What Dr. Bernstein says in his book sort of mitigates the protein centric vs. fat view, though. Okay, it starts with sort of negotiating an amount of protein that you know by experience should satisfy you at a meal, with some estimates of likely protein requirements if I remember correctly. Later in the weight loss section though, one thing he talks about is lowering protein an ounce at a time, and of course reducing insulin appropriately, for weight loss. Also years ago he did an experiment, I think it started with a diabetic aunt of his that needed to gain some weight, but he said he repeated it with other patients. He had her take a shot or two of olive oil a day on top of her diet, apparently she failed to gain weight. His working theory, at least when he was telling this story to Jimmy Moore, was that since pure fat was non-insulinogenic, it wasn't fattening. Of course I don't think he was saying you could drink olive oil with wild abandon and lose weight, that's a little different from it not causing weight gain.

My only problem with ketogains is that they call themselves ketogains. Lowcarbgains might be a better name, if actually being in ketosis doesn't matter that much to the program. I still feel there is a place for a more strictly ketogenic diet for weightloss/diabetes etc. although obviously it's possible to do it very wrongly. On the protein issue--I come to think that the idea that a more strictly ketogenic version of low carb being a perfect match for fasting protocols may be faulty. If you are already trying to eat towards the minimum requirement, pushing things further by not eating can be a problem, on average the protein intake might get pushed too low. Probably not that big a problem if fasting isn't that frequent. You could go the other way, and compensate with higher protein for a while after fasting, but then you'll likely be pushing your ketones lower, that's a problem if they genuinely need to be higher--or if you're otherwise getting benefits from not pushing protein too high on any one day. I get mood benefits and have experienced better weight maintenance since I pushed my protein below the usual low carb recommendations (about a gram per kilogram, the ketogains calculator gives me what looks like 1.5 grams per kilogram), and if I've lost lean mass doing it, it's been subtle, and not affected my strength or endurance working out etc.

The whole point of a more strictly ketogenic diet is to mimic starvation metabolism without actually starving, get the benefits while minimizing any downside. Personally I find I do better with a sort of steady state ketosis, presumably chronically lower insulin etc. than with the up and down that comes with fasting and refeeding.

Good interview about the Bernstein approach. One thing that stands out, besides protein vs. fat is the approach to calories. This is maybe the other area that's the most contentious. "Maybe you're not eating enough," was mentioned as an eye-roller.

There's sort of an "it's wrong to count calories," idea out there. I like Fung's Calorie Restriction As Primary because it isn't "calorie restriction is stupid and should never happen ever, no matter what, blah." To me what I get from that is that calorie restriction shouldn't be the primary, certainly not the sole, intervention. There are lots of studies where people were put on low carb, ate to appetite, and lost weight. There are also studies where people were put on calorie-restricted low carb, lost weight--and where researchers marveled at how well the subjects tolerated the diet, how they reported being able to restrict their calories without hunger.

Calorie restriction hasn't served me well for maintenance. When I started a more ketogenic approach, I'd dieted down with higher protein, calorie restricted, this worked until I got down to 155 or so then I started having issues with hunger and binges, going keto helped at that point--I only regained 5 pounds to the 160 where I am, not all the way back to the 170 that's seemed to be my setpoint since I committed to an Atkins-type diet. I sort of find it funny that we're at a place where for a lot of people not eating at all for periods is considered reasonable, but a milder calorie restriction, in the right context, is not. I'm all like let's keep the toolbox full and all that, and try to find the contexts for applying each tool.

For my metabolism, it just seems so much easier to NOT EAT than have a small meal.

This week, I went two days with coffee, heavy cream, coconut oil, and copious sea salt, and was fine. Indeed, dandy.

If I had gone the two days trying to keep my calories below 1200 (as I have a PhD in doing) it would have been tormenting.

No doubt. What you say is also fairly true for me. But the refeed tends to ruin things for me--I'll feel better while I'm fasting, but then the increased appetite with refeeding has me feeling worse.

Teaser, I have the same problem.

Anytime I increase food consumption, I feel worse and wish I had not tried a longer fast or a decreased food day.

I too have an issue with under eating calories, more so now that I'm closer to an ideal weight than when I was carrying around loads of surplus energy. It is easier for me to skip a meal rather than to eat a small one. And unless I'm eating pure fat and/or fiber I find it difficult to eat less than 2000 calories a day without feeling like I'm going to bed hungry.

That said, I do find that I must watch my calorie intake as part of MY WOE. If I don't, I will gain weight. I can avoid feeling hungry by eating an appropriate amount of good LC food for my body. But I can just as easily eat 1000 calories more of good LC food than my body needs on a given day. For me, satiety takes a long time to set in once I start eating. Satiety for me is quite subtle. I won't even call it feeling "Full". For me satiety is more like the absence of the drive to eat. I am satiated when I am no longer thinking about eating food and my thoughts and focus have turned to something else. I never get an overwhelming feeling of 'full' or a clear signal that tells me that I've eaten enough.

A very 'big boy' friend of mine who was also quite chunky in his youth calls himself a 'plate cleaner'. He has always been one to finish everything on his plate and if you don't want what's on your plate, he'll finish that, too. I can identify with that completely. In fact, we have a lot of "issues" like that in common. I think that a weak sense of satiety has been our problem from the beginning. We are pre-disposed to eat more than we need. Add to that process junk food, sweets, and what-not then the "off switch" became increasingly difficult to find.

So, somewhat depending on how active I am I can avoid nagging hunger and still lose fat eating 2000 to 2500 calories per day. Anything higher than that I am either weight stable or gaining. Eating too many carbs makes me want to eat more; eating junky processed addictive carbs whacks out my BG makes me ravenous. So the only way I can remain the master of what I eat is to strictly count carbs and stay completely away for processed carbs and sugar. Eating good, whole LC food gives me the control I need to do the other thing that I have to do... limit how much I eat. I do that by keeping an eye on the calories.

I don't tell other people what they should do. After a lifetime of obesity I landed upon a strategy that works for me. Counting/limiting calories is certainly not necessary for everyone. But perhaps it is for some of us. I catch flack for talking calories from time to time. But they can't shut me up. If someone, especially a TDC type, wants to know what I did to find success, then I have to be able to tell all.

Ken, in DANDR there is a little about limiting calories, but not in those words, and in small paragraphs. Most people dont even read DANDR before jumping into Atkins style way of eating. IMO this is a mistake. I read that book cover to cover, and reread to troubleshoot. He does say we will decrease our intake......

However, I do think DANDR was only the beginning of this journey Long term weight loss and maintenance as covered in DANDR is insufficient info for too many people.

I do know YOU could write that next book on maintenance.

Wow, Ken! Just looked at your signature links. Wow! So very inspiring, except the one where you are sitting on the edge of the cliff. I perused your links, and want to go back and read in details what worked for you. The pictures are great!

I am one of those caught in the middle of experts regarding how much protein to consume. Dr. Fung says this and Dr. Phinney says that, then there is Dr. Ted Neiman. All of these are making heroic efforts and proving inspirational to us who are in dire need. I like Dr. Neiman's two meals per day window 18/6 and sometimes for me 16/8. He also says not to worry about protein, except to be sure to eat enough. While I admire those fasting for days, for me, at least for now, I like this plan with an occasional 24 hour fast. I am still plagued with presuppositions that massive exercise works, and that strenuous exercise requires protein. I wish the experts could find more commonality on the protein thing and the fasting length as well. I may try to modify, alternate, switch it up with LCHF/ keto formulation. But KEN, thanks for inspiration today!

Me too. Usually I don't eat anything after my early afternoon meal. But last night went out with friends. It gets too weird to sit there with my diet soda & eat nothing, so I got a small Caesar salad. Since I wasn't home it seemed easier than usual to not eat anything more after the salad, tho I was hungry when I went to bed.

But my bg was excellent - both at bedtime & my fbg this morning. Maybe a small salad at night is a good thing? But evening eating is problem for me - it's hard to stop.

Does get confusing doesnt it?

Maybe this will help. I used Protein Power some years ago to better understand what a portion of protein would look like. Allowed me to reign in the higher meat consumption that I started with. Too much protein gets me into trouble on a number of levels. PP says too much protein delays adaptation; and it provides too much glucose. THe latter I find confusing biocehmically, I just know too much meat stalls weight loss, just like too many carbs can.

However, it is less damaging to my control to overeat on meat than to reach for cookies.

Even with studies, we are individiuals. What works for one person maynot work for another.

Protein requirement is funny. Take identical twins, neither have worked out, say the eat 70 grams of protein a day. One starts working out three days a week, full body workout. Probably this twin's muscle mass will increase on that same protein intake. You could argue this as a decrease in protein requirement, since it takes less protein to put the workout twin in a positive balance.

Now double the protein intake, maybe the workout twin grows faster with the increased protein, the other twin might increase lean mass a little, but without the exercise, mostly he just burns more protein. This sort of study gets done by whey protein companies all the time. It's one of those predictable outcome experiments that they can support again and again to justify the existence of their product. I like the way Brad Pilon, the eatstopeat guy puts this, extra protein might increase the rate of increase of lean mass, but that's not the same as increasing the maximum lean mass, he asks, does this make you grow bigger, or just make you hit the inevitable muscle growth plateau sooner? I don't really know the answer, but it seems like a good question. Nobody gets rich if it turns out he's right, so I doubt we'll see the study anytime soon.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/serv...029665194000261

I like this paper, it looks at effects of habitual protein on amino acid oxidation. People who eat more protein also burn more protein when they exercise. Which makes sense, you adapt to the fuel you eat.

It took me a while to figure out how much protein was right for me, and even then it is my best guess based on what I've read, how I feel and how I smell. Searching the internet for advice on protein I saw everything from 60g to 400g per day depending on the context. I wasn't looking for minimum requirements. I wasn't going all out to body build. So the answer for me was somewhere in the middle. It is not very scientific, but here is the process I went through to land at my current plan of 125g to 175g daily...

During much of the first year of my journey my protein intake was somewhere around 100g per day. The last half of that first year is when I started walking daily and lifting weights. Recovery from the weigh lifting seemed really slow. I wasn't 18 anymore, but I figured that two days rest between lifting days should have been enough for full recovery. So I started upping the protein to around 150g per day. It helped with the recovery. I could lift 3 days a week and gain strength. If a little is good, more is better. Right? I upped the protein to more than 200g per day. I didn't notice any clear benefit from this higher protein level with the weight lifting, but one thing was pungently clear -- I started stinking like I'd doused myself with ammonia after a workout. I'd come back from a long walk, take my coat off, and proceed to stink up the whole house. When I looked up the cause I found that the ammonia smell was a byproduct of excess protein being converted to glucose. I dialed the protein back to 125g - 150g and the ammonia smell problem dissipated.

These days I work out even more than I did in those early months when I was adjusting protein. I average around 150g per day and still creep close to 200g on some days. I recover fine from my workouts. My 10K this year felt like just another workout and went on with my daily activities. The 10K 3 years ago had me spent for the rest of the afternoon. Although it does happen from time to time, I rarely get that ammonia smell anymore. So again, this in unscientific, but what I'm doing appears to work well for me. Your results may vary.

WHen I read a bit about protein last week, cant remember the source, the implicatio was that as adipose tissue actually has a fair amount of protein creating the cells and connective tissue, this protein is recycled as adipose tissue decreases.

This protein would be used by the body and could contribute to the excess protein, and perhaps the ammonia efffect.

The one hiccup to this is that our body doesnt decrease the number of cells, in reality they are ready to refill at a moments notice. If true, then the protein in adipose tissue is NOT decreased.

Does anyone have updated info on this?

As mentioned in previous posts, I, too, have found that I do well with an increase in protein compared to what I was consuming about 18 months ago, and I'm solidly in the window that Ken identified, maybe a little lower on the high end. It is truly an individual thing, so when people ask how much protein I eat daily, I thoroughly caveat it. This WOL has been a journey of discovery over the past few years with several course corrections to optimize what I'm experiencing in health and well being. I'm starting to believe that adaptation to amount of protein, fat, and carbs is time based. Over time, if I stay consistent with my eating (ketogenic, with the objective to use fat over glucose as my primary energy), I can "go off the grid" where I'll eat something high carb, and I find I get back into ketosis very quickly or sometimes, never get below 0.5ml/L. I could not have done this in my early days of a ketogenic approach, but now I can easily. Note that I don't (and am not recommending) cheat. There are times under certain and rare circumstances, however, when I'll eat something unusual for my WOE and don't regress.

I've been rolling my eyes over Jimmy Moore's latest cockamamie stunt for the last couple weeks. Apparently he interviewed Dr. Naiman recently and Dr. Naiman made the case for high protein. In the course of talking about his more reasonable usual approach to protein, sort of a 1:1 protein to fat ratio, that would be about two thirds of calories from fat, the rest mostly protein, he mentioned the protein sparing modified fast, which he calls 3:1 protein to fat. So Jimmy and his co-host on his new ketohack podcast accepted the unissued challenge and did that for a week.

Jimmy experienced hypoglycemia after his high protein meals. He did some interviews during the period, one with Dr. Fung, another with Dr. Nally, and also talked about this with various doctor-ish co-hosts of his podcasts. What got me stuck on this is that he kept explaining his hypos like this; he ate too much protein, his body turned it into glucose, this increase in glucose stimulated insulin, he experienced a hypo. Some of these professionals failed to address just how wrong this was, I thought Dr. Fung did a fair job. The fellow on the ketohack podcast actually did okay in my opinion, he got it more towards the insulin response being more directly caused by the protein, not some sudden increase in gluconeogenesis.

Nobody brought up free fatty acids, considering how often insulin reducing availability of free fatty acids is used to explain how insulin makes you fat, that seems a little weird.

Jimmy also reports "nutritional ketosis"level ketones during the experiment, and wonders why they didn't protect him from hypos. Remember that experiment from the 60s where people on an extended fast didn't experience hypoglycemic symptoms, even though insulin administered brought their blood glucose down to 20 mg/dl or lower? Take insulin after a 12 hour fast, enough to bring your glucose down to the 20's. Well, don't. The difference isn't just ketones, it's fatty acids, those starving people will still have high free fatty acids after the insulin dose, after a 12 hour fast and insulin, free fatty acids will be extremely low.

The most likely explanation to me is that this is like what happens with hypoglycemia from a sugar load, but with protein. You can't just look at the glucose, or the glucose and the ketones. Fasted people don't just have elevated ketones, they also have elevated free fatty acids--and even after an insulin injection bringing their blood glucose down to hypoglycemic levels, the free fatty acids will still be high. Contrast to excess insulin in a non-fasted person, free fatty acids will approach zero. Ketones can replace glucose, they can't replace glucose plus free fatty acids.

I've seen experiments with whey protein that look at the free fatty acid response. It's just like the response to glucose, there's an insulin response, free fatty acids get zonked at some point. Eat pure-ish protein or carbohydrate, the body's got this problem, free fatty acids need to decrease temporarily, this increases insulin sensitivity and facilitates the entry of the incoming nutrients into cells. There's always this problem of how well the system "anticipates" the necessary return of free fatty acids to the blood stream.

The hypo isn't quite the result of the insulin peak--it's a result of the mismatch, as the rate of influx of amino acids or glucose from the meal starts to diminish, insulin needs to go down and there needs to be that counterregulatory response to bring back free fatty acids, which will diminish insulin sensitivity. Even Jimmy's original fasting insulin of 15--suddenly drop his free fatty acids to zilch, and clamp his insulin at 15, and as a result of the increase in insulin sensitivity from the drop in free fatty acids, he'll be hypo, anybody would be.

This ties back to why I still think Jimmy should be not just keto, but the sort of "orthorexic" keto as he's described it, of his first year of nutritional ketosis. It isn't because that sort of strict, medical model ketogenic ratio diet keeps ketones elevated, or not just because--it's because eating that way, a meal will not decrease blood free fatty acid levels appreciably, ever.