>Fat is not the enemy, sugar -- and fructose in particular -- is the enemy
I tell this to myself and anyone who wants to listen so I believe it but it bothers me that this is just the current "fact". A while ago, the opposite was "true", and who knows what we will all be thinking in the future? That, I think, is the most depressing thing about nutrition advice.
The opposite was never true; even when fat was looked at much worse than it is now, sugar was still held to be a problem, too. "Sugar free" options have been pushed as healthy just as long as "fat free" options.
(The idea that complex carbs are problematic is somewhat newer, but sugar's been held to be a concern for a long time -- that's why its broken out separately from general carb totals on nutrition labels.)
If you want to find out why the opposite has been true for so many years, Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is a good read.
In a nutshell: long-term nutritional studies are hard and expensive, scientists of the era jumped to some conclusions without the gold-standard double-blind experiments that are expected of scientists today, and once the mantra of low-fat (and high-carb) diet being good for you was accepted by a government-run National Institutes of Health, chances of grant money going towards scientific study proving otherwise are virtually nil (did I mention those studies are hard and expensive?)
I've seen far too many folks on /r/keto shed tens (or even 100+) of pounds on a fat and protein macro heavy diet to not believe it.
I myself am doing keto with Ketochow (a Keto-esq Soylent mixture made by a gentleman out of Utag), and lose 3-5 lbs a week on it (yet it tastes like delicious pancake batter) while doing minimal exercise.
To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week. That's 1550 - 2570 calories less per day. A sedentary person needs somewhere between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. You were either eating half as much food than you needed or there is a more likely explanation.
It's obviously a combination of eating less and losing water weight. Your body can maintain about 1 lb of glycogen and 3 lb of water associated with that glycogen. Not eating carbs will likely lead to a big decrease in this weight. Also the fat itself is stored in 1:1 ratio with water. So your 3-5 lbs per week is likely either a 1 or 2 time thing where you progressively lose all your glycogen. Together with a moderate calorie restriction you end up losing some fat and an equivalent amount of water.
> To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week.
The actual range for the weekly calorie deficit is more like 1800 (3 pounds, 100% muscle @ 600 Cal/pound) to 17,500 (5 pounds, 100% fat @ 3,500 Cal/pound)
And if you are doing losing weight through calorie deficit with a basically sedentary lifestyle, the percentage of weight loss through fat is probably going to be no higher, and possibly substantially lower, than your starting body fat percentage. The key reason for working out while losing weight is maintaining muscle mass.
> To lose 3-5 pounds per week is crazy! That's 10800 - 18000 calories less than used per week. That's 1550 - 2570 calories less per day. A sedentary person needs somewhere between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. You were either eating half as much food than you needed or there is a more likely explanation.
Not only are my macros significantly skewed towards fats now, I am indeed consuming less calories (only 1000 cal/day of Ketochow) while still feeling satiated. My TDEE is ~2200 cal/day.
I've been at about 2 lbs weight loss a week on a 1350 calorie diet since mid December. I know 2000 calories seems to be a standard but after a couple weeks I don't really feel any different consuming <1400 cal a day than I did when I was consuming 2500. I also sit at a desk all day so I'm pretty sedentary. I doubt I could maintain this deficit if I was still doing manual labor. (I'm not doing a keto diet, just an eat less diet)
Correction, keto is not protein heavy. It's fat heavy, moderate protein, and low carb. It say "moderate" but I usually eat about the same amount of calories from fat that I do from protein. I don't think that is high protein though. I probably consume <1g per pound of bodyweight. High protien diets are usually more like 2-3 per pound.
Less protein is converted to glucose than carbs but you can still eat too much protein and kick yourself out of ketosis. Fat converts to glucose at the lowest amount of the 3 macros.
Protein-heavy diets accelerate aging, don't they? I thought that was the result from studies into caloric restriction... a reduction in certain kinds of protein (leucine?) and a reduction in DHEA loss correlate heavily with calorie intake, and are what makes caloric restriction good?
We've been pushed the low fat high carb diet for so long now that people are confused. Especially in the US. They are starting to come around to the idea that maybe fat isn't so bad.
It's hard for people to understand dietary fat != body fat because they've been basically "fed" bullshit their entire lives by advertisers and our own government guidelines. So many people think "low fat" is healthy but all it usually means is "we took the fat out and gave you more sugar".
I'm a bug fan of keto but I wouldn't recommend every one do it. I would recommend everyone cut their carb intake in at least half, unless you are some kind of endurance athlete but then you probably know enough about your body to know what to eat. We eat way too many processed foods which means way too many carbs and not enough of them are fiber. Many people probably don't even realize how many carbs they eat in a day.
I tell this to myself and anyone who wants to listen so I believe it but it bothers me that this is just the current "fact". A while ago, the opposite was "true", and who knows what we will all be thinking in the future? That, I think, is the most depressing thing about nutrition advice.