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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

Something I found kind of oddball about the keto diet community is that they aren’t just recommending low carbs. They push people to eat more fat. I’ve seen a friend fail to lose weight on keto and he was eating tons of stuff like cheese and bacon.

The “eat less carbs” message is great IMO but I think a lot of people need to eat less period. Personally I found that intentionally eating high-protein foods was a good way for me to be satiated with less carbs. A protein bar will fill me up, a chunk of cheese with twice as many calories won’t.

But I also acknowledge that people are different. I’m sure there people who are easily satiated by fat and can therefore eat unmetered fatty foods and lose weight.

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If you cut carbs and just eat more protein instead you can literally die [0]. AIUI you're supposed to be replacing the carbs with fat when doing keto.

I've known a few heavy people over the years who claimed to be eating keto and never seemed to be losing any weight. Whenever we hung out they would use their purported keto diet as a green-light to get extra meat and cheese in whatever we were doing, and inevitably they would also eat carbs. French fries, beers, late night donuts, ice cream, the usual slip-ups.

If a person lacks self-discipline, a keto diet turns into an extremely fattening diet. It does not degrade gracefully at all. You have to either stick to it and stay in ketosis, or reel in your fat consumption something fierce because it'll all get stored as fat when you're running on glucose.

It's kind of a major flaw with ketogenic diets IMHO. The diet inherently gets a person into a habit of consuming rich, fatty foods. But when they slip up, which let's be honest, most people will. It becomes something along the lines of the most fattening diet possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Starvation

Granted, rabbit starvation can occur if your protein consumption exceeds 35% of calories, but most people are nowhere near that level.

Keto community generally recommends replacing carbs with fat and keeping protein constant. Protein consumption is almost a constant (with some variability due to workout regimen, etc).

I think of it like a see-saw, with protein level being the axis of rotation (ie., it stays the same). Now you have 2 remaining macro variables: carbs and fat. If you decrease one, you need to increase the other or else caloric intake might be too low.

Keto community generally refers to the diet as Low Carb High Fat because not eating enough fat can cause problems on the diet.

Edit: To be clear, assuming sufficient consumption of protein, if calories are still deficient, keto community recommends making up the deficit with fat rather than protein.

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