they just don’t feel satiated no matter how much they eat. For them only. I would suggest counting calories and maintaining a modest deficit.

[richard]

I am almost sure that the intervention exercise group had much lower body fat % than the couchies… and really who wants to be skinny fat and floppy?

Dr Phinney spoke about this study when he was in Sydney in 2016

One of the participants in that study lost only 7 lbs where everyone else on average lost 14lbs. She claimed they had ruined her metabolic rate. But her biomarkers told a different story. She had actually gained 7 lbs of lean mass in the 6 weeks, on a relatively hypocaloric diet. It sounds like that shouldn’t be possible. But that is because we have learned to associate weight loss in diets from lean tissue loss.

The general plan for losing weight is to reduce calories to draw down storage, as little as possible to reduce metabolic rate drop, and keep protein intake abnormally high to try to minimize the loss of lean tissue.

But in a ketogenic context, there really is a different calculus. If the person has adequate body fat and has lowered their insulin sufficient enough to access that, and it adequately supplies energy demands — then the body doesn’t need to resort to lean tissue as an energy source, or to lower metabolic rate. You can probably go below satiety and slightly depress your metabolic rate and still lose. But satiety should set a gentle glide path that brings the body into a landing zone that might now be bikini body ready … but should be a body optimized for reproductive survival. And in the case of this one woman who was relatively sarcopenic (a restricter who didn’t have enough lean tissue) it increased her lean tissue.

if there were any slim keto people (who weren’t naturally slim, but lost weight due to keto) I actually don’t know if keto supports that type of physique.

There are some in our thread on 100lb “Centurians” who do get fairly normal on the BMI chart.

Myself I went from Obese III to the cusp between overweight and obese, I went from 46% body fat to 19% so I am trusting my body knows what is optimal. I’ve managed to keep my metabolic rate up over 2700 despite losing 1/3 of my weight from my peak. I’m not ever going to be skinny, I’ll always be built like a rugby player, a front rower, but not the fat kind hopefully.

Myself a naturally slim person, has GAINED 6kg on keto.

It is possible that some peoples’ bodies derange hypoglycemically in the presence of carbohydrates such that their nadirs have driven an unhealthy inability to store an adequate amount of energy. A ketogenic diet and the stable supply of glucose that results might be a positive for people who understore energy as much as those of us who store too much. It’s just an hypothesis. But if you think your performance to run a 26k every day is diminished then maybe keto hasn’t done you any favours.

This seems to counter the current idea that the larger one is in the middle the more prone one is to heart disease, T2D, stroke, etc etc!

I suspect once we get insulin down, we have remove the disseminated vascular insult that causes CVD, Stroke, the complications from T2DM, etc. It may be that if we can get people with raging type 2 diabetes to get their glucose and insulin down into normal ranges, that obesity loses it’s predictive power as a marker for disease risk and becomes simple a marker for injury risk (ie: being overweight becomes more correlated with sprained ankles or knee joint damage than cardiovascular disease).

It certainly is possible to be obese and have a zero Calcium score which is observing the progression of the actual disease - so the association must be weak.

The thing my kids pointed out was why was the person still obese if keto is supposed to work

Well there are some long term keto folk who do some biochemically questionable things with their fuel sources such as take exogenous ketones to make them feel better, or go through phases of crash caloric restriction which will ratchet down your lean mass over time.

There are also some keto coaches who have never been obese and are setting an unrealistic expectation for what a ketogenic diet does - it removes the derangement so your body can find it’s own optimal energy storage state, it doesn’t necessarily just reduce body fat.

[Kirkor]

Marty Kendall with some thoughts on this:

can you eat too much fat on a ketogenic diet?

[Keto6468]

I feel your pain. We could be twins. Reading this thread for bits of wisdom or hope.

K

[Brenda]

I’m itching to add my n = 1 here.
I had my first DEXA scan then I ate fat to satiety (this translates to an enormous amount of “plate fat”, I was a hungry bunny).
I continued my usual twice weekly heavy lifting routine. But in this experiment I DECREASED my protein by nearly half. I had been eating 120 grams protein a day, guessing at a 120 pound lean mass and at the time wanting to eat 1 gram protein per pound of lean mass. Upon much evaluation and reviewing the work of Rosedale, Phinney, and Dr. Jason Fung, I decided the optimal protein intake for me to be approximately .5 grams per pound of LBM. (I added a bit extra because I lift.) I decided on 70 grams protein per day and fat to satiety.
TO SATIETY. This was important, as I believe I had been overeating protein and I needed to replace that fuel source. Throughout this experiment my carbohydrate stayed between 5 and 20 grams net per day.
Three months later I went in for my second DEXA scan. Remember, I was eating fat to satiety, in other words, as much fat as I wanted…
My DEXA showed a GAIN of 4 pounds of lean mass and a LOSS of 1 pound body fat. This from a girl already ketogenic 3 years…
Do I know what I am doing? With MY body I sure as hell do. I suspect most others can eat fat to satiety also, and experience a similar result.
No fat gain.
I believe this strongly. To me? anything else is going to risk slowing the metabolic rate if the body is not given sufficient fuel.
On the ketogenic diet the body uses fat for fuel. FEED IT

FAT IS NOT THE LEVER, INSULIN IS!
Insulin is the fat storing hormone. Dietary fat does not raise insulin. Hmmmmm.

The trick is, figuring out what “to satiety” means. I believe most of us are able to do that.

[Keto6468]

The trick is, figuring out what “to satiety” means. I believe most of us are able to do that.

Very good point. This is where I am struggling. That and where I set my protein grams. My nephrologist says no more than 1/2 gram per pound of full weight. I’m a 48% fat ball. I have run up the fat and sometimes I gain, sometimes I lose. Not consistent at all. I frequently feel hungry.

[Brenda]

is it correct to say that the fat in large amounts won’t stop your body burning its own fat supply as is commonly suggested?

I personally do not believe so, no. Not if you stop when sated. Eat beyond that may mean trouble, but really. It is difficult to eat pure fat beyond satiety. You feel nauseated.

[Brenda]

I have run up the fat and sometimes I gain, sometimes I lose. Not consistent at all. I frequently feel hungry.

When you say you gain or lose, by how much? are you looking at degrees of fluid retention/loss perhaps? It is truly difficult to eat fat beyond satiety. One should not be hungry on keto. How long have you been fat adapted? and I hear you on the nephrologist. If you have kidney disease, pay attention to those limits.

[Keto6468]

I keep wondering if I am fat adapted. I journal the % macros look right. And yet, somehow I feel hungry. Not ravenous, just still hungry. I’ve clearly lost weight, have bunches of nsvs, some health improvements. This week finished fast on Tuesday eve. 163. Wed 163.6, Thurs 163.6, Friday 164.4, Sat 165. Just a steady climb.

Calories a bit high, but <20 g net carbs, mod protein, high fats. Some dairy. Mostly HWC, butter, slice cheddar. I am super salt sensitive. On potassium sparing diuretic prescribed, omega 3 prescribed, both for kidneys.

However I am ahead of my loss line for a goal of 50 lbs loss in a year and kidney health measurements improved. Just breathe and KCKO or increase protein, or fat or ?? Sorry, just have not budged weight wise all February. Hence my interest/thread on Leptin resistance. Not diabetic, not insulin resistant, just fat.

K

[CandyLindTX]

You can definitely overeat fat if you are eating past satiety, but then that wouldn’t be a well formulated ketogenic diet. Only you know if you need a BPC to reach satiety. Don’t rely on facebook “experts” to tell you, they don’t know.

Since the forum software won’t allow me to like this ten times, I’m doing it here.

[Brenda]

Your weight is not always going to move. Relax. Your body is probably doing something else atm. Practice eating fat to satiety. Either you have cortisol causing hunger, or sodium issues, but I suspect not enough fat, only because I see this SO often.