Skipping meals / Keto calorie restriction

(Jason) #1

I’m curious, are a lot of you who are doing Keto for weight loss purposes skipping meals – that is only eating 1 or 2 meals a day or using IF eating windows?

Something I am trying to work out in my head: supposedly the thing wrong with traditional calorie restriction diets is they lead to slower metabolism which leads to putting weight back on after dieting. Yet, isnt skipping meals, even on Keto, still calorie restriction? How does it not lead to the same effect? Also Keto people say that by running on fat, you will be more satiated and thus eat less. But isnt that just calorie restriction?

#2

Some people end up calorie restricting with IF, but not everyone.

How do they not restrict when skipping meals? They eat larger meals when they do eat.

That’s the simplest answer, but there are other ways that IF and keto interact with the metabolism allowing it to tap into stored fat anyway as well, though it appears that this ability may fluctuate depending on how much bodyfat one has (with less, it seems less can be used at a time).

(Doug) #3

Hi Jason. :slightly_smiling_face: One can eat enough fat that it would not be calorie restriction. In practice, I think that fat is very satisfying, so there will be a very probably lessened intake, overall. Fat is dense, calorically, so certainly less volume, usually.

Normally, less meals per day will mean less overall calories, i.e. even if one eats more during the reduced number of meals, it won’t be so much more that the total calories increase or stay the same. So, in the end, I agree - skipping meals usually means calorie restriction. Yet that’s “restriction” compared to what it would have been with more meals. It’s not necessarily less calories than one’s basal metabolism, nor less than the number of calories where “starvation mode” will start.

On this matter I think it’s a strongly personal thing. Some people will do better fasting/feasting, some will do better with Intermittent Fasting/one “eating window” per day, for example.

For many years I’ve often eaten only one meal. Just coffee in the morning, no lunch and then “whatever” in the evening, even if that was fairly horrible over-indulgence. I don’t think that ever slowed my metabolism down. There are also health benefits to eating less times per day, in general, especially for those who are overweight and/or have problems with blood sugar/insulin resistance. Less prompting for the body to send out more insulin into the bloodstream, etc.

While “slowing the metabolism” with calorie restriction makes sense to me, I also think there will be individual variation there. This past April and May I had many days where the only thing I ate was a can of tuna, and perhaps a can of sardines. 300 to 400 calories, far from ideal “keto” ratios, i.e.roughly 2/3 of the calories were from protein, 1/3 from fat. At least it was low-carbohydrate. I didn’t feel deprived, lost a good amount of weight, didn’t feel sluggish, cold, or like my metabolism was slowing. Not recommending this - it’s just something that seemed to work okay for me and that did no apparent harm.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #4

Do I “skip a meal” if I do not follow the traditional
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Snacks

SAD routine?

Hmmmm. Probably not, unless I do not eat when I feel hungry.
When you’re hungry on keto, eat. When not, don’t. This leads to a very different eating pattern than the SAD for me. I usually only want one meal now that I live ketogenically , late in the afternoon. I don’t get hungry until then.

We sometimes need to ask ourselves, am I eating out of habit or to confirm to society’s standards?

Anarchy baby. Everyday.

(Doug) #5

@Brenda - Brenda, excellent post and a great point. Yeah, the Standard American Diet routine. Ugh.

My favorite topic - the mental/emotional part of eating.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #6

Yes. This and the ADA’s standards almost killed me. fuckers

(Sonia A.) #7

I think Dr Fung explains this a lot better than I’d be able to. The whole video is interesting, but you may skip until the 21st minute. So here it is :

(Sonia A.) #8

Don’t forget that when you’re fat adapted, you’re not eating low fat or low calories when you only eat a can of tuna or sardines. You were eating your body fat, which means you were eating a high fat, high calories diet without putting much in your mouth. That’s the beauty of the ketogenic diet.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #9

Careful though. The body has a limit on how much body fat it can draw on daily.

(Crow T. Robot) #10

'Course, even under that restriction, the average American can draw on 1,700 (men) or 2,000 (women) calories per day, based on body fat.

(Sonia A.) #11

Oh yes, of course. I should’ve added that my observation concerns people who are obese or overweight.

(Doug) #12

@Ijjunne Sonia, I love this stuff. :slightly_smiling_face: Good point - I must have been at last somewhat fat-adapted, since the weight loss was quite successful. I’ve never tested for ketones, and still suspect I’m badly insulin-resistant, but I don’t know.

I’ve also seen a few people maintain that while some degree of calorie restriction may be the worst of all worlds, i.e. slowing metabolism and feelings of deprivation that make it very hard to continue, more severe restriction may work better. 1200 calories per day or 1000, for example, seemed to not work well, but 800 or less did. Not making a firm statement here - it was just brought up in some discussions related to a study by Dr. Roy Taylor in England, who had people on 800 calories a day for 8 weeks, with nearly miraculous results.

It’s a long, 75 minute video, but there is excellent information in it about reversing Type 2 Diabetes, weight loss, etc.

(Sonia A.) #13

I’ll definitely watch it, thanks. Dr Mosley has the same type of diet with 800 calories, it’s called the blood sugar diet. It seems to work really well.

#14

I had two reasons for keto combined with IF. First, as for keto, carbs make me feel like crap. Second, as for IF, all my life, my schedule has been controlled by my appetite because I would feel disoriented and light-headed if I went more than a few hours without eating. I thought would pass out if I didn’t fuel my blood sugar five times a day. A few months ago I started an n=1 experiment: I decided to skip breakfast and between meal snacking to find out what would actually happen. I was elated to discover nothing happened. I retrained my appetite fairly quickly so that now I only get hungry once or twice a day.

(Doug) #15

Mel, do you think the disorientation and light-headed feeling was due to lower blood sugar?

(Doug) #16

Doc Fung wrote about more or less caloric restriction just yesterday:

https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/food-cravings/

One quote: “This leads to the counterintuitive fact that we seen in our IDM clinic all the time. Eating less, when you go very, very low, makes you LESS hungry, not more hungry. If you have food cravings, then this effect is potentially very important. In the study shown, a 1200 calorie diet was virtually ineffective at lowering cravings where the 800 calorie diet reduces it by at least 50%.”

(Siobhan) #17

This is also assuming lower basal insulin, but for someone who is insulin resistant with high basal insulin over 13 mlU/L you have zero access to body fat stores until it lowers.

And only partial access if lower than that. Someone with a basal insulin of 2 mlU/L would have much more fat at their disposal than someone with 8 mlU/L even if they had the exact same amount of fat.

People who IF generally eat larger/more calorie dense meals and eat to hunger, which results in how much they need via keto…
And the IF leaves long periods of time with no insulin stimulation which allows insulin sensitivity to return over time.
Fung talks about the differences in metabolism between IF and calorie restriction.

But calorie restriction + keto? Plenty of people find it stalls them out, and some people do accidentally not eat enough on IF and find theyll only continue to lose if they up their calories.

So… make sure you eat enough is the key point.
Keto is not about calorie restriction. It is about fixing the chronic insulin raising that a high carb diet imposes, and healing the disordered metabolism preventing body fat access.

(Sonia A.) #18

I completely agree with you. I don’t subscribe to the calorie hypothesis. I always eat to satiety, which happens to be in a calorie deficit. I don’t do it by design. I don’t think it’s wise to eat when not hungry. IMO, my body won’t differentiate between 1500 and 2000 calories. It’ll however understands hunger and satiation signals.

(Mike Glasbrener) #19

It’s really about insulin response! Skipping meals on a keto diet allows your basal insulin levels to drop. So that’s the benefit not calorie restriction which may help or not. Calorie restriction on a high carb diet keeps your insulin level high commanding your body to store fat. Since it struggles to do this you’ll be lethargic and hungry. Your body will sense starvation since it can not store the fat slowing metabolism to help accomplish this. So IF on keto and high carb calorie restriction are two different things.

#20

I don’t know. When I began skipping breakfast I would be very hungry and light-headed for a couple hours and then it would go away, which leads me to believe it probably wasn’t low blood sugar but rather my ghrelin kicking in the way I had trained it to all my life. Basically, I simply retrained my ghrelin.