How Many Calories To Lose Weight Keto

Calorie counting is a great tool for people to use to get a rough idea of caloric intakes, as well as a way to pinpoint mistakes they might have made if they hit a plateau. This may raise the question, “How many calories should I eat on keto?” Well, that depends…

You might have been told that counting calories is not needed on a ketogenic diet because it causes more weight loss than other diets. That’s not exactly true. Would you be burning more calories than a low-fat diet? Most likely, but that’s because of your protein intake.

What about high carb vs. low carb? The truth is, there are no studies that properly show a fat loss advantage between low carb and high carb diets.

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There have been over 20 long-term studies done in the last 50 years trying to give a solid conclusion on this, but all of the results have been the same: there is no significant difference in weight loss between a low carb and high carb diet. [1][2][3]

The thing about a ketogenic diet is if you tell people to eat as much as they want, they will tend to eat slightly less than other diets. Naturally, you will eat less if you’re eating food that can satiate you easier.

You will have more fullness from vegetables, satiety from protein, feel fuller for longer from the fat, and endure higher levels of thermogenesis from unprocessed foods.

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So what does that all mean? In a nutshell, it means that you will eat less food and therefore fewer calories. Your body can dig into your fat stores, since you’re naturally restricting calories, and you’ll lose weight.

This makes it easy for people to give in to cravings, and succumb to the “carb addiction” created from serotonin and dopamine. There are no magical metabolic advantages to a ketogenic diet. But, the small benefits that make it easier on us is also the reason that it works.

Be magic, but as far as I know there are no studies that support this idea. The scientific consensus is that eating too much will make you fat.

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Keep in mind that the basic calorie in/calorie out formula is exactly that – basic. If you are talking in a realistic perspective, the formula stays true but you have to adjust the calorie expenditure for metabolic rates, activity levels, effectiveness of ones endocrine system, etc. The basic formula is:

Say your body needs 1800 calories, and you only eat 1300 calories. Weight loss will occur because your body uses roughly 500 calories of body fat to cover the missing 500 calories from your diet:

This leads to a theoretical weight loss of 1 lb per week (3500 kcal per pound of fat). If you ate 1300 calories on keto and lost 2 lbs in a week, you’d have to use 1000 calories from fat stores. That means that 1000 calories of expended energy are external of your diet a day, for 7 days. If that isn’t the case, the formula does not work.

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It just doesn’t work in math, and it also doesn’t work in physics. So for keto, or any diet for that matter, to lead to more weight loss – you have to get to a higher energy expenditure of calories for it to hold true. This means increasing your metabolic rate, increasing activity levels, etc.

So, how many calories should you actually eat? Well obviously that will be different from person to person based on current weight and the current state of their endocrine system. To be short, you never want to go into a caloric deficit that is lower than your fat stores can handle.

How many calories are covered by your fat stores? I went into more depth in this in a previous article, but you can get about 31.4 calories per pound of fat per day. That means if you’re 220 lbs (162 lean mass , 58 lbs fat) you can get about 1821 calories from fat stores.

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We might take a look at Volke’s study, which is free-living and self-reported. It’s a short-term study that only allowed 21 total days to be counted, where the induction time of ketosis would cover half of the time the study was carried out.

James Krieger also published a meta-analysis of low-carbohydrate and weight loss which he has since claimed is unreliable and most likely wrong. As the knowledge and science improve, our perspective is changing.

Some may argue that the calorie is a poorly derived unit of energy, which also poorly translates across carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

Week Vegetarian Keto Diet Plan

Counting calories has shown to be accurate. There’s a large database that exists on the energy expenditure. This study shows that the energy expenditure is actually similar to the recommendations adopted by FAO and WHO.

These recommendations have been adopted because studies have been done on these units, and confirmed that these are good approximate values for human digestion and utilization.

Some people are saying that we will excrete excess nutrients if we don’t use them – in terms of protein and fats. This study shows that we will only excrete about 3 grams of fat when we eat 2800 calories a day (50% being from fat).

Keto Weight Loss: How Much Weight Can You Lose On Keto?

Another study shows that over a 14 day window and multiple diets (high fat, low fat, starvation, overfeeding, etc.) the amount of nutrients lost from excretion is only about 4% of the diet.

Let’s take a look at what Gary Taubes has said, as I know people will be thinking of him as they read this article.

Twenty calories a day times the 365 days in a year comes to a little more than seven thousand calories stored as fat every year—two pounds of excess fat. If it were true that our adiposity is determined by calories-in/calories-out, then this is one implication: you only need to overeat, on average, by twenty calories a day to gain fifty extra pounds of fat in twenty years. You need only to rein yourself in by this amount—undereat by twenty calories a day—to undo it. Twenty calories is less than a single bite of a McDonald’s hamburger or a croissant. It’s less than two ounces of Coke or Pepsi or the typical beer. Less than three potato chips. Maybe three small bites of an apple. In short, not very much at all. Twenty calories is less than 1 percent of the daily caloric intake that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has recommended for a middle-aged woman whose idea of regular physical activity is cooking and sewing; it’s less than half a percent of the daily quota of calories recommended for an equally sedentary middle-aged man. That it’s such an insignificant amount is what makes it so telling about the calories-in/calories-out idea.

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The fatal flaw in this reasoning is that we don’t have the same energy expenditure as our fat mass increases. I just want to point out that the calories in/calories out system don’t claim to predict exact energy expenditure, weight gain, or weight loss. It’s just a system that shows how energy intake and expenditure are linked with energy storage and energy loss for the average person.

Whether the system is exactly accurate down to “20 calories” or not doesn’t really matter, as that’s not the intended purpose. What it does is give a reference point for people to individualize their intended weight loss.

Let me dispute what Gary Taubes said with Gary Taubes, in a 2010 interview with Andreas Eenfeldt,  “Gary Taubes about why we get fat.”

If I Cut Carbs And Calories But I'm Not On Keto, Will I Still Lose Weight?

If we get bigger, if we get fatter, if we get heavier we have to take in more calories. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. And if we want to get lighter we have to expend more calories than we consume. Absolutely no doubt about it.

Health experts think that the first law is relevant to why we get fat because they say to themselves and then to us, as the The New York Times did, “Those who consume more calories than they expend in energy will gain weight.” This is true. It has to be. To get fatter and heavier, we have to overeat. We have to consume more calories than we expend. That’s a given. But thermodynamics tells us nothing about why this happens, why we consume more calories than we expend. It only says that if we do, we will get heavier, and if we get heavier, then we did.

Although Taubes thinks that calories matter, He, as well as other low-carb proponents like Dr. Lustig and Dr. Fung, believe that something else plays a more prominent role in causing obesity. That “something else” is commonly referred to as the insulin theory of obesity.

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The insulin theory of obesity, in short, declares that the primary cause of obesity is higher carbohydrate diets because these diets increase insulin secretion more than any other diet. When insulin levels are high, fat storage will increase significantly and “starve” muscles and organs of energy.   This causes increased hunger and overeating that results in obesity.

The reason why low-carb diets work, according to this theory, is that the lowered levels of insulin (caused by restricting carbs) allow for the body to begin metabolizing fat and