Too much fat

[Newbeginnings20]

I’m on my 5th day of LCHF and tonight I thought I would cook the meatballs with tomato’s and spinach and mozzarella. Looked lovely but I could only manage a few mouthfuls it was just so oily and greasy, was making me feel sick to be honest. Is it because I’m not used to eating so much fat in my diet.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador]

It's partly not being used to it, but it's more likely you just didn't have enough veg there. I generally advise people to start by deciding on their veg, and then adding the greasy bit to taste. Otherwise it's quite easy to end up with a plate of oil and think, ugh, that doesn't look very appetising.

Try cauliflower rice, squash (only a little, if you're doing induction), or spiralized veg. Any of those should go well with meatballs and cheese. Another possibility would be cold meatballs with a mixed salad. Use plenty of dressing (I suggest proper homemade Caesar or blue cheese). There's a restaurant near me that does this dish, and it's really tasty.

[Newbeginnings20 in reply to TheAwfulToad]

Thanks so much - great suggestions!

I was proud of the fact I even home cooked as Friday night I’d normally chill and pizza.

[Aussie64]

I'm day 6, I'm not used to cooking with much oil or fat either, I normally use a spray of olive oil and cut any visible fat off meat, I've been feeling nauseous the past 24 hours and was wondering the same but I've still been eating plenty of leafy greens and broccoli.... Got on the scales after day 5 and had only Lost a kilo which I was disappointed in, but on a positive I'm eating food I've been denying myself and I haven't been starving.... So if the nausea is transient I guess this way of eating is sustainable.... I was advised to eat within an 8 hour window but working night duty I find it difficult. Are you eating 3 meals a day or trying to stick with 2? Do you eat snacks? I find checking in here really helpful too.

[Newbeginnings20 in reply to Aussie64]

Hey Aussie64

So we started the same time really!

First of all huge congratulations 🥳 you have lost 2 and a bit pounds in less than a week that’s awesome. I thought a pound a week is the right amount to lose when trying to lose weight.

Yes same as I used to do that too- cut the fat off. I am eating lots of veg with my dinner. Thing is the meatballs were swimming in the 3 tablespoons of olive oil and then the spinach you cooked in butter! It was just all to much and I just couldn’t eat it! I will just be more mindful of what I cook.

Ok so before LCHF I was fasting - however for 20-4 but I’m sure as you read I’ve had problems etc with my hair falling out! So I’m now doing 16:8

I have 1 black coffee in the morning then before I can open my window at 12 I will have a few nuts 🥜 and lots of water! Oh and a few olives (not so sure if that’s ok?) Lunch I’ve been having avocado 🥑 tuna fish 🐟 and boiled egg or carrots sticks etc with humous.

Then dinner when I get home which I’ve been following the 2 week diet doctor trial. Thing is I’ve never ever been a meat lover - never eaten steak in my life and I’m 51 now ha

So will eat more chicken maybe.

Love vegetables - so am eating lots of them even when the recipe doesn’t say have them.

Actually a few of the diet doctor recipes I’ve done I’m like if I hadn’t of put vegetables with it there wouldn’t have been much to eat?!

So my dinner takes me up to 8pm then I just drink water or soda water for a change.

Yes I agree this forum is fantastic and all so lovely and kind with their advice x

[Newbeginnings20 in reply to Aussie64]

See I’m reading on the Diet Doctor when doing Keto - you should not need snacks if you are doing it properly. However if you are fasting then for most people you are skipping breakfast and so for me when my window opens at 12 but my lunch break isn’t until day 1:30 then yes I will snack on the appropriate food. I’m looking at it like it’s my late breakfast!

[Aussie64 in reply to Newbeginnings20]

Yeah I saw that but as I work 4 ND a week it makes it really hard to not snack when the 3am witching hour hits. I eat breakfast at 8ish and dinner at 8ish and because I sleep all day don't eat between, then about 3am snack. This week it's been celery/cucumber/Brie/cream cheese... Eggs every way imaginable for breakfast and this week dinner was Fish Laksa 4 nights and satay beef with cabbage one night... After dinner 2 nights I had Greek Yoghurt with Berries and a sprinkle of paleo mix (grated coconut/seeds/nuts), so I was surprised I didn't lose much, have felt lousy as in head foggy and nauseous, despite all this I actually think this is a way of eating that I can do long term... On my days off going to try eating in an 8 hour window see how it goes. I eat meat rarely, maybe once a month and am very fussy about trimming it, which I will still do as I dry retch if I eat anything fatty... Your explanation makes sense though, I'd be smashing open that window at 12.00 😉

[Subtle_badger]

Ah, this is familiar. Back in the 90s I was fully into Dean Ornish ultra low fat. I could mostly stick to it, but when visiting my parents I would eat their food as they prepared it. It was standard, modern food, still plenty of carbs but healthy fats and meat cuts chosen for flavour, not leanness, butter in the mash potatoes etc. Much higher fat than I was used to, but much lower fat than LCHF.

It would cause me days of gastric distress. I understood it at the time, my body was unused to the fat and that's was the only problem, but the distress was real.

I think going straight from low fat to keto induction might be pretty rough. I accidentally did it more slowly. Phew!

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to Subtle_badger]

Just curious, how did you get on with the Dean Ornish thing?

[Subtle_badger in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I was young, active, with no medical problems. I did fine on it.

It helps that I am not an idiot. I never bought things that boasted "low fat" without reading the ingredients. I remember an American friend had 0% fat coffee creamer, and I was mystified, so I looked at the ingredient list: everything on the list ended with "-ose"; it was all sugar! I never thought that was part of the diet.

Boil up some wholegrain pasta, and serve with an arrabbiata sauce, maybe with some chicken and a cautious grating of parmesan. Sweat some pumpkin with carrots, onions, garlic, ginger and turmeric, blend it with a little stock or skim milk, and serve garnished with a tablespoon of low fat yoghurt. In restaurants choose the leaner cuts and stay away from the deep fried food and the butter.

I know Jason Fung thinks that was killing me, but I don't think it was that unhealthy a diet. I didn't stick to it for 30 years, but still held a lot of it's tenets for that time, which I guess got me to my present weight.

(I haven't yet bought full fat milk. Old habits die hard)

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to Subtle_badger]

Interesting. I actually quite like Dean Ornish as person. I think he's a well-meaning if rather misguided guy, and as you say his diet probably isn't terribly unhealthy - or at least, it's probably a lot better than what many people subsist on.

When I was a teenager I was eating what you just described. Then I started getting fat. By the time I was 30 I was noticeably overweight. Not massively fat, but fat enough to look unattractive. It took me several years to figure out that fat doesn't make you fat, and that it's not all about "calories in vs. calories out".

The funny part about the story is that, by this time, I had left the UK and was living in a country where people would laugh out loud at the idea of "low fat diets" - and in fact grandma's advice here, to girls who want to stay skinny, is "don't eat rice with your meals and don't eat sweets". What Western medicine has only grudgingly accepted in the last few years has been common knowledge for decades (perhaps centuries) over here.

It's much easier for me to eat LCHF here than it would be back in England, because it's basically what everyone else eats anyway. But I've modulated my ideas about carbs over the years. It's clear that humans can eat carbs. We have some sophisticated internal machinery for digesting, storing and burning them. But I think it all goes wrong when we eat them all the time, at every meal, for years on end. There is no ecosystem on earth that provides that abundance of carbs, so it's mismatched to our capacity to deal with them. We make this worse by ignoring fat as a macronutrient: our bodies have parallel mechanisms for dealing with fat as efficiently as carbs, and there's no logical reason to ignore its existence.

[Subtle_badger in reply to TheAwfulToad]

"What Western medicine has only grudgingly accepted in the last few years has been common knowledge for decades (perhaps centuries) over here."

TBF, Western medicine used to know about it. A doctor told me to reduce my intake of bread and potatoes when I was about 10. It nipped a threatening weight problem in the bud, I didn't get too big until 40 years later.

He had a point. I would sprinkle salt on a slice of white bread and eat it for dessert.

[Aussie64 in reply to Subtle_badger]

I've upped the probiotics in the hope that helps, and trying to persevere

[Subtle_badger in reply to Aussie64]

I was going to write "that's worth a try", and then tried to Google something and found this

gponline.com/probiotics-red...

Probiotics reduce the absorption of lipids! So it might make it worse. In my experience, it was the unabsorbed fats that were the problem.

[Stoozie]

I felt a little bit, not exactly nauseous, more slightly carsick as I adjusted from burning glucose for fuel to burning ketones. It could be this. However none of us is medically trained, so if you are worried, do go and see your GP

[Aussie64 in reply to Stoozie]

I'm an A&E CNS, Nurses are the worst, we self diagnose all the time 😉 I actually had a no carb Caesar salad for dinner and the nausea has resolved... I think it is because it's such a drastic diet change for me, a good change though, who doesn't love Cheese, Butter, olives and eggs, which I've been denying myself for years.

[Stoozie in reply to Aussie64]

Apologies. Some of us ARE medically trained

My DH is a consultant in Special Care dentistry, and we have the reverse thing where everything is 'just a flesh wound' with even half an arm off. (think Monty Python)

[Subtle_badger]

I know my parents' diet was lower in fat than LCHF because they were not low carb: muesli or porridge for breakfast, bread at lunch and always a loaf of bread as well potatoes, pasta or rice taking up about a third of the plate for the evening meal. So if they were having as much fat as you on top of that, they would have been ballooning in weight.

[S11m]

When I tried a Mediterranian meal (in Lanzarote) I thought it was disgustingly oily - but that was 20 years ago - and now, after18 months of Lower-Carbohydrate, Higher-Fat, I might like food that oily.

[ChubbieChops]

I don't think of LCHF meals as being greasy - to me they are rich (and delicious). Maybe if you have been eating low fat up to now, you are finding the difference very noticeable. I also find I don't want to eat as much as I did before because I am not ravenous which I used to be when on HCLF

[Newbeginnings20 in reply to ChubbieChops]

No I agree they are not normally greasy - ChubbieChops but this recipe called for 3 tablespoons of olive oil to cook the meatballs and with the fat that can out of the meatballs was just disgusting to me - in my opinion only. I would normally use 5% fat but research was telling me to use 20% if I could. Then I would normally have spinach wilted in the dinner but this was to be cooked in butter. So I just won’t cook it again it’s cool. I will do stuff that requires less fat so to speak.

[ChubbieChops in reply to Newbeginnings20]

I think you already know I make it up as I go along. With 20% fat mince, I would have dry fried them, as I agree - 3 tbsps. - oil does make it sound like it would be greasy. I make creamed spinach - I gently fry some garlic in a bit of butter. I cheat and use frozen spinach as my hubby doesn't like it so I add that to the butter/garlic. I also like a little sprinkle of chilli flakes. Then salt, pepper and cream - lots of cream. To me it's not greasy, just rich

[Newbeginnings20 in reply to ChubbieChops]

Ahh yes I should have done that!! No oil- call it inexperienced & not confident yet. Do you drain the mince at all? Great idea with the Spinach thanks 😊

[ChubbieChops in reply to Newbeginnings20]

No I've never drained mince but then I've never bought 20% fat mince. I get my meat from my local butcher so I don't know what the fat levels are. It doesn't seem very fatty but I'm not going to buy meat from the supermarket. If the meal doesn't seem fatty enough, I'm adding cream to taste.

[Newbeginnings20]

Oh and yes I agree I definitely get full up quicker! I had a late lunch today as went for a run. I had grilled bacon and mushrooms and fresh tomatoes and a poached egg yum

So I had to make myself eat a dinner tonight - chicken with mozzarella cheeses and sundried tomatoes- well actually they were burnt so tasted disgusting lol. Had with steamed greens but put a knob of butter on.