Let's chew the fat...

We need to talk about fat and your metabolism.

When you live low-carb, you inevitably eat more fat. You may doubt me, but you will need to eat more of it when you live low-carb. Think of it this way, the typical American consumes 200-400 grams of carbohydrate a day. That amounts to roughly 800-1600 calories a day from carbohydrate. When you're eating low-carb, you'll probably start by eating around 20-40 grams of carbohydrate a day, roughly 80 - 160 calories. That means you just dropped between 600 and 1500 calories a day from your diet. If you have loads of weight to lose, then this may work for a while, but the likelihood is you may need to replace some or all of those calories depending on how much weight you have to lose.

So you have two other macronutrients from which you can make up those missing calories, fat or protein.

Protein is an essential macronutrient because it is required for cell construction and all kinds of maintenance of structures and functions in the body. It is great for structures, but not so great as a fuel. Your body can convert protein to blood glucose as needed via a process called gluconeogenesis. That's what make carbohydrates metabolically unnecessary. You can eat enough protein to use some as fuel, but your body can only take so much before bad things start to happen. After a few posts about fat, I'll get to talking about protein, how much you need, and where it should come from.

Fat is an energy source just like carbohydrates. Just like carbohydrates, fats provide energy and have metabolic and health effects on the body. Unlike carbohydrates, fats do not require insulin to use the energy they provide. Insulin is a fat regulating hormone, among other things, and I explain the physiology of that process here and here. I'd read them in order.

When your body is metabolizing fat as it's main energy source it uses both free fatty acids from the blood stream and it converts some of the fatty acids in your blood to ketones and uses the ketones as it's energy source.

Now we have a foundation from which to build the discussion on fat. I have several more posts coming regarding fat metabolism, fat's effect on your health, fat fears, big fat myths, cholesterol, and fat facts.

As these posts come out, we need all of you who read them to chime in. I know there are people that are reading this because I've gotten a few comments, but we need more. Diet is an extraordinarily complex, controversial, and, in many cases, emotional subject. It needs to be talked about more. We need to have more open dialogue backed up by facts, anecdotes, and studies. If we can talk about this, maybe we can cut through some of the myths and misconceptions and remove some of the erroneous beliefs that are rooted in speculation.

This post may not be so controversial, but there will some real controversy and some conclusions that challenge convention over some of the upcoming posts.

Cheers,
Alex

PS. Don't fear the fat! (You'll need it)