Are You Using Too Much Heavy Cream in Your Coffee?

Are extra calories sneaking into your ketogenic diet?
Here's what to do when stalled on KETO!

Ketogenic diets are quite restrictive.

They ask you to give up a lot of your favorite foods. However, since keto is designed to burn fat, rather than glucose, some foods that are normally considered fattening are allowed on low-carb diets. This can make dieting more pleasant and enjoyable.

In fact, many low carbers are thrilled when they discover that heavy cream has only 0.4 grams of carbohydrate per tablespoon. You don't have to drink your coffee black on keto. However, if you use too much heavy cream, or you don't measure it out first, your weight loss might stop. 

Yes, heavy whipping cream is super low in carbs but it is also very high in calories. And regardless what the low-carb influencers claim, fat loss requires you to eat and drink at a calorie deficit.

But whipping cream isn't the only high-calorie item that you have to pay attention to if your weight loss stops. There are several popular keto fads that can seriously interfere with weight loss.

If it's been more than 4 to 6 weeks since you've lost weight or inches, here's how to pinpoint the foods that might be causing your weight loss to stall.

I ran into an interesting thread over at Low Carb Friends one day. A senior member had lost almost 50 pounds on Keto. Because weight loss never travels in a straight line, he wanted to share how several week prior, he had stalled just a few pounds above his goal weight.

Like most of us who have experienced a stall, he felt frustrated and helpless, but luckily, he was able to hold onto what he had accomplished so far.

Not everyone does.

Those last pesky pounds can really put up a strong fight.

If you have reached the point in your weight-loss journey yourself, or if you have found yourself only halfway to goal weight and on a lengthy plateau, it's time to take a serious look at your everyday food habits, so you can make a few adjustments.

While no one wants to hear that further dietary changes must be made as you progress toward thinness, there is no way to know what's wrong with your current diet until you take a closer look.

At the suggestion of others, the man decided to spend a week carefully weighing out his food and beverages, recording everything in a food journal, so he could take a closer look at the end of the week.

His largest calorie hog?

Heavy whipping cream in his coffee!

Can Dietary Fat Slow Down Weight Loss on Keto?

On a low-carb diet, heavy cream is considered one of those luxurious foods you don't get to eat on low-fat diets. At 6.6 carbs per cup, 2 tablespoons of rich, heavy whipping cream in your morning cup or travel mug will set you back just under 1 carb.

However, the calories in heavy whipping cream and the bulky sugar substitutes that most people use can add up quickly, especially if you drink several cups of coffee a day and you are not measuring how much heavy cream you are actually using.

In this particular case, the man was drinking 4 cups of coffee per day.

At 50 to 60 calories per tablespoon, depending on the brand, that heavy cream added a whopping 700 calories to his daily low-carb diet plan because after measuring, he discovered that he was using:

• 3-1/2 tablespoons of heavy cream for each 8-ounce cup of coffee.

At 4 cups of coffee per day and using 3-1/2 tablespoons of cream per cup means he was drinking almost a full cup of heavy cream just for breakfast! 

At 700 extra calories a day, or even 500, that will slow down weight loss by a pound a week, which is enough of a caloric excess to cause a stall for a great many people.

Add in the:

• extra-virgin olive oil
• real butter
• coconut oil
• mayonnaise
• sour cream
• cream cheese
• bacon fat

that many low-carbers enjoy on a daily basis, and it’s easy to tip the scales with over 1,200 calories in added fats per day alone. And that doesn't include the fat that naturally comes with your:

• meat, poultry, and fish
• whole eggs
• hard cheeses

Needless to say, since reaching goal weight was the most valuable thing to this man, he decided to cut back on his use of heavy cream, and report back to the group.

Ketosis is driven by carbohydrate restriction.
Ketosis is NOT driven by eating more fat!

Upping Fats Isn't Always the Right Answer

Surprisingly, the courage that this man had in posting his discovery encouraged others to come forward. This was unusual for the Low Carb Friends group because most of the time, the only advice we heard over there was:

“Up your fats!”

Regardless of what’s wrong, due to the misconceptions about Nutritional Ketosis, eat more fat was always the advice you got.

It was nice to see a helpful post for a change, a post that addressed the real issues surrounding a stall instead of hearing some fantasy ideal where you're told that you can:

1. Eat all of the fat you want.
2. Have your body fat just fall off in record time.
3. And achieve everlasting happiness, once you hit goal.

Metabolic defects are different for each of us, so upping the fat content of your diet isn't always the right answer. For upping the fat to work, you must be either protein sensitive and over-secreting insulin at meals or eating so little fat that your body isn't getting what it needs.

Most of the time, the answer isn't to lower protein, eat more fat, and up your calories. Most of the time, the correct answer is to cut back on fat and calories instead. On keto, it's actually rare for the problem to be too little fat.

In this particular case, cutting back on fat and calories was the correct solution.

But the man didn't know that until he'd taken the time to actually weigh and measure all of his food for 7 days.

If you don't keep a close eye on what you’re eating and drinking, you can't evaluate what's going on. And without a solid evidence-based evaluation, you can't make an educated decision that is in your best interest.

If you don’t know what you’re eating and drinking, the amount that you're eating and drinking, you can’t make the necessary changes that will enable you to reach your weight-loss goals.

The Danger of Focusing Only On Carbs

Coffee isn't the only place where heavy cream sneaks
into your low-carb diet. To reach goal, you need to
pay attention to your food habits.

Like most low-carb folks, this particular person lost his first 45 pounds mindlessly, by focusing only on restricting carbohydrates.

If you only have 30 or 40 pounds to lose, that might work nicely for you, but for those who start the low-carb journey with over a hundred pounds to lose, like I did, it’s a completely different ballgame.

From what I’ve seen throughout the years:

Fifty to 75 pounds seems to be about the maximum fat loss that's possible with mindless eating. After reaching that milestone, and once the body adapts to what you're doing, you will probably have to either:

• start counting calories
• pay attention to quantities or serving sizes
• find another way to limit the amount of food you’re eating

Examples of other ways to limit food and beverages other than counting calories might be:

• Nutritional Ketosis (restrict fat and protein)
• Intermittent Fasting (fewer meals)
• PSMF diets (severely limit fat)
• Short-term water fasting
• cutting down on portion sizes of what you already eat

But you could also come up with a few sneaky ways to cut calories painlessly, as well. For example, dieters moving into maintenance often switch from heavy cream in their coffee to half and half, since it doesn't affect the volume of food they get to eat.

A smaller body needs fewer calories to function, and because dieting itself will lower your metabolism by at least 10 percent, or more, you won't be able to continue eating and drinking what you ate and drank when you first started your weight-loss journey.

The three major nutrients you have to work with are:

• protein
• carbohydrates
• and fats

Since the amount of protein you eat is set to maintain muscle mass and carbs are set according to your carbohydrate tolerance, that only leaves dietary fats to play with.

And yet, despite what Dr. Phinney has said about dietary fats again and again, it is dietary fat that brings the loudest noise, controversy, argument, and rebellion from the low-carb community.

It is common to have to lower your dietary fats as you get nearer to goal weight, especially if you've been dieting for a long time and try to increase your carbohydrate load.

This is where Dr. Phinney and I do not see eye-to-eye.

His experience is with endurance athletes who don't have a whole lot of weight to lose. If I remember correctly, the example he used in his book was of a woman whose maintenance calories were 2800 a day. She only had 40 or 50 pounds to lose.

My experience is with obese, sedentary individuals who have quite a bit more weight to lose than that. Often, they are disabled to some extent -- either by age or injury.

Dr. Phinney argues that dietary fats go up at the end of the weight-loss phase, to bring equilibrium. This holds true on paper and I've honestly seen it over at the Reddit Keto subforum among some young men and women, but it doesn't work for the majority.

For most of us, the body has usually already figured out how to reduce energy output long before we reach that point.

For me, with over 135 pounds to lose, I reached equilibrium when I was still about 30 pounds above goal weight of 125. And that 30 pounds was actually 25 pounds higher than what would be standard for my size.

If I were younger, equilibrium would have occurred when I still had 55 pounds to go.

At the time I stalled, my calorie intake was only 1500 calories a day. There was no way to raise my fat and calories.

The extra fat I ate on Jimmy Moore's version of Nutritional Ketosis started packing on the pounds, and the lower protein intake simply caused the body to burn muscle tissue for the amino acids it needed. And this was eating at 1,200 calories a day, what should have been a small deficit.

In my own experience, moving to a high-fat diet didn't work. It actually backfired on me.

How to Reach Goal Weight

Most people who have actually reached goal weight on keto will tell you that the closer they got to goal weight, the more calories mattered.

Many of the maintenance folks at Low Carb Friends only ate 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day. Nothing even close to the 2,800 calorie example given by Dr. Phinney.

For me, calories started to really matter about 50 pounds into my weight-loss journey.

I'm experiencing the same thing today. I've managed to get back down to 200 pounds, about where calories began to matter before, and I've completely stalled out eating mindlessly.

Going back to Atkins Induction a few months ago hasn't made a difference. The weight still isn't coming off.

Although cutting down on portion sizes isn’t a fun thought, the lengths to which you have to go to reach goal weight depends on your current dietary habits, tastes, and activity level.

So how do you reach your weight-loss goal?
By trimming just enough calories to get there.

Cutting calories doesn’t have to be brutal.

It can be more like a gentle wave if you observe your current lifestyle and find where the wiggle room is in your diet, such as the amount of heavy cream in your coffee or protein shakes.

While some people have switched from heavy cream to organic half-and-half, others prefer to cut down on the amount of coffee they drink instead of going lighter.

This is how I personally solved the problem. I now drink only one travel mug of coffee instead of two. And I now use a coffee scoop (1/8 cup, which is 2 tablespoons) to measure my 100 calories of heavy cream.

What you choose to do is a matter of what’s important to you, what you value, and what you can live with, of course. There's no right or wrong way to do this.

The idea isn’t to cut down so much that you feel deprived.

The point is to take an honest, realistic look at what you are doing right now, write it down, and find simple, almost unnoticeable adjustments that you can make to your current habits -- something you can easily live with.

Low carb shouldn't be miserable.

The man that I talked about at the beginning of this post decided to give up one cup of coffee per day. Instead of four cups, he lowered his coffee drinking to three. He also dropped his 3-1/2 tablespoons of heavy cream per cup to 2 level tablespoons, which he carefully measured out.

The result?

The weight started coming off again, and very quickly.

All he had to do to jump start his weight loss was cut out 400 calories of heavy cream.

Where Are YOUR Calories Sneaking In?

Bullet-Proof Coffee with coconut oil and butter
is popular for breakfast on low-carb diets.

Bullet-proof coffee is extremely popular among the low-carb crowd, especially those who believe they are following a LCHF diet plan (low-carb high-fat) by consuming coconut oil and grass-fed butter in their coffee each morning -- with or without the heavy cream.

While some dieters use bullet-proof coffee as a substitute for eating whole foods at breakfast, others use it for a late night snack or as an addition to their regular high-fat, low-carb meal. This habit will add a lot of calories to your menu.

However, your particular problem might be different than putting too much heavy cream in your coffee.

Not everyone uses too much.

When I was in the weight-loss phase, most people were only using a level tablespoon of heavy cream per cup of coffee, but they were using gobs of heavy whipping cream in other ways.

Making protein shakes with a quarter cup of heavy cream isn't too bad. That will cost you 200 calories. I used to make mine that way, but the shake was a meal for me. In general, these shakes replaced a small bacon-and-egg or sausage-and-egg breakfast for me, so the calorie count was comparable.

If you're using it as a snack in the afternoon or after dinner, however, those 325 calories can cause your weight to stall.

Problems can also arise when you use 2 cups of heavy cream to make only 4 servings of instant chocolate pudding for a snack or dessert. Two cups of heavy cream is 1,600 calories. That's 400 calories just for the cream and doesn't include the pudding ingredients.

Chocolate Mousse

Not only is that dessert heavy on carbs, due to the cornstarch in the dry sugar-free pudding mix, it is more calories than most people can consume every since day once they reach goal weight.

Yet, many low carbers snack on this type of high calorie pudding every single afternoon. And some even add more whipped cream as a garnish.

Other dieters mindlessly use high-fat cream sauces with lots of butter and cream cheese.

While there is nothing wrong with doing this occasionally, (I like to whip up a low-carb casserole with white alfredo-type sauce about once a week), some LCHF dieters believe they have to hit some arbitrary fat percentage every day, so they will:

• eat a few berries with a full cup of whipped cream
• eat coconut oil or grass-fed butter right off the spoon
• pop chunks of cream cheese into their mouth after dinner
• stir half a cup of mayonnaise into tuna or egg salad
• feast on fat bombs or salami slices for snacks

Just because heavy cream in your coffee isn’t your downfall, that doesn’t mean there are not excess calories sneaking into your diet in other ways, calories that are keeping you from reaching goal weight.

But if you aren't tracking your macros or writing down exactly what you're eating and drinking, you won't know where they are sneaking in. Neither will you know where to start cutting back.

The idea isn't to brush off what I'm saying, just because you aren't using tons of heavy cream.

If you have reached a plateau, and are no longer losing weight or inches, you need to take a good, hard look at yourself and what you're eating and drinking.

Where are YOUR excess calories sneaking in?

Those are the calories that matter. Those are the calories that need to be cut back on.

A LCHF Diet plan is high in fat when compared to the average American Diet, but part of those fat calories must come from your body's fat stores. Dr. Phinney has said again and again that this is why he calls his diet low-carb high-fat. Part of that 80 percent fat statistic you hear quoted so much online must come from body fat! And not all from your diet!

On paper, if you're doing it right, the absolute protein and fat grams will look like you're eating too much protein.

You're not.

You have to give the body a reason to go into your fat stores. If you're eating all of the fat that your body needs to function throughout the day, there will be no reason for your liver to call upon your stored fat reserves for help.

So What Have You Discovered About Yourself?

Have you made similar discoveries of your own?

Please take a moment and share what you’ve learned with us in the comments below. What you've learned about yourself can help others.