I also lost a bunch of weight on keto after several failed attempts at simply cutting calories. 235 lbs to about 185 and it all happened pretty rapidly (about half a year) considering I barely exercised. Lots of salads, chicken breasts, eggs & bacon, lettuce wraps, and quest bars. Regular coffee though, never was a fan of throwing butter in there. I mean I did do light cardio on and off, but I think it was mostly the diet that did it for me. Tried to stay under 20 daily grams of carbs.
> I mean I did do light cardio on and off, but I think it was mostly the diet that did it for me.
Most likely. The amount of calories burnt by exercising is surprisingly low. Unless you really do a lot of it simply eating a bit less may be easier, esp. because you get hungry after exercising which easily leads to more intake than you have burned before.
That being the case, isn't exercise still very important to overall health - even if you're at a healthy weight? (Personally, I've never had any weight problems regardless of diet, but regular exercise makes a big difference in how I feel.)
Exercise is incredibly important for our health. It mitigates or even reverses ailments tied to lifestyle choices. To use myself as an example I have a bad shoulder as a result of stupid amounts of online video games (MMOs...) and every Thursday for the past two months I have specifially worked out the muscle group that's causing me pains in my right shoulder. And what do you know, after the initial muscle soreness goes away I feel slightly better and less sore. If I stop my regular exercise, the pain comes back.
I used to suffer from depression and anxiety. Meds didn't really help and I changed my lifestyle around. It helped. I do agree with you, exercise as well as diet is incredibly important if you want to feel normal.
Sure it is good for your health. If you are obese I think it may nevertheless often be better for your health to direct will power onto your eating habits to loose weight instead of using using that willpower to force yourself into exercising thinking it might help you achieving the former.
What is the logic behind putting butter in your coffee? If your goal is to lose weight, wouldn't not eating that butter still be better than eating it?
You're stuck in the mindset that fat makes you "fat". This is the whole point of ketosis, and a rethinking of wrong dietary guidelines that have persisted for decades.
The butter in the coffee supplies fat for fuel / energy, suppresses appetite, and does not contribute to weight gain or more specifically an increase in adipose fat tissue.
Simply cutting all calories is futile. Your body needs energy to sustain itself. The point of keto diet is replacing carbs with a significant increase in fat (~70% give or take) as a percentage of calories consumed.
But it is crucial to actually consume a lot of fat, not just try to cut overall calories.
The point of putting butter in your coffee is to extend your natural faste. The faste that you enter every night during sleep. It is done in tandem with also skipping breakfast on keto.
The reason you put butter in your coffee instead of a spoonful of say, sugar, is that fat takes a long time to digest and even a fairly small amount of it (a table spoon of butter in your coffee) takes a while to digest. During that time period your hunger sensation is suppressed.
Coffee also promotes weight loss because it speeds up your metabolism. The idea behind buttered coffee is fairly simple. Put enough fat in your coffee so that you don't get hungry and eat a meal and you help extend your natural faste - and your morning coffee helps speed up your metabolism.
There are good reasons for drinking buttered coffee even if you're deliberately trying to avoid weight loss i.e you are following a net neutral or net positive caloric intake diet. When you're fasting your body isn't spending energy digesting food which means less of your body's immediately available resources aren't spent digesting food.
Even if you're getting calories from your coffee it doesn't impact your weight loss because you're still eating less calories than your body needs to maintain the weight.
> Even if you're getting calories from your coffee it doesn't impact your weight loss because you're still eating less calories than your body needs to maintain the weight.
This is completely dependent on other factors. Weight loss is dependent on a hell of a lot of things in tandem. It is mathematically strictly better to say, drink only black coffee or sugar-free energy drinks in the morning. Caffeine is an appetite suppressant. The difference is that most people don't have the personal willpower to stick to the fasting without a few calories to help them along.
Weight loss in general is precisely mathematical in pacing and it will absolutely make you lose weight faster if you consume less calories.
Dr. Jason Fung has done extensive research and experiments on this topic including fasting. You can read his research in his book obesity code. Very eye opening.
I'm sure it could also yield multiple well-cited articles on the other side as well. It would be much more helpful to actually provide some research that you stand behind.
Basically, you can certainly go into starvation mode, but not in any reasonable amount of time. Skipping meals or even fasting for a whole day will not cause "starvation mode". Prolonged calorie restriction can affect hormones like Leptin and affect energy expenditure.
Bear in mind that Lyle believed in "starvation mode" 10-17 years ago; I believe he mentions it in his first book. He was also a firm believer in strict caloric arithmetic and that microbiome didn't matter. His content is only as good as the current scientific literature is, and that has changed a lot in the past 20 years.
Who says it's an addition of calories? For many people breakfast is just coffee with coconut oil and butter. It's not adding calories it's just consuming them at a different time. You're still going to be at a deficit at the end of the day.
For me it would be compared to just black coffee and no breakfast, so of course it would be additional calories if I force myself to drink coffee with butter in it.
In that case it probably doesn't make sense. Unless you find that adding it to your coffee allows you to not eat additional calories for a longer period of time.
It's hard for me to explain why the "calories in, calories out" theory is incorrect in so far as it's not useful to structure your diet around to prevent getting fat.
Gary Taubes was the person who I learned from the most, many years ago about high fat, low carb diet, and I have been following his advice ever since, to great success.
He has MANY videos on the internet, here is a recent one:
His book "Why we get fat" is also a great, clearly written explanation of all this, and I highly advise you to look into the subject, with an open mind. You may be surprised.
Not all calories are the same. For example, body excretes excess dietary fat, but stores excess carbohydrates adding 4 times the amount of water to it. You can find the details in any Paleo Diet related site.
If you don't eat a lot of carbs, that means you need to eat fat during the day to replace it. Would you rather eat the butter raw, or with a cup of coffee?
Fat takes a long time to digest in your stomach, as such you feel satiated for a much longer period of time. Butter can be used somewhat to sweeten coffee, and unlike using sugar won't invoke an insulin response and a subsequent crash.
Might as well use heavy cream. 20% or more, just an unsweetened version. Pity the diet trashed my liver long term. Not sure why (the actual dietetician had no idea either), but lab numbers do not lie. (Aspartate, alanine, cholesterol, no inflammation in CRP) It was the only thing effective so far. Long term was around 2 years thereof.
Moral is, diet responsibly and pay for the metabolic panels when dieting.
What exactly did it do to your liver (what's the diagnosis so to speak), did you have alcohol, what carbs did you have, and how do you treat the issue now?
When I tried keto a few years back (an interesting experience, to say the least), and I eliminated almost all carbs from my diet, estimated the calories that are left, I found I needed to eat a LOT more fat to reach a sensible daily amount of calories. Like heaping a few big tablespoons of mayo on a bowl of broccoli lots (being Dutch, cue the Pulp Fiction references :) ). Maybe it's just that I've never been a very big eater, but yeah I found it a bit of a struggle to keep up. So adding some butter and coconut fat to the coffee helps. Plus fat lasts longer, it doesn't quite spike like sugars do, so getting a whole lot of it in the morning is a great way to start the day.
I kinda want to try and start again, it definitely had some benefits, as long as I managed to get enough calories and vegetables/nutrients (sorry I'm one of those persons that needs to take care they eat enough).
The big problem, however, is that in the mean time I've greatly reduced the amount of animal products from my diet--for environmental and ethical reasons, not health. And I'm not really sure how to do both.
I would need to spend a lot of money on almonds and other foods that may not seem that expensive until you need to consume them in bulk to replace the cheap, cheap carbs :) Being nearly-vegetarian is very cheap.
And even though I could probably hack the costs (or figure out something clever to do so), I'm not at all sure if it's even possible to live on a healthy keto diet while keeping my environmental impact footprint to a reasonable size that I can consider myself a responsible inhabitant of this planet. I don't think I can bring myself to eat very large amounts of meat again, even if they're organic certifiably happy cows. Tempeh has slightly more proteins anyway :p (also tastier than tofu, which is not a very high bar, I know)
If you are not opposed to eating sea food, there are many fish that are good on keto. Mackerels, Sardines, Anchovies, and Salmon come to mind, plus they have a high ratio of omega 3 vs omega 6 and 9. I eat lots of Avacado and use a lot of olive oil you can cook vegetables in. You honestly want to go light on the nuts, because even many of the fatty ones still have quite a few carbs, and the omega fat ratio is not great. Also flax is a big deal. I get what you are saying though; I think it would be difficult to be vegetarian on this diet, though ironically I probably eat less meat than I did before keto.
I'm on a similar boat. Vegan for +10 years, I fast one day a week and aim to keep carbs under 20 grams the day after, I feel my great during those 2 days. I would like to make the switch into full vegan keto, but I've yet to find a plan that I feel would cover my nutritional bases and that I could maintain on a low-budget.
Let me know if you make any headway! /r/veganketo helps.
p.s. I recently found that dumpster diving asian supermarkets I can get infinite supply of still-fresh packaged tofu, that has sure been helping!
Just to get in calories by fat, which generally hold you over longer. I have coffee with coconut oil every morning. I've tried doing on coffee with coconut oil and butter but it's not for me. I'd rather have eggs and bacon.
Are you blending the butter or just stirring? I make mine with butter, coconut/almond milk from califia and a bit of vanilla extract. Blended in bullet mixer for about 20 seconds and it comes out like an unsweetened latte.
