wait, so how many calories can I have on LCHF diet?
Options
Replies
-
I think due to the fat, and protein you need more calories, you will be amazed how full you feel , when you change eating and are still losing weight, give it a week or ten days, it works, and it's so much easier than watching the calories all the time.0
-
rowanshepherd3 wrote: »I've never really accepted the eat more to lose theory
Well, the eat more theory does not mean "eat more than your energy expenditure". You are still going to be eating below TDEE. The goal there is basically find the highest calorie level where you can still lose, thereby preventing metabolic adaptation to the lower amount of calories.
A 22% deficit to lose the last 10 pounds is steep. You might do better with a 15% deficit.
0 -
I'm 5'6" with 20 lbs left to lose and right now I eat 1200-1400.0
-
The goal there is basically find the highest calorie level where you can still lose, thereby preventing metabolic adaptation to the lower amount of calories.
Think I need to find out more about this, why would you get metabolic adaption to lower calories but not higher?0 -
The hypothesis is that "large" deficits lead to reductions in RMR. The evidence is weak, if not contradictory. The reductions seen are seldom as big as a candy bar.
It's an approach favoured by people that struggle to control their eating and are happy to lose very slowly, in my opinion.0 -
I agree with @yarwell.
The benefit of higher calorie (lower deficit) seems to be more aboutsustainability. If you're eating 1300 cals and are starving hungry all the time, you're more likely to cheat and blow your deficit anyway.0 -
-
Obvs to be able to eat more and still lose at a steady rate i.e. .5 lb a week would be great but you can't expect to eat more and lose more than when you ate less surely?
Thanks for digging out those studies deksgrl, unfortunately they made no sense to me though, too much science speak! What was is that you were pointing out there?0 -
Many of us find that when our body isn't fighting to process carbs, it becomes more efficient, and as a baseline burns more calories naturally in this fat burning state. Therefore, I can eat more calories now than I could just counting calories and still be eating at a deficit due to the state of my metabolism and the way my body handles the types of food I'm eating now.0
-
rowanshepherd3 wrote: »Obvs to be able to eat more and still lose at a steady rate i.e. .5 lb a week would be great but you can't expect to eat more and lose more than when you ate less surely?
Thanks for digging out those studies deksgrl, unfortunately they made no sense to me though, too much science speak! What was is that you were pointing out there?
Actually, there are situations in which you can eat more an lose at the same or a faster rate.
The body is not a bomb calorimeter. Protein, fat, and carbohydrates are not burned, per se, but rather disassembled. Carbohydrates, even "complex" carbohydrates are either easy to disassemble (starches, sugars, etc) and get broken down quickly, or are impossible to disassemble (fiber) and get sent straight to the intestines. Protein and fat are harder to disassemble (and protein is harder, still, to be converted into a usable form of energy), requiring both more time and more energy in which to do it.
Even after digestion, the body responds differently to different inputs -- fructose gets sent straight to the liver to be turned into triglycerides, glucose goes straight into the bloodstream, amino acids (proteins) and fatty acids go to the liver to be stored or packaged up into lipoproteins to be sent to various parts of the body for fuel and repair. These all take different amounts of energy and require different hormones, and those different hormones send different signals to the brain.
When you eat a high carbohydrate diet, all the carbohydrates that aren't fiber get broken down into sugar. The glucose part of that gets sent into the bloodstream, raising your blood sugar levels. Because glucose is a neurotoxin at high concentrations, the body attempts to keep a tight reign on the blood glucose levels. Insulin is called upon to deal with it. If you're insulin sensitive, then it gets dealt with fairly quickly and easily, but the more you subject yourself to this cycle without having a use for all the stored glucose, the more resistant your cells become to taking it (they're full, basically). When you become insulin resistant, your body has to make more insulin in order to get the sugar into the cells. However, that's also accompanied by hyperinsulinemia -- elevated insulin levels. Hyperinsulinemia can either be caused by something internal (the "off" switch is faulty) or external (the resulting blood sugar crash forces you to eat every couple of hours, so you're never fully done digesting the last meal and allowing insulin to drop). High levels of insulin tell the brain and rest of the body that there is fuel to be dealt with before turning to fat stores, so the fat cells remain "closed" or "input only." The result is difficulty losing weight with a sane amount of calories on a high carb diet.
Or, you can lower your carbohydrates, which lowers the amount of glucose you're putting into your body, and ultimately the amount of insulin running around, and eat a sane amount of food and lose at least as much weight, if not more.
This is just one of the processes that affects weight loss or retention. There are a number of others, including the ones involving cortisol, glucagon, thyroid, the full range of sex hormones and their balance, leptin, ghrelin, and more. And that doesn't even get into the stuff about resting metabolic rate changes after prolonged severe calorie restriction.
I'm actually a pretty good example of how changing what you eat can affect your weight more than changing how much you eat.
Here's my weight for the past year:
Note how straight those lines are until recently (yes, those are swaths of months where my weight didn't go below that level, but bounced from there often to a pound or two higher and then between that higher number and about 3-5lbs above that). That first big jump is when I stopped taking Metformin, due to the horrid side effects and limited results I was getting. The second big jump is who the hell knows what. Seriously, my body seemed to have decided that New Year's meant getting back the other half of what I lost when I first started the Metformin.
Here is my caloric intake for the past 90 days (well, the days I logged, I admittedly have been spotty lately, but what I eat is pretty consistent), unfortunately, MFP's logs don't go back any farther for this metric:
You'll see, though, that my net caloric intake hasn't really changed much. There are still the occasional day that I'm way over, and the occasional days that I'm under to one degree or another. And yes, there are days where I'm way under net calories, because I don't typically get as hungry on my more active days. While this doesn't show the full year, this has been pretty consistently my caloric intake for the past year. In fact, my caloric intake has held pretty steady in that range for several years at this point, but it was only in the past 45 days or so that the chart has started that downward trend. So what's different?
Am I more active? Nope. In fact, I'm actually less active than I was this time last year.
Is my logging more accurate? Not really. I still eyeball, measure some things, and rely more on packaging weights and spacial recognition to determine amounts. Weighing everything I eat would be an exercise in disordered eating for me, I learned that a long time ago. One would actually think I should be having a harder time now, because a higher fat diet means a smaller margin of error, especially as I decreased the amount of low-calorie foods I was consuming.
So, if I'm less active, but still eating the same, how is it that I'm losing weight now, when I wasn't for several years (you can't see that there, but the first part of that chart is pretty representative of the past 4-5 years at this point, with the exception of corresponding drops when I started the Metformin), what changed?
The composition of my diet.
In my case, I had to go all the way to a carnivorous way of eating and eliminate plants from my diet for the time being. My body responded how you see there. That last peak before it starts dropping was 3/24, a day or two after Easter. I started my new way of eating that Wednesday. And I wasn't coming from SAD, either. I'd been Primal for the past 5 years or so, and have been reducing my carbs down from 100g since the time I started that. Before I went to carnivore, my carb intake averaged 50g and some days even quite a bit less. For me, something in even a whole-foods based standard low carb/ketogenic diet was triggering my body to hold on to weight. Once I dropped the foods that weren't working for me, my weight immediately started dropping in a way that it never has before.0 -
Also, the story of the woman who wasn't losing weight, despite eating a mere 700 calories a day -- http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/FitBeto/view/700-calories-a-day-and-not-losing-4784680
-
Dragonwolf wrote: »Also, the story of the woman who wasn't losing weight, despite eating a mere 700 calories a day -- http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/FitBeto/view/700-calories-a-day-and-not-losing-478468
Somewhat apocryphal and a bit of a one off though. Steve Phinney says nobody ever walked into his lab and clocked an RMR below 1200 as a counter example.0 -
Dragonwolf wrote: »Also, the story of the woman who wasn't losing weight, despite eating a mere 700 calories a day -- http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/FitBeto/view/700-calories-a-day-and-not-losing-478468
Somewhat apocryphal and a bit of a one off though. Steve Phinney says nobody ever walked into his lab and clocked an RMR below 1200 as a counter example.
That particular one, possibly (though I'm more apt to want to see his client base, given my own experiences), though I've seen a number of similar cases (among women with PCOS, for example, the SAD-style lifestyle changes generally involve regimens along the lines of 800 total calories and 1+ hours a day of strenuous activity, and still, most women struggle and lose at a snail's pace at best).0
