My parents both died young from cancer (mom 52, dad 57) and I have Lynch Syndrome something that gives me a very very high probability of developing several forms of cancer.
I have always been told by doctors that there really isn’t anything I can do about my cancer risk.
But at one point I thought to myself, “I have at least got to try to do something”. And online I found fasting and keto.
Best of luck to you in avoiding cancer. Sorry to hear about your family history of it 
When I first went lowcarb, I lost 170#. So I am at the cardiologist’s office, and three nurses are in a tiny room while one takes my blood, and they find out I have lost this much weight. And then they start asking me if I’m going to have gastric bypass.
I just looked at them, baffled. I just finished telling them I had lost THAT MUCH weight on a low-carb eating plan… and they expected me, this was clear, to have someone slice open my gut with surgery to fix a problem I had just demonstrated an amazing amount of success with via diet. As if that wasn’t bad enough, these women ranged from 50-150# overweight themselves.
Oy. I have had people say that they expect that after surgery they will have to eat lowcarb. I say, why don’t you just eat lowcarb before the surgery?! Go figure.
What I can’t figure out is how the hell anybody can get enough fats or calories – neither of which I stress on, but this makes it extreme – on a meat-only diet. I can easily track my greatest weight loss periods to my mostly-just-meat cycles (I usually attribute that to the fact that during those I am not eating much if any dairy outside butter) (I do eat tomatillos, onion, garlic and hot peppers in pork chili verde). But I can eat meat until I am insanely high on protein and still be insanely low in calories. Kinda seems like that would just be a real severe ‘diet’ which would complicate the ‘because it’s meat vs. meat+ in the diet’ for figuring out.
PJ, are those fairly lean cuts of meat? I’m thinking of prime rib - a 1 lb or 453 gram piece has like 1813 calories, with 1376 being from fat. Throw in some fatty bacon, some non-baby back pork ribs, and I’d think you’d be way up there in both fat and calories.
Hi Doug. Yeah that’s the problem. I don’t LIKE fatty meat. I like sirloin, and chicken breasts, and pork loin. That’s why I have to either have dairy or fat bombs, because there is just not remotely enough fats in my diet otherwise.
I don’t obsess on it – but I do want to get enough calories that I’m not torquing myself, I am prone to under-eat (years of no appetite for medical reasons) and it has done me tremendous harm, so I work very hard to eat enough now. But without bacon-mayo or cream-cheese or butter-coconut oil, I just don’t know how.
(Edited to add: this is a keto-specific problem. If I’m eating carbs and grains I can clear 10K calories in a day without blinking and still be up at 2am to drink milk from the carton frantically like a heroin addict. Keto has a radically different effect on my appetite… night and day.)
I find fatty meats… gross. I mean intellectually I don’t. But to be fair, I am in a little town in nowhere Oklahoma and Walmart is my only source outside amazon. So the meat I’m eating is super high Omega 6 in its fats anyway – getting fats from dairy or the other is probably healthier in the end.
PS I once had prime rib at Outback. Huge plate-sized thick piece of meat my friend talked me into. One bite. I HATED IT. The manager gave me a sirloin to replace it no charge. It was just embarrassing… everyone else thought it was divine. So it’s just me. I don’t much like ribs either. Sigh. I have improved my palate a lot for LC but I don’t think this part is going to change.
PJ
I personally don’t obsess about the amount of protein I eat, nor does low fat/high protein cause me issues. I have eaten single meals with over 200 grams of protein in them.
There’s no reason you couldn’t eat all meat and just get what you get. Some say high protein causes them effects, but high fat seems to cause me worse effects. Now, whether you would get enough calories eating a high protein meat-only diet, that I don’t know.
But, we’ll see. I hope to do a test of high protein, low fat, then high fat/low protein. I’m going to pick up beef fat tonight. I will record calories, but will let them float to see what happens.
I am so happy you found these. I don’t see how they can’t make a huge difference. Someday, doctors will recommending this as a course of prevention.
When people say they’re doing keto “to lose weight fast”, I ask them what way of eating they plan to use when they reach their goal weight, telling them that if that way of eating will maintain the weight, it would also lose the weight, without ever needing to use keto.
I did, too, until I started to get a good sear on the fat. It gets crispy, flavorful and a different consistency. Love it now.
I wanted to lose weight and stumbled across the obesity code by Dr Fung. It made so much sense but I was still resistant to the ideas in there. I was compelled to do more research and came across work by Taubes, teichloz, lustig and you tube videos, and the more i researched the more it made sense. I started listening to the 2 keto dudes podcast and decided to make the jump,
Wow, sounds like you jumped in armed and ready! I had done some research but a lot of it was still a mystery. I was terrified.
Taubes’s book (good calories bad calories, or the diet delusion) is so amazing. Very dense, but fascinating. Really makes it clear how we got to where we are today in nutrition science and public health.
I did not until about 5-6 months ago when I started using a Ketonix to track BrAce. The problem with it is that BrAce is extremely volatile and variable. So interpreting its ups and downs is quite problematic. I’m not interested in donating blood.
I have ordered and paid for a Lumen RER measuring device. This is designed to measure the ratio of fat/carb burn in real time. If it works as well as I hope it might, I think measuring ketones will become obsolete.
This is soooo not a problem. Here are my macros from yesterday. It was a high calorie day. I had a third meal which is a rare and I’m usually closer to 1500-1600 calories (but I’m only 106 lbs) but the ratios are absolutely typical. As you can see, I’m getting 81% of calories from fat on nothing but meat.
Thanks, I’ve only started really recently. I am hoping engaging with people doing the same thing will be helpful. there does seem to be resistance to low carb, keto and fasting from friends and family so hoping this is a nice safe space.
