Keto help

Having a hard time hitting my caloric minimum of 1200 almost every day without exceeding protein or carb limit. Any suggestions for what I could eat to help increase my fat/caloric intake?

Answers

  • rileysowner
    rileysowner Posts: 8,375 Member
    Butter, tallow, lard.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 36,422 Member
    As long as you don't have a relevant health condition that imposes unusual conditions on your nutritional needs, it's fine to exceed your protein goal, your fats goal, or both.

    What isn't a great idea is to be persistently quite low on either protein or fats. Both of those contain essential nutrients (essential amino acids, EAAs, and essential fatty acids, EFAs, specifically). That means we need to eat some, because our bodies can't manufature the EAAs or EFAs out of any other intake. Carbs aren't essential in that same sense, because loosely speaking our bodies are able to manufacture their own carb equivalents. That makes carbs more flexible, and if you're trying to eat keto, I would think you'd want to be keeping those low, by definition.

    If you're persistently low on fats, that's an area to try to increase to reach a sensible calorie minimum. To do that, some good sources are avocadoes, nuts, nut butters, seeds, fatty cold-water fish, olive oil on veggies or in dressings, etc. Higher in saturated fats, but still potentially fine within reason, would be cheese, fattier meats, butter, etc.

    An important point that sometimes missed, IMO: The macro goals don't need to be exactly exact every single day, even for adequate nutrition, and they're of at most indirect importance simply for weight loss. Weight loss is directly about calorie intake. Sub-par nutrition can cause fatigue so we burn fewer calories than expected, or spike appetite so it's too hard to stick with a sensible calorie goal, but the direct effect on weight loss is still calories.

    Macros are about nutrition, and of course that's important for health. Even there, pretty close to reasonable macros on average will be fine, no need to be exactly exact. Macros aren't like some magic spell where every syllable must be precisely correct, or bad things will happen. They're more guideline-like than that.

    Best wishes!