Gallowmere1984 wrote: »

Dragonwolf wrote: »

strong deficits cause minimal hormonal issues

Do you have evidence of that for women on keto? Female bodies are notoriously fickle when it comes to environmentally-affected hormones. Keto alone is known to screw with women's hormones, and extreme caloric restriction is known to elevate cortisol. For an active 5'10" woman, 1450 calories may in fact be too low.

The whole point of this thread was not to pray for online calculator magic, but rather to explore the theory that if I eat less fat (and use my body fat for the difference) how much protein is too much.

It's not really possible to have "too much" protein without putting in some serious effort. At 5'10", your protein could go as high as 160g or so and still fall into the typically accepted average range. In my experience, even eating carnivore, going much beyond 160-180g requires effort and more than double the amount you're consuming (to compare, I've got a day of nearly 4000 calories, nearly entirely of meat, and still didn't break 180g of protein).

Have you considered dropping the coffee and/or trying ("true") intermittent fasting? Either of those might help, without having to further restrict calories on a daily basis.

You left out the part about high bodyfat in your quote, which is important. When I say "hormones" within the context of fat loss, I am talking about leptin, ghrelin, shbg, thyroid, etc. Cortisol ALWAYS goes up in response to stress, and caloric deficits definitely qualify.

Also, for an active person, you are right, though "active" is pretty hard to quantify. I have seen several examples of people (women and men) who try to cut calories hard AND throw in a bunch of cardio, and yes, the results are often disastrous. However, 30 minutes per day hardly qualifies as excessive, unless it were HIIT, in which case I'd ask why the hell they were doing such on a heavy deficit anyway.

I'll spend some time today going through some of the articles I have on the subject and get you some sources.

In the meantime, give this a read: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/does-the-diet-determine-the-training-or-the-training-determine-the-diet.html/

It gives a rather concise explanation of what I was talking about with the previous paragraph.

The fact is, unless one is already low in bodyfat, or has an actual metabolic disorder, strong deficits cause minimal hormonal issues