The diet of Metas - Ketogenic

[Martin Hash]

I'll just say, as a licensed medical doctor interested in weight loss, that's all bullshit.

p.s. And fuck you characterizing people on a Keto diet. You're a fucking loon. (That's a professional diagnosis.)

[Speaker to Animals]

p.s. Not trying to be an asshole.

Why, yes, you are.

I gave you links to the research. Your turn or fuck off.

[Speaker to Animals]

A research fellow who knows what he is talking about:

https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/ ... enic-diets

2 – Impaired High-Intensity Performance
Many studies show decreased capacity to perform high-intensity work. This is likely due to two mechanisms: 1. reduced intramuscular glycogen, and 2. reduced capacity for hepatic glucose output during high-intensity training.

3 – Reduced Levels of Intramuscular Glycogen
The reduction in performance at high-intensity is likely a feature of the reduced levels of intramuscular glycogen seen across the studies. This may also impact recovery for hard training athletes and impair the ability for muscles to increase in size.

4 – Ketogenic Diets Don't Work With High-Intensity Exercise
In high-intensity, anaerobic exercise, your body relies mainly on glucose from blood glucose, muscle glycogen, hepatic glucose output, and gluconeogenesis for fuel. Since ketogenic diets reduce muscle glycogen, it's really hard to train at a high level.

That alone should be a deal-breaker for longterm dieting.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Ketogenic diets may be good for losing weight but they certainly don't optimize muscle gain, nor do they optimize your training capacity.

Using a ketogenic diet will hamper your ability to put on lean tissue and to train at high intensities. If those are your goals, skip trying a ketogenic diet.

Nutrition science has found that consuming both carbohydrates and protein elicit a greater anabolic response than either in isolation. On a ketogenic diet you strip out the carbs, but since both protein and carbs are needed for optimal muscle gain, ketogenic diets strip you of a missing key ingredient.

Ultimately, ketogenic diets aren't optimal for building mass and they likely affect performance negatively.

And that sucks big time right there.


If you want to lose weight, you want to optimize hypertrophy at the same time if you are not already near your genetic potential (yes, you can lose fat and build muscle at the same time if you are not already jacked). Muscle burns calories. The more muscle you have, the more calories your metabolism burns. Compromising that is not efficient at all.

Furthermore, because the diet totally fucks up your performance in most sports, including weight lifting which is the fastest means to build muscle available to you, it doesn't come close to more sophisticated diets like carb-cycling, in my opinion. First of all, by diminishing your performance at those exercises, you diminish your capacity to burn more fat. Secondly, you diminish your muscle growth, which doesn't help you longterm at all (you want a faster metabolism when you are done dieting). Thirdly, it makes skill development harder and less satisfying, which sabotages a man's will to want to change his life for the better and alter his habits so this doesn't happen to him again. Everything you do should be relatively healthy. Eat good whole foods. Eat a healthy macro ratio. Get all the micronutrients you need each day. Build muscle and lose fat. Find something you enjoy and get really good at it.

I'd estimate that around 80% of the battle is finding the sports and exercises you love, and improving your skills to the point where you become hooked and WANT to do this most days of the week. Sabotage that at your own peril, man. If you think most men will want to pump away at an elliptical machine for the next forty years, you are mistaken.

[Martin Hash]

That's a good pivot, dude, you're not a loon anymore (and you didn't attack Keto-followers).

OWGs (like me) don't give a rat's ass about "workouts," "performance" or any kind of body-building bullshit. In fact, I'd say ALL of my patients don't give a fuck about those things, so all of my patients should be Keto. (My overweight patients: super thin people should not be Keto.)

[Speaker to Animals]

It's not a pivot. I think you just didn't read what I wrote.

I am not against keto diets. I am against the average man doing that longterm. Use keto to jumpstart fat loss or maybe get rid of that last vestige of fat. Definitely use it if you are diabetic or have problems with epilepsy.

Carb-cycling is a much better protocol for longterm nutritional planning, in my opinion, and most of the success you see in average guys using keto is just from the fact that they counted calories and restricted their calorie intake. You don't need ketosis to do that.

[Martin Hash]

Carb-cycling is a much better protocol for longterm nutritional planning, in my opinion, and most of the success you see in average guys using keto is just from the fact that they counted calories and restricted their calorie intake. You don't need ketosis to do that.

Dude, ketosis is burning fat. Anyone burning fat is in ketosis. When YOU LOSE FAT, you are in ketosis. A ketone is the energy that fat produces.

[Speaker to Animals]

Ketosis is a metabolic state that occurs when dietary carbohydrates are in such low quantities that your body must rely almost exclusively on fatty acid oxidation and ketone metabolism.

That sounds simple on the surface, but let's unpack that explanation a bit.

To function, your body requires a substantial amount of energy in the form of ATP. So, let's just assume that the average person uses about 1,800 calories per day to create enough ATP to keep him alive (not including any physical activity).

Now this is where it gets interesting. You have this thing in your skull called a brain. It uses about 400 or so calories per day and runs almost exclusively on glucose. (There's some evidence it can use small amounts of fat and lactate, but in the big picture it's not all that important). This means you need a minimum 100g of glucose per day just to fuel your brain.

Let's say we cut out all carbs from our diet, in effect removing any dietary source of glucose for the brain. That means we need to get it from somewhere. Thankfully, the liver stores glucose and can pump some into the blood to fuel the brain.

Your liver, on average, can store around 100-120 grams of glucose. Awesome, so you can function for about a day, but eventually that supply is going to run out because we can't replace it fast enough, and you'll soon need a new source of fuel.

Your muscles are also a huge store of glucose (around 400-500 grams) in the form of glycogen. Sadly, your muscles can't break that glycogen down to ship it out to the brain because your muscles lack the enzyme that breaks glycogen down (glucose-6-phosphatase).

Now we're really in a bind!

Without available carbs, our liver begins to do something really interesting. It starts producing ketone bodies that are released into the blood for our brain and other tissues that don't utilize fat for energy.

This is crucial because when you "burn fat," you're really taking a fatty acid molecule and converting it to something called acetyl CoA that's then combined with oxaloacetate, which then begins the Kreb cycle (the name given to a series of chemical reactions that generates energy).

During ketosis your liver is utilizing so much fat for energy that it begins to have excess acetyl CoA hanging around and starts turning it into ketone bodies (beta-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetic acid, and acetone).

Since your body is in need of a new energy source, your liver begins to dump these ketones into the blood stream, which can then fuel the body and brain.

Once your body reaches a state where it begins to do this continually and there are noticeable increases in blood levels of ketones, you're officially in ketosis.

You can eat bananas all day, burn a ton of fat off because you are on a calorie deficit, and not be in ketosis. Ketosis and catabolism are two different terms.

Hell, Penn Jillette lost something like a hundred pounds by eating nothing but potatoes. That's not keto.

[Martin Hash]

Don't just repost some bullshit. Ask me.

When you lose fat, you are in ketosis. If you're getting ALL of your energy from burning fat, your blood is LOADED with ketones instead of glucose. Your breath smells sweet, your urine strip turns bright red, and your doctor says, buddy, you're in some serious Keto. If you are a fat person, GREAT, but if you want to keep some muscles, your body needs some fucking glucose, and where do you think it gets it?

[Speaker to Animals]

The keto diet was the 19th century diet for metas. This is the 21st century. Try combining carb cycling with intermittent fasting. Seriously. It's better for you and will work longterm. Keto is great for short term weight loss, but really bad for longterm use unless you are an obeast.

[Speaker to Animals]

Don't just repost some bullshit. Ask me.

When you lose fat, you are in ketosis. If you're getting ALL of your energy from burning fat, your blood is LOADED with ketones instead of glucose. Your breath smells sweet, your urine strip turns bright red, and your doctor says, buddy, you're in some serious Keto. If you are a fat person, GREAT, but if you want to keep some muscles, your body needs some fucking glucose, and where do you think it gets it?

You confuse catabolism with ketosis.

edit:

Okay. I get what you are saying. But that's still not "ketosis". You can burn fat and not be in ketosis, but yeah, you are going to produce ketones still.