The Truth About LCHF Weight Loss

Are You Following the Keto Diet Correctly?
Are you SURE?

Most people believe that Nutritional Ketosis is about cutting back on protein and raising your dietary fats to 80 percent of your calories. That's what I thought too . . .

UNTIL . . .

I actually LISTENED to what Dr. Phinney said!

I have a confession to make.

When I ran my Nutritional Ketosis experiment in the Fall of 2012, was in ketosis and gaining weight, I never looked at Dr. Phinney's and Jeff Volek's book, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living.

I didn't know they had a chart in there showing the four phases of effective LCHF weight loss, and that the chart didn't look anything like what the low-carb community was telling me Nutritional Ketosis was.

I never watched a You Tube video where Dr. Phinney explained what Nutritional Ketosis was, how to reach that metabolic state, and what the four phases of a Nutritional Ketosis diet specifically designed for weight loss looks like.

Well, I did both of those things over the past few days, and my mind is totally blown.

HOW did LCHF, otherwise known as the Nutritional Ketosis Diet, get so twisted in the minds of the low-carb community?

HOW did the truth about LCHF weight loss morph into what it has become today?

Okay.


I know the answer to that, but I'm not going there.

Instead, I will admit that my Nutritional Ketosis disaster was all my fault. I now know WHY I was gaining weight while doing Nutritional Ketosis.

I should have went to the source to learn about the LCHF method of weight loss before trying that diet. I should not have listened to low-carb influencers and people visiting this blog and telling me what Nutritional Ketosis was.

The Real Reason WHY Nutritional Ketosis Didn't Work for Me

How many times have I criticized low-carb dieters for never having read an Atkins book?

How many times have I said that before you can know if you're doing Atkins correctly, you need to read the book!

So why did I think I could DO Nutritional Ketosis without having read Dr. Phinney's book, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living -- or at the very least, watched several of Dr. Phinney's videos?

I honestly don't know.

And . . . I feel sort of numb right now.

The low-carb world is using a diet concept, and preaching a diet concept, that doesn't exist. What they're doing came from a misunderstanding of Nutritional Ketosis and how to design a practical LCHF diet for weight loss.

I now understand that the reason WHY Nutritional Ketosis didn't work for me was NOT because I didn't purchase a ketone blood meter to make sure that I was in the Ketone Zone.

If I had made that purchase, I still would have done the LCHF Diet wrong because I was using a diet design that was never meant for me to use. I would have bought into the false idea that the higher you can get your blood ketones to go, the better.

Keto Mojo Blood Ketone Meter

(Available at Amazon)

And I still would have regained my weight.

None of that would have changed!

If you are eating 75 - 80 percent of your calories in fat, and you are stalled in your weight-loss journey, never lost any weight, or are in Nutritional Ketosis but gaining pounds, then this blog post is for you.

Here's the truth about LCHF weight loss:

A LCHF Diet Isn't What You've Been Told it Is

I was in the Ketone Sweet Spot once.

I didn't know that's what it was until I listened to Dr. Phinney's video on Achieving and Maintaining Nutritional Ketosis over at You Tube and took a closer look at his four-phase LCHF plan.

Dr. Phinney's specific LCHF plan showed me what a realistic Keto Diet for weight loss should look like at each stage of the journey. If you haven't watched the video yet, I highly recommend that you do that. I'm sure you'll be as shocked as I was.

Are you doing Nutritional Ketosis RIGHT?
Are you SURE?

In the video, Dr. Phinney introduced a pie graph that showed the relative percentages for protein, carbohydrate, and dietary fat that you should consume at each phase of the Nutritional Ketosis program.

The graph also showed the amount of body fat, by percentage, that stored fat contributes to the diet. 

This is where most people are falling short of what Nutritional Ketosis really is.

The four phases of the Phinney diet closely align with the Atkins Diet phases, except that the dietary fat percentage and calories change with each phase.

This is something that the Atkins Diet doesn't tell you.

But then, the low-carb influencers are not telling you that either.

Neither, are they showing you the graphs, so you can draw your own conclusions as to what your low-carb diet should be.

After pausing the video, and actually LOOKING at that chart, I realized several things, but the most important lesson I learned was this:

What I thought was Kimkins in 2008 was actually Nutritional Ketosis!

What I was doing to achieve a rapid rate of weight loss and eventually lose over 100 pounds of body fat was just ahead of its time. I was NOT doing it wrong.

I was NOT ruining my metabolism by eating that way.

There was an honest-to-goodness reason why my version of the Kimkins Diet worked so well.

What I was doing closely aligned with what Dr. Phinney has been trying to tell people for years now. It fit closely within the parameters for Nutritional Ketosis.

I was doing LCHF, but I didn't know that when I stopped eating that way.

People were angry at Kimmer for deceiving them.

They were looking to place blame on someone outside of themselves for following bad advice. Those of us using the Kimkins label for how we were eating became a strong target for their mob-mentality revenge.

It wasn't just Kimmer who the low-carb community attacked.

They went after all of us who were succeeding on a non-Atkins low-carb diet and tried to convince us that we were harming our metabolism and not really in ketosis because we were eating too much lean protein and too little fat.

The smear campaign was HUGE.

They called us sugar burners, rather than fat burners, because we were not following their don't-fear-fat protocol. They used terms, such as rabbit starvation, to try and manipulate us back into the fold.

They told us we were in starvation mode from eating too few calories and said we had to GAIN weight to repair our metabolism.

For some reason, which is still odd to me today, they lumped all of us into one basket – those who had joined the Kimkins site and ate only 300 calories a day with those of us eating at our personal Ketone Sweet Spot.

Unfortunately, I listened to the low-carb dogma and obeyed.

I deeply regret that now.

My 90-Day Nutritional Ketosis Experiment

I had never tried to go low protein before.

Lowering protein was something I had not tried before, not even on HCG. Like most diets, I adapted the HCG diet to fit my beliefs about protein.

But HCG didn't work as well as I had hoped.

The fat content of the diet was far below my Sweet Spot, so I was hungry all the time and fat loss was slower than for others.

Moving to Phase 3 of HCG, which is just an Atkins refeed, triggered fat-storage mode, so I was pretty open to the ideas of Nutritional Ketosis floating around the low-carb community when I first considered doing a 90-day LCHF experiment.

What I didn't like about the plan, and why I hesitated to try it for so long, was the low protein content of the diet that everyone was calling moderate protein.

It really confused me how you could say that 50 grams of protein a day was moderate, but that is the level of protein that many women stopping by this blog told me to eat.

Apparently, they had lost weight by eating only 40 to 50 grams of protein per day and assured me that if I went to 50 grams of protein, like them, I'd lose the weight, too.

That didn't make sense to me, and definitely did not reassure me, especially since I ate 80 to 90 grams of protein while doing HCG.

I grew up in an era that worshiped the 4 basic food groups.

In those days, 60 grams of protein was considered the optimal amount for health, but the 60 grams was coupled with a moderate-carb, moderate-fat diet. I was eating all of the carbs the brain needed for optimal performance.

Dropping to 50 grams of protein a day while only eating 20 net carbs didn't sound like a good idea.

That would be less than 8 ounces of meat for the entire day, which was much less than what I ate on HCG. It sounded like a recipe for muscle loss to me, so what I did instead was this:

• I lowered my protein intake to 60 grams a day, which was about 15 percent of my calories.
• I went to 20 net carbs instead of counting total carb intake.
• And I upped my dietary fats to 80 percent of my calories.

Where I had been eating 900 to 950 calories on Kimkins (the 1,000 calorie deficit I needed to get a 2-pound per week fat loss) and 500 calories on HCG (just because that's how they all were doing it), I thought that increasing my calories and going with a smaller caloric deficit would be a good test for the Nutritional Ketosis theory.

With an energy output of 2100 calories, I should have been able to lose a pound of body fat per week quite easily.

Instead, I started to gain weight – very FAST.

By two months into the program, I'd packed on a whopping 30 pounds eating that way.

I had lost some serious muscle mass and experienced very strong cravings for real food, cravings that I never had when eating at my Ketone Sweet Spot or even with HCG.

How Did People React to My Nutritional Ketosis Experiment?

It's amazing to me how people reacted to the weight gain and symptoms.

I got accused of not really doing Nutritional Ketosis because I didn't measure my blood ketones with a meter.

Others told me that my metabolism was damaged and the weight gain was necessary to heal. I just needed to keep eating very high fat, and eventually, the weight would come back down.

Those doing Intermittent Fasting, and only eating once a day, accused me of eating too many calories.

One comment even told me to go back to Atkins, raise my fat, and stay there -- that I was tweaking my diet far too much.

The Paleo crowd were the nicest to me.

They simply said that if it were them gaining weight like that, they would have bailed long before I did, rather than sticking it out for the entire 90-day experiment.

Opinions on what was going on with me were mixed.

Although, I stuck it out for another 30 days, completing the Nutritional Ketosis 90-day trial run, I called it quits, and walked away, assuming that you had to be extremely insulin resistant for the diet to work correctly.

Turns out, that's only partly true.

Achieving Nutritional Ketosis for Weight Loss

Achieving Nutritional Ketosis is only the first part of Dr. Phinney's video. He also talked about maintaining that state, but I want to focus on the first two phases of the LCHF Diet and then do a slight comparison between the two weight-loss phases and maintenance.

Getting into Nutritional Ketosis and eating in a way that will allow you to burn body fat for energy is what a LCHF diet is all about.

You might not realize that when you see what people doing Nutritional Ketosis are eating, but I'm going to clear up the misconceptions they have about losing weight on LCHF right now.

How Much Protein is Enough to Maintain Lean Body Mass?

Are you eating enough protein on your
Nutritonal Ketosis (LCHF) Diet?

There are different theories about finding the optimal protein level for your diet.

The Keto Diet at Reddit uses the standard set by Lyle McDonald of 0.8 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass. This is the stat that I quote here most often because burning the least amount of muscle as you drop the pounds will make weight maintenance easier to sustain.

Dr. Phinney uses percentages of calories and often states the figure of protein being 15 to 20 percent of your calories, with active or athlete individuals eating 25 percent, but that figure is not about the number of calories it takes to maintain where you are right now.

In the example Dr. Phinney gave in his book, protein needs stayed constant across all four stages of the diet.

You need to eat the amount of protein that will maintain your lean body mass.

This is essential.

If you think that this idea doesn't fit into your Nutritional Ketosis lifestyle, then you'll want to pay close attention to the Phinney quote on protein and ketones that I'll share with you in a moment.

Your body's protein requirements stay the same whether you weigh 125 pounds or 250 pounds.

The 15 to 20 percent figure that Dr. Phinney uses is based on the amount of calories it will take to maintain the weight you want to be. That's more difficult to determine, so I usually just tell people to eat 0.8 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass.

To do it Phinney's way:

Today, my maintenance calories are lower than they were when I first tried to reach Nutritional Ketosis.

Maintenance calories for where I was just before the body starting fighting me is closer to 1800, rather than 2100, because I no longer work at a stand-up job outside the home.

When I tested this maintenance level just before I started Nutritional Ketosis, 1800 was where my maintenance was at right then, so that's the figure that I'm going to use in my example because that's the weight that I'm trying to get back to right now.

At 1800 calories, 20 percent would be 360 calories (1800 divided by 5). Each gram of protein contains 4 calories, so if you divide 360 calories by 4 you get 90 grams of protein per day.

For 16 percent (an easier way to divide), you can divide those 1800 calories by 6. That comes to 300 calories. Divide the 300 calories by 4, and you arrive at 75, so 15 percent is probably closer to 72 grams of protein.

If you read my post on what I had to do to ditch over 100 pounds, you'll notice something interesting here.

These are the EXACT protein stats that I was eating on Kimkins when the body fat was coming off at a fast pace: 72 to 90 grams of protein per day! 

Yet, low carbers told me I was doing it wrong!

Eating 72 to 90 grams of protein per day is a lot more protein than the 50 grams that LCHF people were encouraging me to eat, and also explains why I lost so much muscle mass and strength at 60 grams.

Those 60 grams were not enough to maintain muscle mass. I should have been eating at least 80.

How Many Carbohydrates Should You Eat on LCHF?

Your carbohydrate level doesn't stay constant, unless you are severely insulin resistant.

Ordinarily, carbohydrate level will gradually increase as you move through the various stages of the LCHF Diet, depending on your personal carbohydrate tolerance. This principle is exactly like the Atkins Diet.

One of the main reasons why people turn to a low-carb diet is the principle of carbohydrate restriction.

Restricting carbohydrates to very low levels is the driving force that gets you into the state of ketosis. According to Dr. Phinney, carbohydrate restriction is the driving force of what determines the amount of ketones that build up in the bloodstream. 

It isn't protein.

While many people believe the protein content of the diet is what puts you into the sweet spot of Nutritional Ketosis, Dr. Phinney specifically states that it is your carbohydrate level that gets you into the Ketone Zone.

The more insulin resistant you are, the fewer carbohydrates you can eat and still improve your metabolic condition.

Not everyone has to stay at 20 to 25 carbs per day forever.

In Dr. Phinney's examples, carbohydrates started at 35 grams a day, went to 45 grams during the major weight-loss phase, and up to 55 grams at pre-maintenance.

However, the more insulin resistant you are, the more likely it is that you will have to target very low carbs to achieve optimal health and maintain your weight.

In Dr. Phinney's example of a 200 pound woman, with an energy output of 2800 calories, he allotted 5 percent of her calories to come from carbs, which is 35 carbs, rather than the current standard of 20 carbs you usually do when starting a low-carb diet.

This might be why The New Atkins for a New You starts you off with a much higher vegetable content (6 cups of vegetables) than the older Atkins Diets did.

To use me as an example again, I currently weigh 219 pounds. Maintenance calories at this weight are probably close to 2200. If you divide that 2200 by 20, you get 110 calories. Since carbohydrate has 4 calories per gram, you divide the 110 by 4, and arrive at 27-1/2 carbs per day.

On Kimkins, I was eating 20 carbs a day, but I never tried to raise them. I did have mindless days where I didn't count anything. I just ate low carb, so it's possible that I could have eaten more carbohydrates on those days, but I honestly don't know.

I do know that I ate a lot more fat when I wasn't counting carbs and calories, which cut my weight loss in half over the course of a month.

The Ketone Zone

Before we talk about dietary fat and the huge misunderstanding that birthed the whole Nutritional Ketosis movement, you need to understand the Ketone Zone because the misconceptions about dietary protein are firmly connected to this principle.

The Ketone Zone represents the optimal level of Nutritional Ketosis, but next to fat, this zone diagram is one of the most misunderstood concepts of a LCHF diet.

Ketosis begins at 0.5 mM, but the optimal level of ketones is between 1.0 mM and 3.0 mM.

Sedentary individuals will likely fall in the lower range of 1.0 mM to 2.0 mM, while heavy exercisers or those who are extremely active might see ketone levels as high as 2.5 mM to 3.0 mM, especially after a workout.

Of special note here is that the space beyond 3.0 mM is called the starvation zone. 

[NOTE: Dr. Phinney has now raised this number to 4.0 mM, since a lot of the folks he works with are endurance athletes.]

Thie starvation zone is usually ignored by most LCHF dieters, but ignoring it or trying to get there and stay there because you believe that the more ketones you have in your bloodstream, the faster the weight will come off, is a big mistake.

Ketones can climb that high if you fast for a few days, and that's fine. If you are not temporarily fasting, high ketones are a sign that you are not eating enough protein:

“If you are eating enough protein to maintain lean body mass,” Dr. Phinney said, “almost everybody stays under 3.”

So if you're seeing ketone levels above 3 mM, [or 4 mM], you need to eat MORE protein, not less.

You are bordering on starvation because starvation is determined by the amount of protein you eat.

If you don't eat enough protein to sustain muscle and other body functions, your body will take that protein from your muscle supply.

Get to less than 50 percent of your original muscle supply, and you'll die, even if you still have fat left on your body!

You also don't have to have continuously high ketone levels to reap the benefits of ketosis. This is another misunderstanding that is rampant throughout the low-carb community.

The current hypothesis is that being in the Ketone Zone for 6 hours a day might be enough to trigger the benefits of fuel flow and gene expression, benefits that may continue even if you slide back down the scale to a lower level of ketones.

So you don't have to stress out about your ketone blood level.

When you test your blood, you can only see what's going on at that exact moment. Several minutes later, the situation might change, so Dr. Phinney cautions dieters to not become overly concerned with being in the Ketone Zone.

You do not have to watch out for where you are at every minute of the day.

The Truth About Dietary Fat on LCHF Diets

The composition of your diet changes as you move through the four stages of dieting.

In the video, Dr. Phinney shows an example of what each phase looks like. In Phinney's experience, most people who start on a low-carb diet are excited and highly motivated, so they consciously or unconsciously curtail their calories.

Theoretically, the 200-pound woman in the example he gave might only eat about 1400 calories a day for the first month or two. If her energy output was 2800 calories, this would be a huge deficit.

Projected weight loss during this time would be a whopping 2.8 pounds a week.

But here's the catch:

To achieve that type of fat loss, 50 percent of the woman's daily fat calories have to come from body fat.

And this is where people on LCHF diets are messing up.

If your protein calories are set at 20 percent and your carbohydrate calories are at 5 percent, that leaves 75 percent for fat. Right?

However, if 50 percent of your fat calories are coming from body fat, then the only fat calories left for the diet is 25 percent!

In Dr. Phinney's example, 25 percent of 1400 calories is only 31 grams of fat!

During the first weeks of your LCHF diet, 25 percent of your calories come from dietary fat because your body fat makes up the difference. You do NOT eat 75 percent of your calories in dietary fat.

That's maintenance!

That's what you eat when you reach the end of your low-carb journey and need more calories to sustain your weight loss.

That isn't what you eat when you start a low-carb diet.

[Please keep in mind that these figures are just an example that Dr. Phinney gave, showing how the whole high-fat diet concept works. As I've said repeatedly on this blog, my own body preferred that I eat 60 grams of fat per day, which was closer to 50 percent fat instead of 25.]

In general, you might lose about 20 pounds eating that way before you become bored and get tired of consciously watching everything that you put into your mouth.

The dieting mindset starts to thin a bit, and you gain more confidence and experience less fear of fat.

By then, you are fairly comfortable with the low-carb lifestyle, your body has fully adapted to burning ketones and fatty acids for fuel, and if you are only at 30 or 35 carbs, you might feel ready to up the level a little bit. Try a few new foods, or experiment with fattier recipes.

It is at this point, that the LCHF dieter moves into Stage Two.

At Stage Two, carbohydrates might go from 5 percent to 7 percent, if tolerated, which is about 45 carbs. This matches what I've seen over the years, that the average low carber can eat 35 to 45 carbs per day during the weight-loss phase and still reap a decent fat loss.

Protein needs remain relatively constant, so the amount of protein you eat in this second stage stays the same.

The only macro that changes significantly is dietary fat.

It is the increase in calories and dietary fat that causes the familiar slow down in weight loss that occurs as you move into Stage Two. Raising your carbs by 10 carbs per day only adds 40 calories to your diet, so the slow down is due to eating additional fat.

More comfortable with the diet, your overall calories might increase from 1400 a day to a more comfortable 1800, and stay there for the long haul.

Obviously, this would be true for a fairly active woman.

At 1800 calories a day, with a 2800 calorie energy output, your dietary fat increases to about 40 percent of your daily calories, leaving 35 percent of your daily fat calories coming from body fat.

[This is much closer to what I was doing.]

In the example that Phinney used, the woman would still be able to lose about 1.7 pounds a week eating that way.

“A lot of people get confused by this,” Phinney said.

They tend to say to themselves:

“If I'm in Ketosis, why am I not still losing weight?”

Many people believe that if you are in ketosis, then the body has to be burning calories fast enough to lose weight, but that isn't the way dieting works.

If you're eating 75 to 80 percent of your calories in fat, your protein is probably too low and you're eating way too many calories.

That was Dr. Phinney's message to the low-carb world.

And since he designed the diet, he should know. Right?

Truth About LCHF Weight Loss

There are problems with Dr. Phinney's examples, sure.

If you're smaller than the sample woman and your energy output is less, like mine is, eating at 1800 calories could be maintenance.

There are also additional body adaptions that take place, falling Leptin levels, and mind tricks that get played on you, especially if you have over 100 pounds to lose.

However, Phinney's message is quite clear.

To lose body fat, you have to eat less fat, not more.

The daily practice of eating coconut oil off a spoon or chowing down on cakes of cream cheese just to reach some arbitrary fat percentage for the day isn't practical. And it did not come from him!

It's self sabotage.

The less fat you eat, during the weight-loss phase, the more body fat gets used to make up the difference.

Sure, the theory of LCHF means that one day you'll get to eat 75 to 80 percent of your calories from fat, but that day isn't today.

If you're still fat: Today, the name of the game is eating at a calorie deficit.

However, you are free to define whatever level of calorie deficit that is. You don't have to eat at 40 percent fat if you don't want to. That wasn't what Dr. Phinney was saying.

The charts he shows in the video are just examples.

It's the principles he talked about that matter, and it's the principles that the low-carb community has gotten wrong for a very long time now.

Sure, you can keep doing what you're doing if it's working for you. How much fat you can eat on a daily basis and still burn through your fat stores depends on your size, height, weight, age, and tons of other factors -- including heredity.

The important thing is to get enough protein to maintain muscle mass and eat at a calorie deficit.

Everything else is just fluff.