Ok, here's our thread. I don't have the book, and couldn't make much sense out of the web site since polish food is so different.


I didn't really keep track before, just added a bunch of fat in the form of dairy products. I'll do a better job keeping track this time.

Other than macro-nutrient ratios is there anything more I need to know, like only eat beef when the moon is full? And I absolutely binged on the cheese.

Nancy - You ain't just whistling Dixie. Reviews of the book indicate that I wouldn't make much sense out of it either. But the macro numbers speak for themselves, and we can talk here about results (good, bad or ugly) and the science behind it all. I hope everyone who has diligently done LC and lost weight, only to come to a screeching halt will come here and read this thread. Thanks for starting it!


You can eat beef whenever you like, since most protein counts remain the same by weight. Sure, fattier meat might seem like it has a lower protein count per oz --- but --- only if you're eating all the melted fat in the pan as well as what remains on the meat. I learned that the hard way. Go ahead, weigh your raw bacon. Then weigh it again after it's cooked. It might weigh 5 oz. raw - and an OUNCE cooked. There's 4 ounces of fat in that pan!

I've had to learn to weigh most of my food cooked, unless I'm using it in a recipe where I'm absolutely going to eat all the fat as well, as in a casserole. Like my stir-fry.

As far as cheese goes, I've had to cut down. Yes, the softer cheeses (like Brie) made from cream have a better fat/protein ratio for us than hard cheeses, but they still have a fair amount of protein. Not to say I won't eat that slice of Brie, but I'll cut off the mold (which I like) first, before weighing, so that the fat gets upped a tad, and the protein lowered.

In fact, I've decided that my home-made Marscarpone is so delish (and way cheaper and fattier than the store-bought) -- I'm going into cheese-making in a big way. I've just ordered a huge number of cultures and will spend the spring and summer making full fat soft cheeses like Frommage Blanc, Chevre, Mozzerella, etc. If all goes well I'm going to buy a cheese press in the fall and move into semi-hards like cheddar and gouda. I buy all my cream from a dairy, and the fat content is much higher than anything I can get at the market.

Enjoy your Brie!

Lisa

Thanks for starting this Nancy. I think it will be great to keep in touch with each other on how we're doing and what we're doing.

As I said in a different thread, I'm starting week 2 of Dr. K's plan. Here's my numbers for the month:

Protein: 69g
Fat: 121-164g
Net carbs: 34-55g
Minimum caloric intake: 1501
Maximum caloric intake: 1972

For this month at least, I've restarted my menu blog (listed below). It seems to help me stay accountable - that and Fitday.

Good luck everyone!

Dang, that's a lot of calories. more than I eat now.

136 carb 7%
1359 fat 77%
268 prot 15%
========
1763 min

I think this is rather similar to how I eat. I try not to eat more than a few ounces of meat/protein at a meal but I keep my fat content high enough to make me feel full. I also eat more carbs than an atkins dieter. I'm going check out the website.

Ok, so I plugged in a sample menu in my fitday and I can't see how I could eat vastly more calories.

So far the macros are:

Bfast: 3oz brie, 3 slices of bacon
Lunch: Salad, oil, vinegar, pine nuts, 3 slices bacon, olives
Dinner: Bowl of chili

I guess I could add some cheese to the lunch and dinner.

1,172 (calories)
94.6 (fat)
26.7 (carbs -- not excluding fiber)
57 (protein)

I noticed the web site said stop when you're full.

Lisa, do you force yourself to eat what it tells you or do you stop when you're full?

Then get ready for a ride. With the numbers I gave you earlier, if you eat the max. protein you're allowed for the first month, and the middle of the range for fat and carb - your average daily calories will be 2019. And then it will rise considerably. Heh heh heh.

Since I seem to lose the most when my fat/calories are highest and my protein goes a bit below what I'm allowed, I'm going to guess that ratios have a lot to do with this as well. I'll have to think about the mechanics of it a bit, but I'm starting to get some ideas about why this is so.

However, please be sure that you do weigh, measure and count everything, even the protein in a tablespoon of heavy cream, because if you go over the max allowed while eating all that fat, this will work - in reverse!

Lisa

Off the top of my head: coconut oil. Coconut cream. Veggies sauteed with lots of butter, instead of salad. Salad with blue cheese dressing instead of oil and vinegar. Dark Chocolate. Dark Chocolate melted in lots of coconut oil. Gluten-free Cheesecake. Whipped cream. Egg yolks in lard and butter, eating everything in the pan. Eggplant (very low in protein) topped with lots of melted cheese. Quiche made with yolks and a lot of cream. Stir-fries using a small amount of meat instead of chili, with lots of veggies cooked in a combo of lard, oil and butter, with all fat eaten.

This will be hard for the first day or two. But as Kris said, after that it becomes far easier, especially since I promise that you're going to start feeling really good. That's because you're already a fat-burning machine, and the extra fat (in the presence of low protein) will simply burn up without going through the same exact mechanism as protein. It just feels - how can I describe it - like everything is moving much faster inside. If I started eating a lot of protein again, I know I'd get that 'lumpy' feeling in the top of my abdomen again, which seemed to take forever to go through my body.

And once you make a serious dent in those fats, the calories will start adding up by themselves.

Lisa

I noticed the web site said stop when you're full.

Lisa, do you force yourself to eat what it tells you or do you stop when you're full?

Oh great, I found this thread. Thanks for starting it. I'm looking forward to shopping for fatty things tomorrow. I use NutritionData for tracking. Any reviews for that site?

I look forward to following everyone's progress with this.

Lauren

Nancy, I only eat when I'm hungry, and I always stop when I'm satisfied, which is usually well before 'full.' In fact, the last time I remember feeling 'full' (as I think you mean it) was when I ate LF, HC.

I had a light breakfast at 9:00 - 1 ounce proscuitto, half a cup of cantaloupe, a cup of coffee w/cream and a LC cookie. Was I full? Not at all. But I was satisfied. So satisfied, I didn't eat lunch until I felt hungry, looked up, and saw it was 3:30.

Lunch was three small breakfast sausages cooked in bacon fat, three jumbo egg yolks cooked in the same pan with butter added, a slice of PF very thin wheat bread topped with a full tbls of butter and a bit of LC jam. Coffee and cream and a piece of chocolate bacon bar after. I didn't feel 'full' but I felt very good. This meal is often breakfast when I wake up hungry - but if so, I'll typically eat a light lunch that looks like my breakfast today. In other words, it tends to all average out for me, since I only eat to genuine hunger.

It's nearly 8 and I'm just getting hungry again, so I'll probably eat my 1/3 stir-fry leftover recipe with half a pita topped with butter. And the peanut butter choco-chip brownie w/whipped cream. But my guess is that I'm just not going to get to the coconut oil/dark chocolate today.

My protein number will be right, but I'll be nowhere near the amount of fat I need to eat. So, knowing this in advance I guess I'll add an extra tablespoon of butter to that pita and maybe add in a bit more leftover coconut cream when I reheat the stir-fry. I won't even 'feel' those calories in terms of fullness, but they'll count toward the plan nevertheless.

Took the pooch for a walk after my last post, and thought about your menu. Couple of things come to mind:

-- Once you begin to swap protein for fat, your calories will rise automatically since it's 9 for 4 calories, gram per gram.

-- 3 oz of brie is 21g protein. Six slices of bacon is about 12g protein. That's roughly half of your daily allotment, not counting the protein in your salad, dressing and pine nuts. Or chili.

-- Don't know what was in your chili, nor how much you ate. My guess is, if you added it all up, about 50g. If you go back and plug it all in you might have reached 80-90g protein for the day.

Lets say 80. That's more protein than you should be eating now, and far more than you will be eating in two and three months from now. However, if you were to swap just 20 of those grams for fat, you would have eaten 100 more calories in one fell swoop. Add just a bit more fat and you'll easily reach 100-300 calories more per day than you're eating now. And that, combined with the reduced protein, is the very thing that will help you lose those last twenty pounds.

One last thought. One of the side-effects of chronically eating too few calories and not enough fat (and for some, ketosis from eating very few carbs) is decreased appetite. It's as if the body knows it's not going to get any more (like Oliver Twist ) and stops asking. The body then 'helps' us through this semi-starvation by stopping our hunger. That's how people survive the 500-calories-a-day Kimkin crazies.

I know, because I ate too few calories for years - and paid the price. But within a week of starting this, I noticed something. You could draw a graph line straight through my daily calories for the last month - and that line would go straight up. I've increased my calories every single day, with a few abberations here and there when I just wasn't hungry. I began with my usual 1400-1500 - rose to 1600, then 1700, and sometimes even 1900. Yet, oddly, I don't feel like I'm eating more. I don't feel any fuller, though I'm certainly as satisfied.

In fact, I'd argue that I'm not fuller at all. That's because my body is easily disposing of the fat, where it struggled to deal with the protein. So back to you. The more you eat this way, the more calories you will eat, yet you will 'feel' just as you did when you were eating less, though probably with more energy. Make sense?

Lisa

Lauren, I love it. I use Firefox as my browser, and they even have a plug-in for it, which makes it a breeze to use anytime.

Looking forward to hearing how you do on this!

Lisa

I guess my real question is, if you're full, or satisfied, do you force yourself to consume the minimums? It sounds like they don't require that on the web site.


I haven't started yet. Just plugging in numbers to try to come up with meal plans. I based the chili on 3oz of ground beef. I was at or under my protein allotment for the day, but way under the fat allotment in my sample menu.

What sort of meat options do you generally use? I've been looking at ones I thought would be really fatty but they're quite high in protein.

Do you have numbers for the protein/fat content of brie without the crusty part?

This sounds pretty much like how I'm eating anyway, so I'm glad to see that following my impulses works. It usually does. I was mostly vegetarian before low-carbing, and I decided reluctantly that I'd eat a bit of meat, and I do, with butter or sour cream on it. Butter or sour cream or cheese on my veggies too. Coconut oil bark. Thank you all for starting this thread.

Meg

I stand by what I wrote above. I only eat until I'm satisfied, which is well before full - and therefore I never force myself to eat anything. As I said earlier, for me it all averages out. If I eat less on one day, I tend to eat more the next day. And less the day after that.


As I wrote in post #2:

"You can eat beef whenever you like, since most protein counts remain the same by weight. Sure, fattier meat might seem like it has a lower protein count per oz --- but --- only if you're eating all the melted fat in the pan as well as what remains on the meat. I learned that the hard way. Go ahead, weigh your raw bacon. Then weigh it again after it's cooked. It might weigh 5 oz. raw - and an OUNCE cooked. There's 4 ounces of fat in that pan!"

In other words, fattier meat is as protein-laden as lean meat. But it tastes a lot better.


The 'numbers' would be identical to the brie with crust -- but -- you can eat more of the actual brie if you weigh it without the crust. In other words, if you were planning to eat 3 ounces, a 3 oz piece without the crust will be bigger than a 3 oz piece with the crust.

Lisa