I’m trying to understand what happens to the excess fat in a persons diet when they eat past energy needs? I’ve heard different metabolic functions that use up fat, but that would be part of energy needs. I’m talking about the advice that’s given on this forum to eat all the fat you want and it won’t add to weight gain. So for example, you have a person who uses about 2,500 calories a day between organ function, exercise, etc but are eating 5,000 calories on keto… what is the logic that this won’t lead to any weight gain long term? I do know the body requires more energy to actually metabolize the dietary fat, but that only accounts for a couple hundred calories in the example. If you don’t agree that you could eat any amount of fat and not gain weight I’d like your opinion too. Thanks
What happens to excess dietary fat?
I don’t think anyone says you can eat any amount of fat and not gain weight. What I have seen is people recommending eating all the fat you want whenever you get hungry until you reach fat adaptation, but I’m pretty sure that’s only to make the transition more bearable. Keeping your insulin low through the diet does seem to make your body want to resist storing fat, but I have no doubt that if you eat enough of it you’ll gain weight anyway. As for what happens to the fat that isn’t stored or burned away, it’s probably coming out in your urine and stools.
Edit: Also, people probably feel comfortable recommending the unlimited fat in the beginning because they know that once you are fat adapted your appetite will self regulate to allow you to lose or gain weight at will.
You most certainly can over eat and gain weight on Keto, but as fat is so filling, it’s hard to do. The advice to eat to satiety means eating just until full. This should be below most people’s energy needs. Your satiety signals would have to be messed up to consume that much food. It can happen, but it would be rare. Mines messed up from years of yo-yo diets and binging, but even I wouldn’t be able to consume that much food without totally gorging myself beyond the point of comfort.
So long as you follow the rule of eating to satiety, you should be fine.
Here’s some basic info about fat and metabolism.
I hope you find this helpful
Keep calm and keto on
Great info! But even he says to eat majority of fat by calories, not volume. I also agree that it’s really tough to overeat fat, but it’s more of a theoretical question.
Having made the mistake I can tell you it is possible (and easy) to overeat fat - it just depends on how you go about “fat to satiety”.
A ribeye covered in melted blue cheese accompanied by cheddar cheese covered butter sauteed spicy broccoli followed by some stevia enhanced fat bombs followed by what was supposed to be leftovers (i.e. the rest of the ribeye and more fat coated broccoli) is the kind of trap I fell into. About the amount of food I should have had in a day in a single meal.
Going back and forth between spicy and sweet and adding spice to things like a basic broccoli dish were, I determined (for me) not a good idea. This would lead me into way to much food.
For me, the butter sauteed broccoli covered in cheese (with little or no spice) for lunch and the blue cheese covered ribeye for dinner made much more sense (completely skipping anything sweet). Two meals - each satiating with plenty of fats but not lighting a fire (a desire) for more food because each alone is simply not very “hyper-palatable”.
At the same time, if I am on a one-meal-a-day plan, it is easier to get it all down with the addition of spice and sweet fat bombs.
This! My mistake was that in order to have “enough fat” I kept switching it up. Let’s have a pile of one kind of cheese here and a schmear of another over there, some butter on this and a nice blob of sour cream as well, and be sure to eat the fat ring on the steak and then maybe just in case I’ll also add a few T of coconut oil plus Asian spices to some stirfried bok choy. Variety may be the spice of life but it is definitely not the herb of restraint.
That’s pretty much sums up what my thoughts are. Sweets, artificial even more so than real, can screw with satiety.
Especially early on the keto journey when your system is used to that sweet taste being backed up by sugar calories. When it doesn’t get what it was expecting, which is nothing in the case of zero calorie sweeteners, it wants more food.
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Dr Fung helped me understand this as I’ve been researching it a decent amount since this conundrum presented itself to me. I was having a tough time understanding the advice to not pay attention to high fat calories, to just eat to satiety. I understood that it makes it easy for a beginner, take the confusion out, but it didn’t completely calculate with my understanding. His advice really helped shed a light and was actually pretty simple.
In a metabolically healthy person, eating excess fat will cause the metabolism to speed up. Healthy leptin signaling will cause the increase in metabolism as the body won’t want to store excess fat, and will be forced to speed up and utilize it. This seems like a great way to speed up metabolism. I imagine it works best to push your metabolism into overdrive by eating all this fat in low frequency, as a slow fat drip wouldn’t have the same speeding effect.
The problem is if an obese person with improper insulin and leptin signaling eats too much fat, it won’t speed metabolism and could lead to weight gain. Seems like the goal in that individual is to reduce insulin as much as possible, which of course is the goal of keto, but should incorporate fasting. Not necessarily long term (24hrs+), but IF for sure. Long term seems beneficial as well but maybe too much to ask early. At this point however, it seems beneficial to watch calories if possible. Just while the metabolism heals and learns to deal with excess. Eating to satiety keeps it simple, but until a person heals a bit and gets a reasonable satiety indicating mechanism going, it can lead to weight gain. I think the disagreement comes when just the mention of calorie counting comes into play, it congures up the idea of long term, metabolism slowing, calorie restriction. We all know that doesn’t work. However, fasting is ultimate calorie restriction just periodical. My biggest takeaway is that the protocol and advice shouldn’t be dogmatic, as the condition of the individuals metabolic state will greatly change the most effective protocol.
Nicely explained. Do you mind if I store it in my explanation vault and pass it on in the future ?
Haha not at all, I really wanted to thank you and rob but I’m not sure how to tag people in a comment. Realizing my misunderstanding and the research it put me on was extremely eye opening. I’ve listened to hours of podcast but the human body is so dynamic. It’s one of those things where the more I learn the less I realize I know. This forum has been the most educational part of my entire journey. Mostly because I realized I was only able to give advice based about my own experience and my own perspective I was researching on. Here, there are many different struggles and informative perspectives that don’t get touched on in the research I had done.
This was an astonishing realization for me in the beginning that changed the way I approached many of my responses. It is truly an n=1 journey.
Thanks for putting in the legwork and I like the Fung explanation but (and I’m not starting this debate again 
) can that really FULLY explain those experiments with the doubling of fat intake with no storage? If it was that, surely those people with be burning up with the extra thermogenic action going on if their BMR went up that much?
I’m still betting on some explicit non-digestion by the old gut “brain” but no-one is testing stools in these experiments. 
And to reference people just start typing the @ symbol and a couple of letters of their screen name and the system is smart enough to suggest likely suspects 
…
To be fair, I’ve never favored one theory over another… I think many things are at work simultaneously. I added FULLY to the prior post to make that clear.
No problems here starting up any debate, I certainly don’t take it personally and it helps further understanding. At the very least it sparks interest and hopefully research.
I didn’t find an in depth understanding of what exactly happens to the calories apart from just speeding up metabolism. I imagine that this even happens with carbs. In my 20s, I could easily do a 5,000 calorie experiment including high carbs and not gain weight. Many young people still have the metabolism to deal with any excess calories regardless of type. The main difference being that over time, your metabolism will suffer with the high carbs, and won’t with high fat. I think anyone with very healthy metabolism could do a 5,000 calorie experiment with mostly fat and not gain weight, but my understanding suggests that would not be the case for someone with insulin/leptin resistance. Of course there are also genetic factors at play. I for one can eat high carb and not gain weight when my activity is high. That’s why from my experience, CICO isn’t complete BS. I understand why it’s seen that way however. I also didn’t get any info on this, but metabolizing that amount of energy should still result in that being needed to be used. This is where having high energy comes from, and why it’s natural in younger people with naturally fasts metabolisms, but at some point we need to actually use that energy, through movement for example. A slow metabolism would naturally lead to less energy and less movement, both fulfilling one another and leading to energy excess in the body.
Absolutely feel free to correct me, that’s the whole point if I’m going to learn anything 
Calorie For Calorie, Fat Restriction Is Better For Weight Loss