You might have to modulate that with very low fat, high carb. I know Peter D. over at Hyperlipid describes how “the potato diet” might work from a protons perspective.
I was able to eat very low fat, high carb and stay lean, at least for a while. But I was also young and exercised my butt off. (Biking, lifting, walking a ton, etc.)
Because you are like that, satiation is an interesting thing. I can easily overeat on low-carb too but it is way more serious and frequent on higher-carb. Many of us automatically eat more on a carbier diet, there are many reasons for it. I could balance it out with OMAD but carbs often mess with us and our control… On higher carb (longer term, at least), I often eat even when full, it’s not nice. Hormones, habits, all the available carby treats… Most of us can’t easily resist all this unless we restrict carbs. Extremely if it takes that.
But some people get satiated with carbs, even sugar, sometimes easier than with fat. But the type of food matters too, not only the macros.
People eating less on keto and losing is totally simple and understandable.
It’s more interesting to me when people actually don’t eat less than their normal maintenance energy need (not like it’s a fixed thing or they know the amount but we still can see that we stall forever with about 2000 kcal and now we only change the carb intake and fat-loss happens) and still lose fat. That magic doesn’t happen with me (and I know it’s not magic, I can explain it to a small extent, I don’t know what happens when it’s more serious than that). I still don’t force a lower calorie intake, I just don’t expect to lose when I eat as much as before keto. Indeed, it never happened. But when I ate less, I always lost fat, no matter my woe (low-carb or keto in my case, higher-carb makes me too hungry).
Surely many interesting things happen in our body but I always saw a strong correlation between my carb intake and energy intake (but if I use 2 types of fat - the one in my protein sources and the extra - and protein too, I usually can CALCULATE if I will be satiated with my food, it’s a scarily strong correlation at that point) and my satiation is the key. Carbs make me hungry (and I lose my macro balance or something so my other two macros shoot up especially fat), of course I overeat even when I am in control and stop eating when satiated (it’s not nearly as easy with carbs). But it’s still usable energy for my body so no need to use the reserves… Whatever our hormones do, we need our energy from somewhere so no wonder most people theoretically can slim down on high-carb too, be it low-fat or high-fat if they eat little enough, it’s just starving for some of us (I mean we will be very hungry, the deficit isn’t necessarily big. I found it too easy to be very hungry at a surplus as well if too many carbs were involved. carbs mess with me, I always say)… And some very not healthy ones will actually starve because their body choose starvation responses instead of using the reserves, that is one of the very unfair things of life. They are the ones where the “just eat less” advice is not only a very ignorant but a tragic advice. Even doing keto or carnivore may help very little then (at least short term), their body is too damaged and requires some very special woe or something and a long healing time before they have much chance for some serious and very needed fat-loss. I feel so sorry for them.
Fat is necessary only to replace the calories lost from not eating carbohydrate. Your protein intake will likely have remained unchanged when you switched to your ketogenic diet, and your energy has to come from somewhere. The good news is twofold: first, unlike carbohydrate, fat has almost no effect on your insulin secretion (apart from the minimum necessary to keep on living), and second, it has over twice the calories, so it takes a lot less fat to provide the same amount of energy.
If you keep your carbohydrate sufficiently low, eat a moderate amount of protein, and fill in with fat till your hunger is satisfied, you will be fine. Don’t restrict calories, because that tells your body to hang on to all its resources until the famine is over. If you eat a ketogenic diet to satiety, your appetite will guide you to the proper amount of food to eat, which will allow you to burn both the fat in your food and the extra fat in your adipose tissue.
According to Prof. Benjamin Bikman, this depends on circumstances. On a high carbohydrate diet, extra protein stimulates an insulin response that is not matched by glucagon, so insulin is free to prevent ketogenesis in the liver. On a low carbohydrate diet, on the other hand, the extra insulin is matched by extra glucagon, so that the insulin/glucagon ratio stays low and ketogenesis is therefore permitted to continue. He therefore says not to fear getting a bit extra protein on a ketogenic diet.
When we eat a lot of carbohydrate, most of it gets shunted to the adipose tissue for storage in the form of fat, where it is trapped until the insulin level drops. It therefore is not actually feeding the cells that need energy. Furthermore, when fat cells have a certain amount of fat stored, they start secreting leptin to tell the brain that it’s safe to shut off hunger for a while, because we’re not going to starve. However, elevated insulin blocks the leptin receptors in the hypothalamus, so the brain never knows that we have enough stored energy to stop eating.
This is why I could be full to the point of being about to burst my stomach (I mean this literally) with spaghetti or rice, and still be hungry, but on a ketogenic diet I stop wanting to eat while my stomach still has plenty of room in it. My leptin signaling is working properly again.
For you I’d suggest, as others have, using satiety to guide your eating. You already exercise and fast and have only a little fat to lose so your metabolism will hopefully get in good shape more easily. Ask yourself whether you need to measure any macros. I get my protein in, exercise well, fast a bit and eat to satisfy my hunger. I like noticing the day after a big exercise session (a long mountain run hike say) I’m much hungrier, so I eat more food, and enough fat.
For assessing progress I use the Tightness of Pants. And feeling good. And being able to do some exercise sessions fasted, and not feel hungry after - wow how good is that!
Depending on how much extra body fat you have, you may be able to eat more or less fat. The estimate I’ve seen is ~30 kcal/day/lb of body fat. For example, if you have 30 lb of body fat, you could mobilize 900 kcal of energy every day from your stored body fat. So that would be 900 kcal that you don’t need to get from your diet.
This is an estimate based on a single scientific paper afaik, so it probably varies person to person, and over time. It also assumes they you have enough of a fasting window to access this energy from fat stores. If you eat all day, you might stay in a fed state and never start pulling energy out of your body fat.
Because of this, it’s easier to be guided by appetite. Eat slowly, observe yourself getting full, and stop before you’re really full.
@ctviggen Rather than side-track this topic, I started another topic to discuss the hypothesis that eating plant nutrients may trigger fat storage. I’m pretty sure that I discovered this hypothesis while creating a topic based on Stefansson’s article in 1939 Harper’s Magazine ‘Lessons In Living From The Stone Age’. Stefansson states in passing that the Eskimos knew of some edible berries and roots, but considered them not ‘real food’, just survival rations. The opening links, aren’t specifically about the hypothesis, but I think they represent a relevant intro.
@PaulL You may find this of interest as well.
So, some of you have said “don’t restrict calories” or words to that effect.
How does that fit with how people combine fasting with Keto?
Are the carbs from beer as bad/worse than pasta/rice/potatoes/bread?
Also - i get that net carbs are calculated by subtracting the amount of fibre from the amount of carbs - does this still work if I ate one food that had, eg 10g of carbs and offset it with, eg enough broccoli to give me 10g of fibre?
Or can net carbs only be calculated from the one ingredient?
Carbs are carbs, there’s no difference other than some are longer chains of glucose and take slightly more time to breakdown the bonds. The carbs in beer come from barley, just another grain. A significant difference, however, is caused by the ethanol in beer. In sufficient quantities over sufficient time, ethanol and fructose damage the liver.
RE fiber. If you ate a spoonful of sucrose (table sugar) you would be getting approx 20 grams of carbs about half and half glucose and fructose. If you also ate a spoonful of psyllium husks at the same time, you would be getting approx 20 grams of fiber. You could eat a pound of fiber, but you still ate 20 grams of glucose/fructose.
As Dr. Jason Fung, the Canadian nephrologist, explains, there are basically three body states: fed, fasting, and famine. Restricted caloric intake is the signal to the body that there is a famine going on. It causes the metabolic rate to drop and leads the body to hold on to its reserves. The normal human state (evolutionarily speaking), however, is to alternate between feasting and fasting. In both states, the metabolism is revved up, and there is no need to hold on to reserves. When the feasting stops, the body simply switches to meet its needs from fat stores. The metabolic rate does not drop. It would make no sense for hunters to be unable to go out and take down another mammoth once the meat from the first one runs out, after all.
Now, of course there are limits in all things, and the picture is actually more nuanced than this, but this is the general idea.
One could argue that eating a big chunk of beef by itself, day in, day out, gets old. But if you can have it with french fries, or mashed potatoes, pasta… that’s less boring, tastier for many and therefore you’re more tempted to eat more it.
I can easily stop a meal of meat. I can less easily, but also stop a meal of chocolate forest cake with salt caramel ice cream and strawberry coulis. That’s why I’ve always controled my weight. But if I did have to pick one for bingeing, and I think I’m not alone, I’d pick the latter.
When you’re high carbing, there are a lot more foods you can choose from, and they can be cheaper, too. That makes it more difficult to stop eating.
One of the reasons I like very low carb is exactly that. It’s much easier to stop eating. There’s just so much protein and fat I can stomach. The pull to eat more is just not there. As much as I like bacon, I still think caramel ice cream, or jackfruit ice cream is much tastier.
If you never had a sweet tooth, you can’t understand what i’m talking about. But look at the internet. The most popular recipes are keto versions of high carb foods. So, I’m not going to pretend most people prefer fat over carb.
Just a quick search turned up this study. This did not study individuals in ketosis, however, it did demonstrate changes in the insulin:glucagon ratio dependent on protein dosage. Soy and whey were used simply because both are metabolized quickly. So you could argue about soy, but my takeaway is that even without considering ketosis as a factor, response to protein is complex and just claiming more protein equals more gluconeogenesis is wrong.
This is interesting, as well:
If I exercise and, eg burn 600 calories and, therefore, achieve “extra” glycogen depletion could I then stay in ketosis eating more carbs than 30g that day?
Everyone’s carbohydrate tolerance is different. Dr. Stephen Phinney, in a lecture once, estimated that perhaps as many as 20% of the population have no need of a ketogenic diet, because they can tolerate whatever carbohydrates they throw at their bodies. But many of us are not so fortunate, and most people can certainly eat a ketogenic diet and benefit from it, whatever their carb tolerance may be.
Your carbohydrate threshold is the level where, if you eat less than that amount of carbohydrate, your body remains in ketosis. You can discover what that level is by experimenting. But we don’t recommend doing that at the beginning. Those who are new to a ketogenic diet should keep their carb intake less than 20 g/day, until they are sure of being fat-adapted. At that point, if they still want to, they can experiment with increasing their carb intake.
For myself, I find that, while my carb threshold is higher than what I normally eat, there is a point where, even though I still remain in ketosis, if I eat a bit more carbohydrate my aches and pains return, and I am stiff and bloated. I always try to remember that fact, whenever someone leaves something tempting lying around the house. As tasty as the morsel may be, it’s not worth it, given how I’ll feel the next day, even if still in ketosis.
You’re going to need to get food energy (fuel) from “somewhere”. You have three choices: fat, carb, and protein. (I’ll assume that getting a lot of energy from alcohol is not what we want.)
Since we’re going low-carb, that’s going to be very low: say 100 kcal to make the arithmetic easy (25g)
Protein is pretty hard to overeat - typically people find it self-limiting to go over ~150-200g. After this point it becomes repulsive to eat more high-protein food. So that’s about 600-800 kcal of protein.
On the higher end of the estimate, that makes up 900 kcal of food energy. Any other food energy is going to have to come from fat. Someone carrying a huge reserve in their body fat can supply quite a few calories from their own fat stores, but anything else is going to have to come from dietary fat.
A diet with high protein, low carb, and low fat is essentially a protein sparing modified fast - a low calorie diet that is considered effective for medically-supervised rapid weight loss.