Calculate Your Nutrient Balance on a Ketogenic Low Carb Diet
The books make it sound easy. Cut the carbs, eat "luxuriously" and watch the weight drop off. No need to count anything but grams of carbs. Sounds too good to be true, and for most of us, it is.
Most people will lose a lot of weight in the first few weeks of a low carb diet, especially if it is their first low carb diet. Some of this weight is water released as we burn through our reserves of glycogen, the storage form of carbohydrate. This is something that happens during the first week of a truly low carbohydrate diet and is what causes the quick losses and the devastating weight regain you experience the first time you overeat carbohydrates.
You can read more about water weight loss and gain
HERE.
If you don't lose a few pounds during the first couple days of a low carb diet, chances are your diet isn't as low carb as you think it is and that you are eating deceptively marketed "low carb" diet foods that aren't low carb, foods filled with glycerine, maltitol, lacitol, and other high carbohydrate ingredients the manufacturers pretend are low carb.
Certain medications also block this kind of early water weight loss, most commonly metformin, though metformin may still turbocharge your low carbohydrate weight loss.
After those first dramatic weeks, weight loss slows considerably. If you are fortunate or have a lot of weight to lose you may indeed watch the pounds drop off. If that's the case, the only use of our nutrient calculator is to make sure that you are eating enough protein to ensure that the weight you are losing is fat, not lean body mass--i.e. muscle. Diets that do not contain enough protein force your body to cannibalize muscle which can be dangerous or even in extreme cases, fatal.
But after you have lost 10%-15% of your starting weight or as you get within 10 or 20 pounds of goal you are much more likely to stall out and lose no weight at all for weeks, months or even--and I have done this--years.
There are still benefits to eating a low carb diet even when you aren't losing weight. You can eat a lot more food without gaining weight back--and regaining lost weight out of frustration with the diet is the single biggest problem with stalling.
Continuing on with a stalled low carbohydrate diet also controls your blood sugar which has enormous health benefits--some of them far more important than weight loss, like better blood pressure, better cholesterol levels, healthy kidneys, nerves, and retinas--all of which are damaged by blood sugar levels most doctors consider to be only "prediabetic".
But if you want to lose more weight and find yourself stalled it can be helpful to check out what the vast body of metabolic research suggests you need to eat to lose weight. Then start logging your food intake and measuring portion sizes to compare what you have been eating to these values.
To help you do that we've put together a low carb nutritional calculator which you will find here:
Calculate Your Nutrient Balance on a Ketogenic Low Carb Diet
What the Calculator Does
The calculator will help you set realistic calorie goals for weight loss and suggest an ideal nutrient balance, one that provides you with enough protein to keep your body from cannibalizing muscle while preventing you from overeating so much protein that your liver converts it to glucose and raises your blood sugar.
The calculator bases its recommendations on your size, age and, most importantly, your chosen carbohydrate intake level. Count
all carbohydrates rather than "net" carbohydrates, because labeling abuses have become so widespread that using "net" carbohydrates almost always guarantees that you underestimate your true carbohydrate intake.
The calculator calculates your actual protein requirement based on your stated carbohydrate level. This protein calculation provides enough protein to repair muscle and additional protein to provide the small amount of glucose your brain needs to function. (The liver can convert about 58% of the protein you eat into glucose).
After three weeks on a ketogenic diet, the brain requires much less glucose because it switches over to burning some ketones. So the protein required to supplement your low carbohydrate intake drops dramatically. That is why the calculator asks you how many weeks you have been on a ketogenic diet.
Eating too much protein is a major cause for stalls on a low carbohydrate diet and a significant cause of dieters' breath, due to the ammonia compounds released when we digest protein. If you are stalled, cutting back on protein to the amount you actually need can be very helpful.
Once protein is taken care of, the calculator fills out your calculated caloric allotment with fat. When you cut calories, the calculator cuts fat because the protein allotment is already the minimum you need for health.
The other assumptions built into the calculator are listed on the results page. Please read them.
Do Not Use This Calculator If ...
Do not use this calculator if you are eating over 80 grams of carbohydrates a day. While eating at this level is still, technically, defined as a "low carbohydrate" diet, this carbohydrate level is high enough to raise blood sugar for most people, raising insulin output or insulin supplementation requirements for those of us who inject insulin.
That is why the fat intake that is appropriate for a lower carb diet can stall weight loss or contribute to weight gain at a higher carb intake level.
This calculator is not appropriate for children or adolescents whose nutritional needs are different from those of adults.
It is also not appropriate for people over age 70 for whom rigorous dieting, even when successful, has been found to correlate to a greater risk of mortality.
Understanding the Calculator's Activity Levels
The calculator provides several different activity levels.
Use the "Sedentary with Metabolic Advantage" option if you are in the first months of a very low carbohydrate diet--eating 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrates a day, even if you are exercising at any level but training for a professional sport.
Use the "Sedentary" activity level if you have been stalled for a while and do not pursue an exercise program that includes weight lifting or an hour of running, treadmill, elliptical trainer, or biking with hills.
Use the "Light Exercise" option if you exercise and have been on your low carbohydrate diet for more than six months and are stalled. It uses the standard nutritionist approved calculation for calories burned which is lower than the "Sedentary with Metabolic Advantage" level. If after a month of eating at this level you do not lose weight, drop down to the recommendations given for the "Sedentary" level.
Us the "Heavy Exercise" option only if you are truly doing heavy exercise--which is different from "exercise that feels heavy to you!" Most people overestimate the amount of calories they burn during exercise, so if you are stalled you should choose a lower, rather than higher activity level and only move up if you are losing too much weight.
After You Use The Calculator
One you have targets you will need to pay more attention to what you are eating, to see how close you are coming to those targets.
Books and software can help you learn exactly what nutrients are in your food. You'll find some links to good ones at the bottom of
THIS PAGE.
But nutrient counts are useless unless you know exactly how big the portion you are eating is, compared to the portion used in the nutrient information database you consult.
Many people learn that what they think of as "one portion" turns out to be two, three or even, at times five times the portion size given in the databases. For example, The nutritional counts for "Blueberry muffins" are always given with a 2 ounce portion size, though the muffins you buy at a coffee shop are more likely to be 7 or 8 ounces a piece.
Your food scale is the tool that will solve the portion size problem. You'll find a link to an excellent food scale on
THIS PAGE. An ideal food scale will measure in grams and ounces. There is no need to purchase scales with in-built nutrition databases as they are cumbersome to use and may not include entries for many foods low carb dieters eat.
