OT: Keto and similar diets: do they really work?
I know this has been discussed before, especially among those who lift or are trying to lose weight/get into better shape, etc... I've put on the middle-age 7 or 8 pounds in the past couple of years and I want to lose it, stat. I've been curious about the keto diet, but I'm concerned about the cardiac implications. I took an online quiz to determine my own personal keto diet (not going to follow it, was just curious) and it told me my diet should be 75% fat, 20% protein, and 5% carbs. I have a family history of heart attacks and I take a statin. Is it possible to do keto without consuming a ton of saturated fat? Does keto really work or are there better ways to lose weight?
I have read in several notable publications that consuming less calories, leads to weight loss. Take that for what it's worth.
I gained weight without consuming more calories so.......
On a more serious and less funny note. Could you have PCOS....? Because I don’t know how you would gain eating less unless there is a thyroid or another medical type issue at hand.
My doctor says it's my metabolism doing the middle age slow down. The weight even distributes differently than it has in the past. I've had my thyroid checked and it's fine.
They should have said "eat fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight".
Of course as you said, the amount you burn in a day changes over time (and day to day).
I've gone through the same changes as I have aged. I have noticed that I can get by eating a lot less than I used to. These days, I only have a single meal on weekends and on most days I just skip breakfast or lunch (or both). You metabolism is slowing down, you need less calories, and you need to start changing your habits to suit those changes.
I think this is the bottom line: I have to eat less, and eating fewer carbs will probably be helpful, too. I just really love food.
I started counting calories and I've lost 10 pounds in about 6 weeks while also lifting. Any diet is going to require you to demonstrate self control. Find a plan that you can stick to long-term. I did keto for two months, lost a ton of weight and then gained it right back when I realized I could never commit to it. If you count calories then you can still eat what you'd like but just in smaller proportions. Plus, if you also track exercise then you'll find yourself motivated to work out so you can eat more during the day.
I found tracking hugely helpful. I'm down from 230 (about 5-6 years ago) to about 175 and just dipped under 170 for a minute earlier this year. I've been between 170 and 180 for about 3 years now. It changed how I ate and what I ate just by knowing what everything was. The keto things work if your calorie count goes down but the rest is just marketing in my experience.
That's what I've done. Lift before work. Light lunch. Pay attention to the calories and try not to be a pig at dinner. First thing that's worked for me since I reached the point where I needed to lose weight. Down 15. Want to lose 10 more.
It’s a math equation. Energy in- energy spent. Tho there is an equation with regards to the energy in part
Plus you've got a handy little built in sanity check on your numbers... If you're unexpectedly gaining weight your numbers are off. Either the intake or the burn rate. Super simple stuff.
I've tried Keto and my conclusion is it's really not something you can do the rest of your life. It's something you do for a while and then you do something else. So for a long term solution counting calories worked better for me.
My frustration with MyFitnessPal is that it says at my age, size and activity level I should be able to eat x number of calories and still lose weight and what I'm finding through trial and error is that it's a lot less than x even with daily exercise added.
So what I'm doing now is working out every weekday morning, not eating breakfast, minimal lunch and sensible dinner portion.
Correct CI/CO is the only thing that matters for weight loss. For nutrition you need to his your macros. Keto is simply a way to minimize calories in. You will gain weight on keto if you eat more calories than you expend, just like any other diet. However, because of the foods you eat in keto, it’s not likely you will overconsume.
Actually there's also data that keto increases CO (metabolic rate goes up).
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/well/eat/how-a-low-carb-diet-might-help-you-maintain-a-healthy-weight.html
from what I've read you do have to be careful not to trigger a starvation response from your body.
I used to think the same. Download and read “the obesity code” by dr Jason Fung. Lots and lots and lots of scientific evidence, backed by lots and lots of studies that say otherwise.
No I am not fat. I work in the medical field and a coworker recommended it to me. It’s interesting and totally changes everything on nutrition and dieting.
The calories in < calories out is basically a 10,000 foot diet - its a good place to start, but too often people think all dieting can be reduced to this. A lot of people seem to think our bodies are this big calculator that (presumably while we sleep) measures the calories we consumed in a day, subtracts calories burned, and decides based on a negative or positive value if it will create a little bit of fat, or burn a little bit of fat. I'm not in medical field but I'm pretty sure our bodies are a bit more complex.
Go vegan and cut out the carbs. Wow! It works almost as good as a 700 calorie/day liquid diet.
Its all about calories in < calories burned.
I'm on the Tom Brady diet... i.e. I only eat super models. It's tough to stick to, I find myself cheating a lot.
You can be a 'vegan' and still eat very poorly.
Being a full fledged vegan is not sustainable for most people because America loves meet. A true keto diet is also difficult to stick to, and the long term cardiovascular concerns of a diet so high in saturated fat has not specifically been studied beyond a couple years. However, years of nutrition science show saturated fat consumption increases CV risk.
Replacing animal protein as much as possible with plant protein, and eating a diet heavy in fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes is very doable for the majority of the population, and is incredibly protective for CV health.
Considering you have family history of CV disease, you should follow with a cardiologist. But most CV disease is preventable, and diet is by far the most important factor.
This is correct. Focus on eating more plants, including whole grains and seeds/nuts, and less meat. Also limit sugar.
Harvard has a fantastic nutrition site, which includes a healthy eating plate.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate/
This site has the best up-to-date info and even includes recipes.
See: Prince Fielder.
Prince Fielder is vegetarian, which is not necessary to have a very healthy diet. In fact, vegetarians can also eat very poorly.
Agree that portion control is also important.
I mean, carbs are vegetarian, so yeah.
See: Prince Fielder.
"However, years of nutrition science show saturated fat consumption increases CV risk"
False, there are actually no studies that prove that. Processed vegetable oils are what cause inflammation and jack up your heart. It's all about inflammation.
To unequivocally ‘prove’ something in science is difficult to do. Nutrition science is especially VERY difficult to draw anything but correlational conclusions due to the impracticality of true, long-term, randomized control trials.
So I agree with you that no study, definitively ‘proves’ that to be the case. There are obviously multiple factors that contribute to CVD risk, and like you said, chronic inflammation is definitely highly linked as well.
However, there are hundreds of studies that correlate saturated fat with increased CVD risk. There are also studies that conclude there is no correlation between saturated fat and CVD, yet they are far fewer in number.
This is obviously a Wiki article, but is well-cited and is a good read as a starting point for anybody who enjoys nutrition science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovascular_disease
Ewwww..
Going vegan or vegetarian is usually a weight loss trap for the average person. It usually leads to people eating lots of carbs and fats unless you really stick to it and have expendable cash
If I created a diet that said you had to run 1 mile to a grocery store, eat a donut, and run 1 mile back, people would lose weight. It's that simple. Decrease calories and increase activity.
*not medical advice
The human body is not a car engine with consistent energy consumption based on engine output. Our system is much more complex. To make the metaphor more complete, imagine an engine with multiple gas tanks - filled with different fuels - further, based on engine outputs, the fuels act differently under different conditions.(heat, etc.).
The idea that burning more energy than consuming, is correct in principle, but incomplete and of low resolution. Read online, my knowledge is limited, but there is a lot of science behind this diet.
There was a lot of science supporting trans fat consumption at one point. There was also a lot of science behind the food pyramid. I don't trust diet science.
I take your point. The trans fat issue is the sugar industry corrupting science to push a different conclusion than the unbiased scientific conclusion. That isn't a problem with science, that is corruption preventing the proper conclusion.
I get where you are coming from, but the fact is that there really wasn't a lot of science behind the Food Pyramid.
Basically President Eisenhower had a heart attack (likely because he was a huge smoker) and congress panicked. They saw that some guy named Ancel Keys had done "research" on heart disease that blamed saturated fats, so they asked him to make a diet for America. In reality, he had looked at many countries that had diets high in fats and eliminated all of the ones that didn't meet his hypothesis until he had like 8 countries left that "proved fats are bad". The only thing is that the countries left were also the ones that had high sugar, processed carb, and overall calorie intake, but he ignored that.
This new food pyramid diet was never tested on humans and given that we are now a hideously obese society I think it's clear that replacing fats with grains is a bad idea.
To wrap this bit, sugar is the problem. For high fats, genetics play too large of a role to study diet alone. Statins are cheap.
...as explained in the movie the magic pill.
That is because there is no science behind VAST MAJORITY of diet claims. You should also not trust vast majority of diet based studies as well. Science is all about repeatability and almost no diet studies have them because they are notoriously difficult to do. Most of these diet studies are based on what people "remember" eating over last week or even a month. That is notoriously unreliable data. The only way to truly establish cause/effect relationship is to do double-blind random tests and that is almost impossible with what people eat.
So, do not believe any thing you see, even if they are supposedly scientific studies. Other than sugar being really bad for you, there is relatively little science behind almost any other claim (especially with "well known" facts like low-fat diet, which does not help, or lower salt consumption, which really only helps people with high blood pressure).
Science behind diet is really really poor. Just eat everything in moderation, that is really the best advice out there.
It's because science is bunk. We only know what we think we know, then later we realize we were wrong.
It’s not a car engine but it’s not that complicated either for weight gain or loss. Your BMR doesn’t have a great degree of variability. Your TDEE will vary based on your activity but if your activity is consistent, your TDEE will be as well. Keto helps restrict calories and is good if that’s the food you like to eat. As they say, the best diet is the one you can stick too. For optimum health, an IIFYM diet is better. Even with macro dieting you should ideally set your cap for sugar around 40mg/Day.
I recommend eating a grilled chicken deluxe burrito from BTB, or equivalent, 3 times a day, everyday, for the rest of your life.
Can't go wrong with this
Perfect
yes, i'm down 35
Have you ever tracked your calories strictly? If not, personally I would do that before doing a specific type of diet. Teaches you discipline and you don't have to exclude many foods. And it definitely works.
But yes, keto does work for weight loss if you follow it properly.
I want to second this: start by *honestly* tracking how many calories you're taking in. I'm sure people can and do vary when it comes to what works for them, but the foundation of any successful weight loss program is burning more calories than you're taking in. Figuring out how to make the lifestyle adjustments you need to maintain the weight you'd like to be at is the hard part; no simple diet plan is going to solve everything. A lot of "name brand" diet plans don't work for their headline-grabbing method; they work because the dietary changes they entail incidentally also leads to a reduction in calorie consumption.
FWIW, I lost over 50 pounds a couple years ago (from 226 to ~174). I've maintained a weight that's normally in the upper 170s, lower 180s, which is where I'd like to be. Far and away, the most crucial part of my efforts was transitioning from being almost always sedentary to running a lot (four runs each between 3.5 and 7 miles every week). For me, the additional exercise means that I'm still able to eat the things I like to eat on a regular basis. I can't gorge myself every day, of course, but if I watch what I'm eating carefully most days, then I can have some treats (a more caloric meal, or a dessert, or a donut with my coffee, or whatever) on other days. This is what has worked for me.
This is 100% my experience. Started counting calories with MyFitnessPal. It is super easy to use and you can scan the barcode on any grocery store item and get pretty close. Plus it gives you "credit" for exercise calories and gives you realistic intake goals based on your starting weight and weight loss goal, as long as you are realistic (you aren't going to lose 30 pounds in a month unless you starve yourself). I lost 15 pounds in a couple months, and now I don't even log my food anymore and have maintained my weight because I learned not to do stupid shit like eat a snickers bar that my kids left on the table after halloween, when I wasn't even hungry. Or a handful of chips or peanuts just because someone left the bag sitting on the counter at the office. You'll be amazed at how those kinds of calories add up.
Probably the biggest single change I made was cutting way back on beer and drinking more vodka. It's true what the gym meatheads always say - beer is empty calories. My go-to now when out for an evening with the guys is Tito's and Soda (not tonic- tonic adds lots of calories) with a couple lime wedges. Tito's has 70 calories per shot and an IPA has 200. That's a huge freaking difference when you have a 1700 calorie-per-day budget to work from (I am 185 lbs) Plus you don't have to piss as often.
The key to the whole thing is being honest with the app and entering every single thing you eat into it. You figure out in a hurry what things are worth the calories (an apple or crackers with hummus) and what things are not (the aforementioned chips or peanuts, whole milk - yes milk, or a bagel) The problem with Keto as I have seen my friends go through it is that it doesn't make you change your behavior... You just go back to eating a ton of bread and pasta after you lose the 40 lbs and all that work was wasted.
Using a different app but I've been doing the same thing for 4 weeks and I'm down 16 pounds. I set it up to lose 2 pounds a week, which gave me approx. 2600 calories/day (I'm a fatass). I've found that I can get by on about 1500-1700 calories and not feel hungry at all.
Yep, lost about 30 lbs the first time I ever counted calories (I use the MyFitnessPal app). Even when I stop counting I have an idea of how much I am going over what I should be eating when I am trying to shed lbs. Still easy to jump back into it and lose 10 lbs in 2-3 weeks.