Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss (3 page)

This caution applies to anyone on blood-sugar-lowering meds for any reason, by the way—for instance, for polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease—and also to those who have been diagnosed as seriously hypoglycemic.

We are assuming that most people reading this are already on a low carbohydrate diet. If, instead, you have been eating American Standard (full of junk), or a low fat/high carbohydrate diet, whether of processed food or whole grains and beans, you have trained your body to run on glucose rather than fat. That can be changed, but it takes a transition period. Your body takes a few days to a few weeks to get with the program and create the enzymes necessary to burn fat for fuel instead of glucose. Because of this, going straight to a Fat Fast from a diet rich in carbohydrate will very likely make you feel awful for a few days—your body simply won’t know where to get energy. We very much recommend that you go on a standard low carbohydrate diet first—we’re big fans of
The New Atkins For a New You
,
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
, and
Protein Power
. Any of these very similar plans will give you an easier transition than jumping straight to the Fat Fast. Indeed, you may well find they’re all you need to lose weight and improve your health.

No.

The confusion about ketosis comes because Type 1 diabetics have to be careful about
keto
acidosis
. Wikipedia (Some scoff at Wikipedia, but it’s been shown to be on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy, and it’s updated far more often)
defines
ketoacidosis
as
a pathological metabolic state marked by extreme and uncontrolled ketosis
. This causes extremely high ketone levels,
combined
with very high blood sugar and acid accumulating in the blood. Again from Wikipedia,
In healthy individuals this normally does not occur because the pancreas produces insulin in response to rising ketone/blood glucose concentration.
In other words, this doesn’t happen simply from carbohydrate restriction. If you have a functioning pancreas, you can’t go into runaway ketosis. If you’re making more ketones than your body is happy with, it will convert a little

Dietary ketosis or nutritional ketosis appears to have numerous benefits. In particular, it provides energy while sparing muscle tissue. This would have been vital for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who might well have to go out to hunt and gather on an empty stomach. In our modern age, ketogenic diets have long been used to treat epilepsy, and are now showing promise for
treating cancer
and
Alzheimer’s
. And despite years of dire warnings about kidney damage,
recent mouse studies show a ketogenic diet reversing diabetic kidney damage
.

(There is a modestly increased rate of kidney stones among children on a severely limited ketogenic diet for seizure control. This apparently happens because liquids are restricted to allow ketones to build up in the blood. Liberalizing fluids generally solves the problem. So drink plenty of fluids.)

Here’s what
The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition
has to say about ketones:

During very low carbohydrate intake, the regulated and controlled production of ketone bodies causes a harmless physiological state known as dietary ketosis. Ketone bodies flow from the liver to extra-hepatic tissues (e.g., brain) for use as a fuel; this spares glucose metabolism via a mechanism similar to the sparing of glucose by oxidation of fatty acids as an alternative fuel. In comparison with glucose, the ketone bodies are actually a very good respiratory fuel.
Indeed, there is no clear requirement for dietary carbohydrates for human adults. Interestingly, the effects of ketone body metabolism suggest that mild ketosis may offer therapeutic potential in a variety of different common and rare disease states.
(Emphasis mine.)

Dr. Lubert Stryer, Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University and the author of a
biochemistry textbook
used in many medical schools, says ketones are
normal fuels of respiration and are quantitatively important as sources of energy.
(In this usage, respiration doesn’t mean breathing, but rather cellular respiration, the basic processes involved in creating energy within the cells.)
Indeed, heart muscle, and the renal cortex [kidney] use [ketones] in preference to glucose.

Another biochemistry text, this one by
Drs. Donald and Judith Voet
, says that ketones
serve as important metabolic fuels for many peripheral tissues, particularly heart and skeletal muscle.

Ketogenic diets similar to the Fat Fast, only without caloric restriction, have been used successfully for decades to treat epilepsy, and a 2006 article in the journal
Behavioral Pharmacology
states,
there is evidence from uncontrolled clinical trials and studiDrsls and es in animal models that the ketogenic diet can provide symptomatic and disease-modifying activity in a broad range of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, and may also be protective in traumatic brain injury and stroke.
(The same article includes the information that
The ketogenic diet may also protect against various forms of cell death.)

Sounds encouraging to me.

Because cancer cells are glucose-dependent, ketogenic diets are also being studied for cancer treatment.

Finally, here’s the
abstract
from an article titled
Ketogenic diets: additional benefits to the weight loss and unfounded secondary effects:

It is also necessary to emphasize that as well as the weight loss, ketogenic diets are
healthier because they promote a non-atherogenic lipid profile, lower blood pressure and diminish resistance to insulin with an improvement in blood levels of glucose and insulin. Such diets also have antineoplastic (anti-cancer) benefits, do not alter renal or liver functions, do not produce metabolic acidosis by Ketosis, have many neurological benefits in the central nervous system, do not produce osteoporosis and could increase the performance in aerobic sports.

Ketones are your friend.

Let’s cut to the chase: How to do this?

I’ll be honest: Because fat is very high calorie, 1,000 calories per day, 90% of them from fat, is not a lot of food. You won’t be eating meals. Instead, you’ll be having four to five small
feedings
per day, about two to four hours apart—a cup of coffee with heavy cream for breakfast, an ounce of macadamia nuts three hours later, then in a few hours, a bowl of buttered shirataki noodles, and a couple of hours after that, perhaps a serving of low-carbohydrate vegetables in a high-fat sauce.

Here are the
game rules
:

Aim for 1,000 calories per day, with 90% of those calories coming from fat. Do not exceed 1,200 calories per day, or eat less than 80% of calories from fat.

Divide those calories among four to five
feedings
per day, each of about 200 to 250 calories. Space these out so that you’re eating a little something every three to four hours.

Other than the high-fat, portion-controlled beverage recipes in this book—which count as
feedings
—drink zero-calorie beverages: water, tea, coffee, sparkling water. I cannot recommend that you consume much diet soda; there’s too much evidence that it can stall weight loss and make you hungry.

If you eat something a bit low in fat, deliberately make up for it with something quite high in fat at your next feeding.

I regret to tell you that alcohol is right out. Sorry. You might try some of the relaxant herbal teas on the market; your local health food store should have a selection.

Take a good, strong multi-vitamin every day. You shs day. Yould be doing this anyway.

Keep track. There are good nutrition-counter apps available inexpensively, though they’re likely to encourage you to eat low-fat. Ignore that part, just track your calorie count and percentages. Online,
FitDay.com
has a free nutrition tracker program I’ve used to good effect. I also have the free
Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker
app by MyFitnessPal on my iPhone. The problem with these apps is you’ll need to enter ingredients one by one.

At the very least, keep track of your calories. If you balance the lower fat feedings with higher fat ones, the fat percentage should take care of itself.

Menu
isn’t really the right word, since it suggests more than one dish at a time. You won’t be doing that on a Fat Fast. You’ll be eating
only
a handful of nuts, or a cup of coffee with cream, or a couple of stuffed mushrooms, or a salad—just one food—at a time. You’ll then wait a few hours, until actual, physical hunger sets in, and eat another dish.

A daily menu might look like this:

·
     
7 am:
Caramel Coffee
(210 calories, 22 grams fat, 92.4% fat)

·
     
10 am: ¼ cup
Curried Pecans
(235 calories, 24 grams fat, 87.6% fat)

·
     
1 pm:
Sweet ‘n’ Tangy Macaroni Salad
(223 calories, 25 grams fat, 93.8% fat)

·
     
4 pm:
Spinach Salad
(215 calories, 21 grams fat, 85.9% fat)

·
     
7 pm: 1 cup
Curried Coconut Cream of Chicken Soup
(217 calories, 21 grams fat, 83.8% fat)

This comes to 1,100 calories. Calculating the exact fat percentage would be complex and tedious (and frankly, I’m not certain how to do it). However, you can be sure that it’s above 85% of calories—well within our Fat Fast parameters.

Very likely not. Within a day or two, Fat Fasting will induce a state of deep nutritional ketosis—in other words, your body will shift from running on glucose (sugar) to running on fat and ketones. The vast majority of the tissues in your body can run happily on fat and ketones, especially your brain. If you’ve beeHowyou’vn eating a low-carb diet, you should have no hitch. If you’ve never slashed carbs before, you may have a day or two of feeling tired and groggy until your body remembers how to run on the fat/ketone fuel mix instead of on the glucose you’ve been feeding it. (However, if you haven’t tried a low-carb diet, really, good old Atkins is the place to start, rather than this fairly radical protocol. Read
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
or
The New Atkins For a New You
, and get going!)

Here’s the cool thing: Ketones have a profound appetite-suppressant effect. You may be mildly hungry the first day or two, but after that you should be fine. Just space your feedings out, eating only when you feel physically hungry.

I’m not uncomfortably hungry when I Fat Fast. Harder, is getting over the tendency to eat just to eat—grab a handful of something as I’m walking through the kitchen, or sit down to dinner because the clock says it’s time. Most of us eat unconsciously, and there’s no room for that on a Fat Fast. After a day or two, though, I’m so un-hungry that even this doesn’t bother me much.

Honestly, the hardest part of Fat Fasting is getting up to 90% of calories per day from fat. Unless you like to eat straight butter, or can afford to eat nothing but macadamia nuts, it’s hard. It’s also hard to hit that 1,000 calorie mark exactly.