To worry or not worry about calories?

(Susan) #3

Some people stall or cannot lose weight while having any artificial sweeteners, so you might have to try eliminating them from your food plan.

#4

Most short-term weight fluctuation is going to be a simple change in water retention and digestive tract contents. Typically, most early weight loss is water. Glycogen binds with water, so when you go into ketosis and your stored glycogen declines, that water would be released. That flushing of water can take electrolytes along with it, which is why some people get the keto flu early on.

Ketosis is driven by carb restriction. Weight loss is driven by caloric restriction. For many, ketosis just makes caloric restriction easier because hunger is no longer being driven by carbs and insulin.

Overly simplified, if you were eating at a deficit of 500 calories daily, you could hope to lose about a pound of fat in a week.

(Stephanie) #5

How do i know if i got fat adapted? I’m also so lost on good carbs and bad carbs. I feel like water, salt and 1 chef salad a day is all I’m allowed to consume. My head is spinning.

(Susan) #6

20 carbs or less a day, NO Sugar, good healthy protein, good healthy fats, drink tons of water, and make sure you are getting enough Electrolytes.

Sample day could be something like this:

Breakfast:

2 eggs, cooked with a good fat (salted butter, or ghee, olive oil, coconut oil, or bacon fat).
3 or 4 pieces of bacon, you can cook in the same pan as the eggs, or separately, your choice.

Lunch:

Romaine lettuce, spinach, an avocado chopped up into it, some celery chopped up, some little bits of broccoli in it, then for a dressing, toss some olive oil or avocado oil on it (I put the olive oil and some avocado mayonnaise on it myself).

Supper: Protein-examples - a steak, Pork chop, lamb, chicken, salmon, some other fish, etc.(cooked with healthy fats).
Vegetables: asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, spinach, cabbage, are all good choices -any vegetable that is low carb, or a mix of them, and sautee in healthy oils.

If you were to eat all that in a day; you should not be hungry. Try to eat your last food of the day 3 hours before sleeping, so your body has time to digest it, and if you can give yourself 12 hours of not eating and 12 hours during which you eat for now, that will also help your body for beginning Keto =).

I meant to put that quote at the top, before I started typing. but as you see from a sample day I typed, that you can eat way more then water, salt and 1 chef salad a day… =).

If you are eating Keto correctly; you should not be hungry between your meals, and should soon enough decide that an eating window of 16: 8 will work for you and having two meals a day will be sufficient. It is good to remember that Keto is awesome, but slow and steady wins the race.

(Stephanie) #7

I keep myself from eating when not hungry. I start breakfast between 9am and 10am but never eat dinner past 5pm or 6pm. Some times I can go 6 hours and not be hungry, but then after a small snack I’m starving 2 hours later. Also the chef salad I eat for lunch at work has 5 grams of sugars. I don’t understand that. Its 1 handfuls lettuce/spinach with 1 hard boiled egg, 2 slices of bacon, 6 cherry tomatoes, and purple onion.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #8

There are no good carbs and bad carbs. All carbs become glucose, the only difference is whether it takes an hour or two or three. Ditch the chef’s salad. Trust me, you’re not ‘fat adapted’ yet.

#9

There’s natural sugars in onion and in cherry tomatoes, also some bacon has sugars added in the curing process. So I’d say a combination of those three is where your sugars are coming from.

('Jackie P') #10

Zoe Harcombe artfully debunks this myth!

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #11

Yes. And I’ve never believed any of the talk about good sugars or bad sugars… Good carbs or bad carbs…

Your body hardly notices a difference in the sugar from an apple, or the sugar from a can of soda. Sugar is sugar.

Oh, but should you worry about calories ? Well at first, not much. I mean, within reason anyway. Later on, after you become fully fat adapted, and your carb addiction broken, you can see for yourself what your weight is doing. If you have some weight to lose, and it’s hanging onto you, you can lower your cals, and / or step up your calories then.

(Cancer Fighting Ketovore :)) #12

Those have natural sugar

('Jackie P') #13


This was an interesting article on this topic I thought

#14

I think you misunderstood my post. I’m not justifying eating natural sugars. Stephanie wondered why there was 5g of sugar in her chef salad and I was letting her know what it was from.

(mole person) #15

Also a large egg has a gram and assuming there is any dressing there is probably some in that as well.

(mole person) #16

This is not exactly true as Robert Lustig explains. Whole fruit eaten with its fibre takes a lot of the sugars lower into your intestines where the gut biota will use them rather than having them all cross your intestinal wall. So if you must have sugar, fruit sugar gram for gram is a far better choice.

That being said, I only eat random fruit that I pick myself off wild growing plants in summer and I never have more than a small palmful.

(Scott) #17

I ignore calories. If I were you I would make an effort to only eat real food. This means giving up diet soda and any other artificial sweeteners. I was in a habit of chewing sugarless gum. I liked the way it kept my mouth wet when I ran and also to put off hunger. It was also just a plain old habit. I was having between 10 and 20 pieces daily. When I started digging into it each piece was 1g carb. I went cold turkey on the gum and I survived. It also had a positive effect.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #18

What we know so far is that wo things are required for your body to be willing to part with excess stored fat: a hormonal milieu that permits fat to be metabolised instead of being stored, and a caloric intake that doesn’t trigger a famine response. The first is accomplished by lowering carbohydrate intake to a safe level—on these forums, we recommend an upper limit of 20 g/day. The second is accomplished by Dr. Phinney’s advice to eat to satiety. In other words don’t eat until you are hungry, stop eating when you stop being hungry, and don’t eat again until you are hungry again.

The reason this all works is that lowering carbohydrate intake permits insulin levels to drop. Insulin is the main hormone promoting the storage of fat, so until your insulin level is low enough for most of the day, the fat in your adipose tissue is trapped there. In addition, the body adjusts its energy expenditure to accommodate the amount of food we give it, so that if we eat too few calories, it will slow down our metabolism to match, requiring us to cut back on calories even further, which will stimulate a further reduction in metabolism, and so on.

Eating to satiety, however, allows the body enough energy to meet its needs, and it will respond by ramping up our metabolism. Up to a certain point, we can even overeat, and the body will respond by using even more energy, but past that point it will want to start building up its reserves again. This is why listening to our body is so important. When we have excess fat to shed and eat to satiety, the body will automatically set our appetite at a level that permits that fat to be metabolised. The difference between this and restricting calories is that we are not trying to outthink our body, but rather to listen to it. If we continue to eat to satiety while losing that excess weight, our appetite will graduallly adjust, till we are providing all of our energy expenditure from our energy intake.

The idea of eating less and moving more as the key to fat loss has been so drummed into our heads that it is difficult to shake. It sounds reasonable on the surface, but the competing hypothsis states that what the body does with food is determined by its hormonal response to that food. Eat something that stimulates too much insulin secretion (i.e., carbohydrate), and the body will store fat, even though other cells in the body are starving. Eat in a way that keeps insulin levels as low as possible (we need some insulin or we will die, just not too much), and that stored energy becomes available for the body to use.

People will often point to the First Law of Thermodynamics as support for eating less and moving more, but the point the miss is that the human body does not shed fat because we eat less than we expend, but rather when we end up eating less than we expend, it is because we are eating in a way that puts our body in fat-shedding mode.

(John) #19

I eat less food than I used to. I keep carbs generally low overall. This is all accomplished by food choices, and portion sizes, so I am not constantly measuring macros or tracking.

The eating less is achieved by eating (mostly) only for true hunger and nutrition, and not from habit, pleasure-seeking, or stress reduction (mostly).

So am I eating fewer calories? Yep. Am I hungry all of the time? No, but I do get hungry, and I don’t always eat as soon as I feel any hunger.

I have also taught myself that there is nothing wrong with being hungry and not immediately responding, until the next planned meal time, and then eating a normal amount of food at that time rather than eating a larger than normal meal just because I was extra-hungry going into it. And that normal-sized meal does the job just fine.

So while I don’t count calories, I try to not eat a lot of food. By that, I mean more food than is necessary.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #20

No, I understood your post perfectly, and your totally correct. I just wanted to add that those sugar cals you speak of, are still sugar cals, that have the exact same effect of the sugar in a candy bar, albeit, usually a lot less of it. Eating enough fruit though, can be as much as a candy bar.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #21

Eh… Impo, it’s a small difference.

If I “must have sugar” it’s Splenda :wink: It’s awesome what a little chlorination does to sugar :grinning:

I agree on a little select fruit. We eat Blueberries, and Strawberries from our garden. They are great in fat bombs.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #22

John, that was a very reasonable post. Agreed.