Totally confused

[SeeEss]

Totally confused- I don’t know how to figure my macros. When I go to a macro calculator it talks about deficit. Do I want to be in deficit or not? I want to lose weight. I have been doing this for this will be the fourth day, I tried the Keto strip and I there is a trace of Keto. I think I understand that once I get my macros, I just make sure that I stay on the range of the numbers provided. Can someone please clarify this for me. Thank you. You I think I understand that once I get my macros, I just make sure that I stay on the range of the numbers provided. Can someone please clarify this for me. Thank you.

[PaulL]

You don’t really need to count macros but feel free to do so. The gist of the ketogenic diet is to keep carbohydrate under 20g/day in order to keep insulin secretion as low as possible. Protein should be moderate—we recommend somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.8 to 1.0 grams per kilogram of lean body mass daily. The rest of the calories you need should come from fat, because of the three macronutrients, fat stimulates insulin secretion the least, therefore allowing your body access to any excess stored fat it might have.

If you want to count your macros, set your calculator to “maintenance,” because otherwise it will give you a caloric intake that will not be helpful. The best way to set your caloric intake, however, is to eat fat to satiety, because this lets your body tell you how much it needs and wants for full metabolic health and body recomposition. Somewhat counter-intuitively, eating too few calories convinces your body there’s a famine going on, so it will conserve every scrap of energy possible. Give it an abundance of calories, however, and it will ramp up your basal metabolic rate, start burning extra stored fat, and even waste energy. Don’t worry about how much you are eating during the first few weeks; eventually your satiety signaling will kick in and you will automatically start restricing calories at a level that makes your body very happy.

Since you’re a woman, let me warn you that your scale might prove an unreliable indicator of your progress in ketosis. Particularly if you’ve been restricting calories for some time, your body might want to put on lean muscle while it burns off excess fat, and this might make it appear as though you’re not making any progress. But since lean tissue is denser than fat, you can tell keto is working for you if your clothes start to get looser, so don’t worry about the scale.

Remember also that your overall goal is to become fat-adapted, so that your body is, by and large, burning fatty acids and ketone bodies instead of glucose (i.e., carbohydrate). Most people who are fat-adapted find that their mental processes are sharper and their energy level is higher than anything they’ve experienced before.