Stop telling newbies to eat more fat!

#21

I don’t think I’ve ever counted fat since dropping carbs if I’m honest. I don’t shy away from fatty meats, olive oil, butter, mayo & the like but I don’t feel the need for more than a tsp or so of cream or coconut oil in my coffee & I don’t bother with fat bombs or the like. Intuitive eating seems to work better for me in general - I only concern myself with electrolytes in summer for example & I eat good sized meals/have energy to exercise so haven’t counted a calorie since heaven knows when. I probably eat more protein than many but that’s just where I’ve landed naturally.

(Empress of the Unexpected) #22

I agree - for me it’s stay under 20 grams of carbs, and give your body whatever else it needs. If I’m feeling good, I know keto is working.

#23

That’s the great thing about low carb for me - screw the endless counting required when you eat according to the pyramid pushing ‘experts’ :smile:

(Katie the Quiche Scoffing Stick Ninja ) #24

With all due respect, you aren’t burning anything until you are fat adapted. So you must ramp up the fat and keep the carbs low.

(Empress of the Unexpected) #25

Katie - I just couldn’t/can’t tolerate that much fat, for whatever reason. GAWD, hope it’s not my gallbladder on the fritz (actually thought of that at the time.) But then again, had no idea when I became fat-adapted. But whatever, it worked.

(Empress of the Unexpected) #26

We have to agree to disagree - but you have had out-of-this-world results. So you still got a “like!”

(Katie the Quiche Scoffing Stick Ninja ) #27

I’m happy to be corrected if I am wrong, but that was my understanding!

(Linda) #28

I think so too. I try to look at the bright side - instead of a bugout bag in preparation for TEOTWAWKI I just carry my emergency food around with me at all times. :slight_smile:

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #29

I think the problem lies in that word, “dogmatically.” Newbies are all accustomed to thinking in terms of either calories—or percentages of calories—and apparently the first thing they see when they Google “keto” is the sites with macro calculators. They are accustomed to following instructions, so they take the macros the calculator gives them and treat them as Gospel.

I think most people must find it more exciting to use a calculator that gives them “exact” figures than to keep carbs under 20 g/day, keep protein moderate, and eat fat to satiety. In fact, the notion of “fat to satiety” seems virtually incomprehensible to them. I wonder if it’s an effect of dogmatically following the governmental dietary advice. The 20 g/day business is definite enough to go over well, but “moderate protein” must be almost as vague as “fat to satiety,” given all the questions we have to field.

Perhaps we need to get back to basics. I think we even get too dogmatic about the 20 g/day limit. It’s not a magic number, just a practical means of getting everybody but the most seriously metabolically-deranged into ketosis. A well-formulated ketogenic diet is any diet that keeps a person’s insulin level low enough and protein moderate enough to allow the liver to produce ketone bodies. Since that diet will necessarily involve limiting carbohydrate intake and replacing the lost calories with fat, it doesn’t really make sense to call one carb limit “keto” and another “LCHF.” What Phinney calls “low-carb, high-fat” is just as much intended to lead to nutritional ketosis as our limit of 20 g/day is.

The only real difference is that Phinney’s original limit of 100 g/day was intended for a metabolically healthier audience, and our forums seem to attract those who are really metabolically deranged. Both limits make perfect sense in context, but neither is written in stone. We need to keep the nuances in the back of our minds, instead of insisting that you can’t call what you do keto if your carb limit is higher than the one we endorse. I grant that it is much simpler to say “20 g/day” and be done with it, than to write (over and over and over), "Well, everyone has a different carb tolerance, but what we recommend is . . . . "

But to get back to Gabe’s point, I’m not sure it is we who are telling the newcomers that they need to hit their fat macro. My impression is that they are coming here with that idea already fixed in their minds. I don’t really know how to fix that, short of putting up a “macro” calculator of our own that simply says

  1. Eat less than 20 grams of carbohydrate a day.
  2. Eat x grams of protein (x being a number calculated off their lean body mass).
  3. Eat enough fat on top of that so that you don’t feel hungry when you are finished eating.

Think anyone would go for that? My impression is that it’s not complicated enough.
:bacon:

(Empress of the Unexpected) #30

That makes perfect sense. However, in my case, I am not testing for ketones, so I stay at 20 or under just to assure myself. I am planning on buying a blood monitor, but even that is not a true assessment of ketogenic status. Apparently the breath output is more accurate. And, I started overloading on fats at the request of the forums. Just took me a while to find my own limit. I have, however, started testing my BG, and it is higher than I would like, which tells me the 20 or under carb limit is still a good idea.

(Empress of the Unexpected) #31

Protein is hard, since I can’t afford a DEXA scan. I go by the pictures provided on chronometer.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #32

Well I don’t know enough about the biochemistry to qualify this claim. Perhaps you’re right, though I wasn’t fully fat adapted for a long while and I was very obviously burning fat while eating two mangoes a day. So there’s that.

I suppose my broader point would be that to get to fat adaptation, you simply don’t need to be eating copious amounts of fat. It’s a misconception. Cut the starches and sugars and for most obese and overweight people, they can just eat meat and fat ad libitum and they’ll drop body fat. And if you measured the fat they’re eating ad libitum, it’s definitey not in the 70+% range.

(Continued in my reply to Paul below…)

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #33

I pretty closely hewed to the appendix in Why We Get Fat, which comes from Westman’s clinic at Duke. Here it is again: https://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/why-we-get-fat.pdf

There are no grams in that appendix. Honestly, fuck grams. Here’s the diet, here’s keto, here’s LCHF: cut out starchy carbs and sugar. Eat meat and fat/oil ad libitum. That’ll get you 90% of the way there.

A refinement: You can eat a limited amount of some dairy, which you should research. Eat some green leafy veg and some cooked veg.

I never found a need to limit non-starchy veg. I never tracked carbs down to 20g until recently. I never limited protein, though I’ve been watching it recently and I rarely go over what the Dudes suggest. And I certainly never tried to hit a fat macro.

The bottom line is that I think you can achieve 90% of “keto”/LCHF with “no sugar, no starches.”

Thats the message Taubes was pushing. That’s why Westman’s pamphlet (the link above) is so brilliant: it says here’s what you can eat, here’s what you can’t. Now go enjoy eating whole foods without worrying about any of the minutiae!

(Empress of the Unexpected) #34

And that’s why his info is so easy to pass along to family and friends. Non-intimidating!

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #35

Taubes is a giant among men. He deserves a Pulitzer. And possibly a Nobel.

(Ron) #36

I’m in the different line here and think that telling a newbie to eat more fat has benefits. Many come to the Ketogenic WOE from many years of yo-yo dieting and under-eating has become the only lifestyle thay have known for as long as they can remember. This style is automatically included in their beginning keto journey. Telling someone to eat to satiety means nothing to them especially if they have lowered their metabolism and satiety level to well below their BMR and they feel full at a 5/600 caloric daily intake as we all know is not healthy. They have to up their intake and as @clackley posted " Eating a low carb, moderate protein means eating high fat."
I am thankful that in the beginning of my Keto journey that people told me to eat fat because I was coming from a world of binge eating and thought that in order to be successful I needed to eat at a deficit . If I were to follow the advice of just eating to satiety I would have been indulging in double or triple my macro amounts and would have become even bigger while doing a keto food intake. Telling me to eat fat to macros was a big help to me. (and still is as my satiety button is still broken).
I also have seen others on here that have praised the suggestion to eat more fat as it helped them with energy levels they were struggling with during their adaption phase. This also gave them more confidence to continue as it waved off the discouragement that had them on the verge of giving up.
And IMO, when your body is going through all the transitions that it has to in order to utilize energy as its main fuel source, supplying it with higher volumes of dietary fat as a resource (because we know that the body prioritizes healing over burning stored body fat in the beginning) gives the digestive track and other functioning tasks the things needed to rebuild a more fat digestible gut biome, etc.

(Kaiden) #37

1.9 meters. Yes, I know what you mean, and agree wholeheartedly. I just had to Google the literal meaning, though.

(Katie the Quiche Scoffing Stick Ninja ) #38

No, I understand what you are saying.
And that’s true, to get into ketosis you don’t need to eat high fat, you need an absence of carbs.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #39

Amen, brother! :bacon:

(Alec) #40

Ron
I am with you on this. I think a simple “eat more fat” is often the right message early on for many reasons, some of which you detail above. That message may not be right for all circumstances and all newbies, but for many I have seen I believe it is.

End of the day, we all provide our own advice, and the newbie has to decide what to take and what to ignore.