The Keto Deficit

Let your body start it

The Keto Diet seems much misunderstood. For one thing, many don’t seem to know that the term “keto” has become a generic reference to a low- or very-low-carb diet. This lack of understanding leads many keto critics to talk about how hard it is to maintain, and that it’s really for people with epilepsy. Well, the “therapeutic ketogenic diet” was developed to treat epileptics and is typically administered under the care of a medical doctor. Typically, a therapeutic ketogenic diet derives about 90% of calories from fat and 5% each from protein and carbohydrates. And this would be hard to do at home! And, for some reason, keto critics often complain that the diet “eliminates entire food groups” — which is not at all true, but a topic for another day.

The popular keto diet of today has several versions, but typically isn’t as fat-centric and contains more protein than its therapeutic ancestor. This article discusses the mechanism behind the popular versions of the keto diet:

What I want to discuss here, however, is the often-mentioned criticism that “you only lose weight on a keto diet because you eat at a deficit, not because of insulin control or using ketones for fuel.” And like the belief that deficits are needed to lose excess body fat, while there is some truth to the claim about keto being all about the deficit, it’s not what people think.

I covered deficit diets at length in this article:

In a nutshell, I point out that an imposed deficit (for example, eating below maintenance-level calories — the “eat less” advice we are given) doesn’t work long-term. You need to get the body itself to trigger a situation where it uses up more energy than you are taking in — but you need to NOT be eating at a deficit. The body will create a deficit by wasting energy.

The wasting of excess body fat for energy starts with a very-low-carb (keto) diet, which triggers the production of ketone bodies, which in turn flips the metabolic switch that wastes fat by over-producing ATP (the chemical energy cells use to do their work). But if you have a lot of excess body fat available, your deficit could go beyond this over-production of energy.

If you have a lot of excess body fat, you are carrying around a lot of potential energy. That’s exactly what body fat is — potential energy. The body manages your energy — not your weight. Weight is just a side-effect of our energy management. When you go on a very low-carb diet, levels of the hormone preventing your body from using that potential energy (insulin) drop back to normal, which allows you to use fat again for fuel. In addition to preventing fat to be used for fuel, high levels of insulin can also disrupt the signals fat cells send to the brain via a hormone called leptin.

The signals fat cells send to the brain via leptin are the “I’m full” signals. When these signals become disrupted, we tend to eat more than we need. When insulin levels lower, leptin signaling improves and we start to get the “I’m full” feelings again. I remember when I was starting to lose weight on a low-carb diet. I was surprised by these feelings. I never used to get full until I was bursting. I would gauge when to stop eating when I saw others stopping. But after a few months on a low-carb diet, I actually started feeling full again.

At this point, you might start eating below your maintenance level number of calories — but because you simply aren’t as hungry. It’s not something you will have to track. You will just find you don’t feel like eating all the food on your plate. Or you’ll just not feel like a big lunch. So, what’s going on — are you expending less energy, therefore you don’t need to eat as much?

Not quite.

What’s happening is that your body is pulling more energy from your stores of body fat — your potential energy. You can think of it as your body eating extra fat — but the fat is in your body. This is the way our bodies evolved to function. For a lean person, when they take in more energy than needed at each meal (and we all take in more than we need at the moment), they store a little as body fat and then use that body fat between meals. But a high-carb diet can cause a hormonal imbalance in a lot of people which prevents that little bit of body fat from being used, so it accumulates over days, weeks, months, years — until the person is overweight or obese.

Controlling insulin allows the body to reset the amount of body fat it stores by 1) wasting some via uncoupled metabolism in our fat cells and 2) using some instead of eating as much food as we did before. It’s important to note, however, that both of these situations are initiated by the body via subconscious processes — you can’t will your body to initiate these processes nor can you impose them on the body, they are the result of biochemistry. The only place willpower comes into play is in the strength it takes to avoid all the tasty, processed foods we have available to us today.

The body has an “off switch” to these fat-burning processes as well. Once your stored fat gets down to a certain level (different for each of us), the uncoupled metabolism stops — likely due to leptin signal strength. Independently, with less body fat available for “consumption” in place of eating more food, your hunger hormone (ghrelin) will motivate you to eat more — closer to your maintenance level. Then, at some point, your weight loss will stop, and you will stay at a maintenance level if you listen to your hunger and full signals. This last part is, essentially, intuitive eating — following the signals your body gives you. But before you can do this, you have to be sure the signals are working!

In summary, the human body has a natural way to both add body fat and use body fat. If your systems are running as they evolved, these two events will balance each other out over the course of the day. If they don’t balance out, and you find you are accumulating excess body fat, chances are you are insulin resistant and the level of insulin in your blood is too high for most of the day — and this is both promoting fat gain and inhibiting fat loss. A very low-carb diet can reset your insulin level and get your body to rid itself of excess body fat. It did for me — I lost over 170 pounds without counting calories. Instead, I just kept an eye on my carbohydrate intake, staying under 25 grams per day most days.

The body is a marvelous machine. Give it the right fuel and it will do the weight-loss work for you!

Thank you for reading this article — hopefully, it contained something you found useful.

If you aren’t a member of Medium but are thinking of joining, please join through my page! If you do sign up to Medium through my page, some of your membership fees goes to me (but you still pay the normal membership price).

With a paid membership to Medium, you will get to read more of my work plus you get unlimited access to thousands of Medium writers. And it’s only about $5.00 a month!