Carb Manager Question

Yes, you can search by macros.

go to ‘foods’ and just below the top menu bar (search, quick find, my foods, etc) you’ll see a search box.   Go to the far right of that box and you’ll see a small ‘v’.  Click that and it will show four options: calorie range, carb range, protein range, and fat range.  Just slide the bars under the particular item (or combination of items) and click the blue ‘filter results’ box.

if it’s easier, you can just search for ‘fat bombs’ in the basic search and that will also give you lots of recipe options that are high in fat.  Also, one tablespoon of butter has 0g carbs, 12g fat, and 0g protein.   Goes good with just about anything!

Hope this helps

Pat F  this is really helpful. I too struggle to manage macros without blowing past my proteins. I suspect my slow weight loss after 3 weeks may have to do with too much protein. I’ve not exceeded protein macro in 3 weeks and have done really well staying at 20-24 carbs so, in the absence of any other causes, I think I need more healthy fat bombs to speed up weight loss.

MC  a thought -

I’ve read a lot since starting this back in mid-Oct.  The less carbs we eat, the more fat we force our body to burn.  It’s a zero-sum game; less carbs to burn means more fat has to be burned.  And within fat, the body can burn either fat we eat or stored fat (again, think zero-sum game,  less of one requires more of the other).

You don't want to exceed your protein macros by too much or too often.  Excess proteins are converted to sugars and that’s just like excess carbs.  Proteins power muscles, organs, etc. so you don’t want to short them by too much or too often - bodily ‘systems’ start to degrade without sufficient proteins.  

So (I believe) the best way to generate weight loss is to cut back on carbs (we’re all different but as an example, I’m at 12g/day in order to keep my blood sugars down) and keep things at or just below proteins to properly power body systems.   As for fats, they’re not really a goal or objective.  Again, burning fats can include dietary fats, stored fats, or a combination of both.  Less fats eaten means more stored fats burned, particularly at the beginning when we might have more stored fats to burn.  As the weight comes off and the health improvements take place, you can up your dietary fats since there’s less stored fat to burn.

Last, a lot of folks want to take what I think is the quick way - still want their shakes, bagels, buns, cakes, etc.  Just because something is labeled ‘Keto’ (as is quite often the case out on Pinterest), it doesn’t mean that it is, only that somebody’s doing some clever (or nefarious) advertising.   My readings suggest it’s best to stick to ‘real’ foods: beef, chicken, fish, pork, with salads.  (I come to tell myself that ‘Keto junk food’ is still junk food.)

There are some great books out there, and I’d recommend ‘The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living’ by Drs Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney. They’re also on YouTube, and you can find their business at www.Virtahealth.com (I’m NOT a customer) where they have a plethora of medical case studies to back up what they say - either way, they can explain things very well and give all the medical science behind the scenes.

Hope this helps.

RBianca if I understand my readings, it would ‘disincentivize’ the body to burn fat stores, although perhaps it would just a little.  The fat macro is a limit.  The 70% mention (more directly, the number of grams of fat eaten daily) is the limit of fat the body needs to survive at a particular weight.   Let’s say, for example, it needs 100grams (nice easy number for me to do the math with).  Now, the body doesn’t care where there fat comes from, dietary or adipose.  It just needs to burn 100g/day (in our example) to ‘keep the lights on’.   10g dietary/90g adipose; 50g/50g split; 0g dietary and 100g adipose (starvation diet or complete fasting) - its all the same.  It’s going to burn 100g.

So if we cut back on our dietary fat, the body will have to make up the shortage by burning adipose fat.  Losing adipose fat is where a lot of the health benefits come from: less fat to pump blood through (lowering BP, heart stress, among other benefits), less stress on knees/back from having to lug around the extra weight (this really came home to me when we were in a feed store and I hoisted a 50-lbs bag of chicken feed (we keep chickens) and my wife said, ‘you know you just picked up all the weight you’ve lost.  Powerful moment to really see how much weight that was and to have to work to lift it) and more.

Likewise, if we eat too much fat (exceed 100g in our example), there’s less requirement for the body to burn any adipose fat.   The medical science gets a little detailed for me to follow with complete certainty, so I can’t say that the body never ever burns dietary fat, and I believe that it always burns at least a little).  But to me the practical results is: eating less fat drives the body to burn more stored fat.

Somewhat long winded, but I hope this helps.  

RBianca your question got me thinking so I did some more reading and have a clarification to add: 

from the Virtahealth website’s FAQ:  Is dietary fat burned before stored fat on a ketogenic diet?

‘Certain fats, like medium-chain triglycerides found in coconut or MCT oil cannot be stored in body fat, so whatever is consumed must be promptly burned for energy. This means that if you’re adding these fats on top of your dietary fat consumption for satiety, this type of fat takes priority.

For regular dietary fats, once they are digested, they enter the circulation and participate in what is called ‘fatty acid turnover.’ Whether fed or fasted, the body is always releasing, burning, and storing fat. When insulin is high, storage predominates, but turnover continues. When insulin is low, release and oxidation predominate. If you eat fat along with a lot of carbohydrates, it is prone to be stored. When fat is consumed in the context of a well formulated ketogenic diet, it—along with fat released from adipose stores—is prone to be burned. But once digested and absorbed, dietary fat and stored fat enter the ‘turnover pool’ and are in a constant state of mixing.’

It’s still zero-sum: our previous example of 100g/day Requirements.  The body will burn 100g’s, but if you ate 20g of fat, all you did was replace that amount, leaving you with a net loss of 80g.

hope this makes sense.