Have you heard the advice ‘you have to eat fat to burn fat’?
Is this the golden truth? Or a crock of lies?
Check out my response in this short video:
Don’t have headphones (or just wanna skim)? Full transcript below:
Nicki: Rob, there are some highly visible people in the keto community shall we say, that sort of eschew your take and people like Tyler and Louise from Keto Gains Approach, and Ted [Naiman 00:00:19] as well, that people that have a large amount of body fat on their person shouldn’t eat a lot of fat on a Keto diet. Your guys’ perspective tends to be if you have a lot of stored fat, you don’t want to be eating a ton of fat. Whereas, there are other people in the community that say that is one of the biggest keto mistakes you could make is to stop eating fat, even though you have fat on your person.
Robb: If there wasn’t a little old lady parked in front of us, I would punch a fucking hole through my steering wheel here. This is one of those things that it just so seemingly defies logic, but the fastest way to lose weight, across the board, is you starve people. Period. Just as an aside, fasting is not a particularly anabolic state, otherwise we would have all kinds of concentration camps of people that are jacked, so that’s just a whole other misnomer that’s out there.
Robb: But there’s this idea that you need to eat some fat to prime your fat mobilizing metabolism. No. You’ve got a bunch of fat stuck to your body, and that is kind of the hardest to claw away, because your body is wired for survival. There’s a priority that occurs that when you consume dietary calories, your body will largely metabolize that first. There’s a dynamic interplay where some molecules are going to get metabolized immediately, and some of them are going to get stored, and there’s a dynamic equilibrium that occurs, and all that type of stuff. But, in general, if you’re consuming extra calories, then you’re going to be burning consequently fewer calories out of your body.
Robb: This is where something like a protein sparing modified fast that’s pretty darn high in protein, so it spares lean muscle mass, you eat a lot of vegetable matter, but it’s very low in both fat and calories, it’s absolutely miserable to do. It’s nothing enjoyable. But if you want to lean out really, really quickly, and maintain a decent amount of muscle mass, it’s very, very effective. This whole notion that you’ve got to eat fat to burn fat is kind of like the notion that you’ve got to spend money to make money. It’s fucking bullshit. It leads people astray frequently.
Robb: That’s my quasi-scientific treatment of it. My super unscientific treatment of it is get a catalog of everybody that makes that claim, and get the best body composition perspective you can on those people, and then take myself, and Ted Naiman and Louise Tyler, and look at the body composition of the folks that are saying no, you actually need to reduce fat intake dietarily to optimize burning body fat.
Very interesting. It makes sense that initially a higher fat intake may work just because your body is switching gears, but as it adapts it may not be the optimum route, especially if you still don’t have the physique that you aspire to.
I have been LCHF keto (mostly carnivore actually) and initially it worked great but I seem to have hit a plateau. I will work on figuring what I need to do for a protein sparing modified fast to move past this point. When you say “pretty darned high in protein” are you talking 1.5 to 2g per lbs of BW (or LBM) or even higher? Right now I eat about 200g/day, which is about 1g/lbs of BW.
Well, I do a low carb diet, how low are carbohydrates, for your advice should I eat now only lean protein ??
No, we’re not saying not to eat fat at all, it’s just not something you should do unlimited or a add tons of.
I must agree with Edward, nothing gives you more satiety than natural (non seed derived) fats. In the beginning it helps patients with hunger and cravings and after the person is “paleo converted” you can twich macros toward the goals.