Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss (4 page)

I have found that so long as I stay above 80% calories from fat, and under 1,200 calories per day, I lose weight like crazy, and am in a deep, appetite-suppressing ketosis. I’m guessing those numbers will work for you, too. After all, Kekwick and Pawan and Benoit’s subjects had a dietary ward’s kitchen making and measuring all their food for them. We’re doing this at home, and are unlikely to be quite so precise. Shoot for the 90% fat/1,000 calorie mark, but if you find you’ve gotten to, say, 84% fat and 1,142 calories, no harm, no foul.

Dr. Atkins recommended a Fat Fast of five
feedings
per day, each with 200 calories. I find that unnecessarily rigid. The recipes in this book are designed to have 200 to 250 calories per serving—a few a little higher or lower—with 80% or more of those calories from fat. If you choose a recipe with 80% fat, balance it with higher fat feedings during the same day.

Unlike most cookbooks, this one is not arranged with a beverage chapter, an appetizer chapter, salads, soups, etc. Instead, I have grouped the recipes by fat content. This makes it easier to shoot for that 85 to 90% mark. If you have a recipe from the first chapter early in the day, have one from the last chapter later on. Conversely, if you have, say,
Keto Coffee
, at 95% fat, for breakfast, you can afford to have one of the lower-fat dishes later on.

Remember that Fat Fasting isn’t just about eating a very high-fat diet, it’s also about caloric restriction. Because fat is so high in calories, it is easy to blow past the caloric limit. So long as you are Fat Fasting for quick weight loss, you should strictly observe the portions listed in the recipes. Many of the recfony of thipes make only one serving, so you don’t have to worry about dividing a recipe into equal portions. Others make multiple servings. You’ll need to be scrupulously honest with yourself when dividing them up.

If you’ve purchased this book because you’re maintaining deep nutritional ketosis for sports performance, long-term weight loss, or therapeutic reasons, and want ideas for increasing your fat intake, portion control becomes less important.

Because a Fat Fast is calorie-restricted, and because fat is high in calories, portions can be quite small. For example, a portion of macadamia nuts is just ¼ cup. I find those nuts will keep me sated for a few hours, but they’re not a satisfyingly big portion if I really feel like a meal.

If you crave a good-sized portion of food on a Fat Fast, your two best friends are fiber and water. Because they have neither usable calories nor carbs, these two items are
free
, or darned close to it. Add fat, and you get a dish that derives the vast majority of its calories from fat.

What foods can you use this way? Broth is mostly water, so soups made from broth plus fat, generally heavy cream or
coconut milk
, are good choices. Similarly, you’ll find some high-fat coffee drinks in this book.

Very low-carb vegetables are largely a combination of fiber and water; add olive oil to make a salad, or butter,
coconut oil
, or other fat to sauté.
Shirataki noodles
, too, are pretty much a fiber-and-water blend, and can be used to make a satisfying portion. When I’m really hungry, I’ll make a Fat Fast cream soup and serve it as a sauce over shirataki noodles.

Keep fiber and water in mind as you create your own Fat Fast recipes.

I’ve had a few queries from people wondering how they can get enough fiber on a Fat Fast. Using the fiber-and-water strategy will help. If you like, you can also take a sugar-free fiber supplement, but I really don’t think you will need to. First of all, I’m unconvinced that fiber, in and of itself, has a nutritional benefit. I think its good reputation comes from the fact that fiber-conscious folks tend to eat more vegetables and less junk food in general than people who aren’t paying attention. Too, since fiber displaces some digestible carbohydrate, it can lower the blood sugar impact of carbohydrate foods.

As for what we politely call
regularity,
it’s unlikely to be a problem. All that fat greases the skids. But you can take a sugar-free fiber supplement if you really feel the need.

Long Term Strategy

One trusts that you’re not going to try to eat 1,000 calories per day, 90% from fat, forever. It is, as you may suspect, very restrictive. Furthermore, it’s not enough protein for the long run.

However, Fat Fasting is a great strategy foty, strater losing five to ten pounds very quickly, and for jump-starting stalled weight loss. Dr. Atkins recommended that a Fat Fast last only three to five days. I’ve done it for eight days with no apparent ill effect. And as mentioned earlier, Dr. Benoit fat-fasted his subjects for ten days. I can’t recommend taking it further than that.

Remember, we’re not talking only about eating a very high-fat diet, we’re also talking severe caloric restriction. It’s the caloric restriction that is not appropriate for long-term use. After all, if you’re eating only 1,000 calories per day, 900 of them from fat, that leaves only 100 calories for protein and carbs combined. Since protein runs four calories per gram, you can only get a maximum of 25 grams of protein per day on your Fat Fast, and that’s if you eat no carbs at all, which is unlikely. Such a low protein intake is fine for the short run—as Benoit demonstrated, fat-fasting spares muscle mass—but it’s insufficient for long-term use.

I asked
Jacqueline Eberstein, RN
, who was Dr. Atkins’ right hand for thirty years, about his recommendation that people only Fat Fast very short term. She said that Dr. Atkins’ concern was that people would abuse the Fat Fast, using it for quick weight loss, but never making the transition to a long-term low-carbohydrate diet. Using the Fat Fast sporadically, while eating a high-carb diet in between times, could lead, Atkins felt, to weight cycling, and eventually metabolic syndrome. Please, don’t do this.

How to transition to a long-term strategy?

Here’s my experience: For many years my low carb diet averaged around 1,800 to 2,200 calories per day, with somewhere around 100 to 120 grams of protein. Sadly, as I’ve aged, my body has gotten better at
gluconeogenesis
—c
onverting protein to glucose. Though my blood sugar generally was normal, I started running pre-diabetic fasting blood sugar first thing in the morning. My doctor told me my liver was creating sugar from protein while I slept. He put me on metformin and Victoza, two blood-sugar-lowering medications. Even so, my morning sugar often ran in the 100 to 110 range.

Then I tried Fat Fasting. Very rapidly, my fasting blood sugar was running a tad too low—as low as 69 one morning. I dropped the Victoza—it was expensive and involved sticking myself with a needle.

After a week of Fat Fasting, I went to an every-other-day Fat Fast for several weeks, eating my usual low-carb fare on alternate days. My blood sugar got better and better, and I eventually dropped the metformin, too.

I have not continued with the every-other-day Fat Fast—I had a
cookbook to write
—but I have permanently reduced my protein intake to 70 to 80 grams per day, and increased my fat. Most days, I don’t keep track of calories, but when I do, I find I’m getting more than 80% of my calories from fat. (Unless I drink alcohol, which skews the percentages.)

My blood sugar is not just normal, but considerably
better
than it was when I was on medication. When I had blood work done this past summer, my HbA1C (a measure of blood sugar over the previous three months) had dropped by 0.4 points as compared to last year—from 5.1 to 4.7 (that 5.1 indicated my blood sugar was normal overall, despitr drall, de the high fasting sugar, but 4.7 is better).

Super-star blogger and podcaster, Jimmy Moore, has also reduced protein and increased fat, with the result that he has, at this writing, lost 60 pounds, and is crowing about his dramatic increase in energy.

If you’ve been low-carbing for a while and have plateaued at a higher weight than you’d hoped, or you still aren’t getting the blood sugar levels you and your doctor want, you need to consider reducing protein intake permanently. Half a gram for every pound of body weight is about right (a gram per kilo if you live in the civilized world), with very little carbohydrate, and the rest of your calories coming from fat. These recipes will help.

Jackie Eberstein tells me that my every-other-day Fat Fast strategy was actually not a good idea, because it takes the body longer than that to really shift metabolism. Jackie is smarter, more educated, and far more experienced with the ins and outs of low carbohydrate nutrition than I. I will not try every-other-day Fat Fasting again, and cannot recommend it.

Instead, consider using the Fat Fast to break stalls, or if, despite a low-carbohydrate diet, your weight creeps up a few pounds. You might include a three to five day Fat Fast monthly or quarterly.

Jackie also says that in her current practice,
Controlled Carbohydrate Nutrition
, she often puts people on the Fat Fast five days per week, with an Atkins Induction Diet on the weekends. She says many people find this easier than Fat Fasting straight through.

These recipes are valuable for anyone who wants to be in nutritional ketosis.

Ketogenic diets have been used for decades to
control seizures in children
. I hope these recipes help epileptic children and their parents find more variety and interest in what can be a very restrictive diet.

Because cancer cells rely on glucose, there is growing interest in
ketogenic diets for cancer patients
.

Researchers Jeff Volek and Steve Phinney, in their groundbreaking book,
The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance
, have made a strong case for a ketogenic diet for athletes. Because it allows athletes to easily tap into stored fat for energy, instead of relying on limited stores of glycogen, a ketogenic diet has tremendous benefits, especially for endurance athletes.

Ketogenic diets also show promise for
preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease
. Since Alzheimer’s has been tied to elevated blood sugar, and even dubbed
type 3 diabete
s, this is not surprising. Brains with Alzheimer’s cannot properly use glucose for fuel, but can still run on ketones. Having watched helplessly as my mother disappeared into the twilight world of dementia, I find the reports that ketogenic diets are improving and even reversing Alzheimer’s exciting beyond all telignyond alling.

by Jimmy Moore (Updated from original article published on
CarbSmart.com
)

If you’ve been paying attention to the low-carb community lately, no doubt you have already heard about nutritional ketosis. Keen interest in this simple, yet important, idea has been one of the most exciting things to happen since I started blogging about this stuff in 2005. It just goes to show that despite the best efforts by the media and all the so-called health
experts
, hell-bent on discrediting healthy low-carb living, countless numbers of people who want to lose weight and attain optimal health still believe in its amazing benefits. There’s certainly something there that warrants a closer look for those who have been struggling with their nutritional health goals.

If you’ve been following a low-carb lifestyle for any length of time, you probably already understand the importance of being in a ketogenic state, in which your body switches from using carbohydrates to using fat—both dietary and stored body fat—and ketone bodies as its primary fuel sources. The late, great Dr. Robert C. Atkins made this key concept the centerpiece of his best-selling books. Unfortunately, dietary ketosis has been severely maligned by Dr. Atkins’ detractors as somehow being a
dangerous
state.
Ketosis
has a mistaken negative association with the truly dangerous and potentially fatal diabetic
ketoacidosis
that most frequently occurs in type 1 diabetics.

Another problem with using the term
ketosis
alone, as Dr. Atkins did throughout his work, is that it neglects to communicate any concrete, practical meaning regarding what it takes to get there. There are true benefits from ketosis, so this understanding is crucial. This is why I believe the phrase
nutritional ketosis
is a better way of framing the idea of becoming keto-adapted or fat-adapted through the use of a well-formulated high-fat, adequate- (moderate-) protein, low-carb diet. Until you get the macronutrient mix that is right for YOU, the health benefits of nutritional ketosis will continue to elude you.