Eat fat to Burn fat?

[MikePollard]

I've just watched the latest from Low Carb Down Under (I recommend you subscribe) by Maria Emmerich. I'm not the greatest fan of her presentation style but certainly, it's worth a watch.

However, one thing that she say's I fully agree with, and it's worth taking on board if you are eating LCHF and struggling with weight loss, it's monitoring your fat intake.

If your diet consists of say, 60% fat, 15% protein and 25% carbs then if you want to lose weight you do not EAT 60% fat, because some of that fat HAS to come from your stored fat.

I found this out the hard way by making double cream a big part of my diet and drinking it in coffee 3 times a day.

So what I'm suggesting is keeping the protein/carbs as above (or whatever your ratio to goals might be) and row back on the fats.

You might be in ketosis, (as evidenced by keto sticks/monitor) and be frustrated by not losing weight because the fat you are burning will be from the fat you are ingesting NOT from your body fat. I've put this a little clumsily, but you cannot eat fat ad libitum and hope to lose weight.

youtube.com/watch?v=v2NSQBm...(Not working as expected?)

[namaha]

Dear MikePollard

not able to open the video.... Not playing !

[MikePollard in reply to namaha]

Fixed.

[namaha in reply to MikePollard]

👍

[Cosmo501]

Fascinating. This has been on my mind lately. I wanted to ask the forum if that was the right way to go to increase weight loss.will look forward to watching.

[Lytham in reply to Cosmo501]

I think we've already come to that conclusion havent we? x

[Cosmo501 in reply to Lytham]

I don’t know!! 🤣😭 it’s the protein ratio/proportions that have me questioning things at the moment... but I saw a response from praveen (I think!) in the other recent post that gives some very helpful pointers re protein.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador]

While i agree with you in principle, i think the percentages make the point confusing. If you think in terms of absolute calories, you might have a daily requirement of 1800kcal but consume only 1200kcal of that as food. You would want to minimize carbs (obviously) and keep protein moderate - so let's say 25g (100kcal) carbs, 75g (300kcal) protein, and 90g (800kcal) as fat. That's still 66% fat.

Having said that i'm a firm believer in letting your body make the decisions (as opposed to "calculating" your daily calorie requirement and forcing yourself to consume some lesser fraction). I've found that as long as you consume adequate veg, you are unlikely to over-eat either fat or protein. That's just me, of course, so YMMV.

[MikePollard in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I was aware the comparison was a little clumsy, however the point needing driving home is that being on LCHF does not give licence to overconsume fat, especially easy to consume fats like cream. Again, if the carbs are super low, your ketostix firmly blue and you aren't losing weight, then although you are in ketosis, it can be that you are burning exogenous fat and not body fat.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to MikePollard]

The problem here is, how do you know if you're "over-consuming"? You have absolutely no way of knowing how much is too much. It's the same problem that arises with calorie-counting. If you eliminated cream from your diet and found that your weight loss resumed, fair enough, but perhaps the culprit identification would be just "cream" rather than "too much fat".

If one keeps carbs very low then I suspect it would be very hard indeed to eat too much fat. After your previous post on the subject, I tried. Continually overriding your appetite is unpleasant. What I found was that I was discarding vegetables from my meals in order to make space for my calorie target. I gained about 1kg over 3 weeks, but at least half of that appeared to be muscle mass (I'm only carrying about 9kg of total bodyfat, so even a 0.5kg increase would have been visually noticeable).

My lifestyle isn't really conducive to a fixed diet/workout routine, but I'm going to give this another go, for longer if possible. I'm genuinely curious to see what happens.

Personally, I'd always look elsewhere for potential problems before worrying about too much fat, especially sneaky things like fructose, lactose, or alcohol. Also (and I realise it was only a figure plucked out of the air) 25% carbs on a nominal 1800kCal diet would imply 100g+ net carbs, which would definitely slow your weight loss. Emmerich does appear to make this point in the video: adding fat to carbs will result in blood ketones increasing, but that doesn't mean you're going to lose weight.

[MikePollard in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I would suggest that one way of checking whether your fat consumption is a problem or not is using ketostix (or a monitor).

If you are keeping the carbohydrate in the keto range and the Ketostix are firmly blue but you are not losing weight, then that certainly suggests you are burning dietary fat rather than stored fat.

How you do overconsume is an issue that would then need investigation.

[ru_b]

Thank you for posting this. It was an interesting watch. Thought provoking...