Ketogenic Athlete Study page 4

[Leida]

You know what's scary? They did hard-core training for 30 hours a week, they were presumably males, so they ate a tiny amount of calories compared to the 'normal' estimators, and they barely lost 3 lbs in a month (or was it 15 days?)

Here goes to everyone who recommends the smaller pretty much sedentary (compared to 30 hours a week!!!) females that they need to eat MORE! to lose weight, and go 'omg, 1200 or 1300 is NOT ENOUGH! look at the calculator!) I mean, calculator return that many calories for someone who does an hour or so exercise a day at far less intensity.

What follows is that the amount of calories we have to eat is much lower, not higher....

[MarissaLinnea]

Or, you could just mix a few table spoons of lemon juice in water and drink it. Another way to get some potassium.

[pklopp]

Sorry folks, but I haven't read through the entire thread, although I did download the paper and will have at it later.

I've done ketogenic diets, I've peed on test strips, even did blood tests for ketones, since the test strips only measure aceto acetate, not beta hydroxy butyrate which is the predominant ketone produced by the body.

Now, can someone please explain to me why I would seek to be in ketosis? I'm not particularly interested in hearing about the physiology of glucose vs. fat metabolism. I'm also not interested in hearing satiety arguments, because that implies that satiety is somehow predicated on ketosis, which it is clearly not.

I'm more interested in knowing why or whether we would expect different results from nominally isocaloric diets where one was non-ketogenic, while the other was. I would also allow for ketotic adaptation to have occurred for the ketogenic diet.

I'll kick things off with one pro of this diet : if I were a hyper-competitive athlete, the water weight that I would shed might be an advantage, unless my sport required mass ( e.g. football lineman ), assuming, of course, that muscular performance would be unaffected, as the study seems to suggest.

-PK

[MarissaLinnea]

I read this last night. This guy had some really interesting results athletically after being in a ketonic state:

My Personal Nutrition Journey « The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D. The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D.

[Neckhammer]

You know what's scary? They did hard-core training for 30 hours a week, they were presumably males, so they ate a tiny amount of calories compared to the 'normal' estimators, and they barely lost 3 lbs in a month (or was it 15 days?)

Here goes to everyone who recommends the smaller pretty much sedentary (compared to 30 hours a week!!!) females that they need to eat MORE! to lose weight, and go 'omg, 1200 or 1300 is NOT ENOUGH! look at the calculator!) I mean, calculator return that many calories for someone who does an hour or so exercise a day at far less intensity.

What follows is that the amount of calories we have to eat is much lower, not higher....

Yes these already lean elite athletes lost only 3 lbs of almost pure fat without lean tissue loss and without consciously restricting calories. I think thats pretty damn good actually.

[Gorbag]

You know what's scary? They did hard-core training for 30 hours a week, they were presumably males, so they ate a tiny amount of calories compared to the 'normal' estimators, and they barely lost 3 lbs in a month (or was it 15 days?)

He,he, more than 4 hours intense training 7 days of week on a 2000 kcal diet and only 3 lbs lost in a month??? Something seem to be absurd in that study...

[otzi]

He,he, more than 4 hours intense training 7 days of week on a 2000 kcal diet and only 3 lbs lost in a month??? Something seem to be absurd in that study...

If you look closely, they ate 300kcal per day less for 30 days and lost 3lbs. So 9000kcal reduction resulted in 3lbs loss...whodathunkit?

[pklopp]

I read this last night. This guy had some really interesting results athletically after being in a ketonic state:

My Personal Nutrition Journey « The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D. The Eating Academy | Peter Attia, M.D.

He did, but he engaged in predominantly oxidative metabolism activities ... i.e. he flexed his mitochondria hard. Mitochondria prefer to metabolize fatty acids hands down because the energy yield is several times that of glucose. So this is hardly a surprise. Because he was in ketosis and reliant upon FFA oxidation not glycolysis, I would also expect that his lactate production would decrease overall, as lactate is produced from excess pyruvate accumulation, pyruvate being the end product of glycolysis. So, nothing to see here, metabolism 101.

What would surprise me is if he were to engage in predominantly glycolytic activities and were to experience no degradation in performance. This would require activities that called upon fast twitch muscle fibers, which are predominantly glycolytic and white in color because they lack myoglobin, the muscular oxygen transporter. They lack myoglobin precisely because they are independent of oxygen for their function.

If you're in the wild and need to leap across a chasm to save your life, it should matter very little if you're sucking wind or not, because you simply cannot wait around to catch your breath while the predator that intends to make a nice snack of you bears down upon you. With that said, if he were an Olympic weightlifter, a highly explosive sport if ever there was one, and his performance were to be equivalent while in ketosis to his non-ketotic self, then you could truly colour me impressed!

-PK

[Gorbag]

If you look closely, they ate 300kcal per day less for 30 days and lost 3lbs. So 9000kcal reduction resulted in 3lbs loss...whodathunkit?

But I still find it absurd that elite gymnasts that train hard for more than 4 hours per day, 7 days a week, (!) are doing this on more and less 2000 kcal/day, and still only loses 3 lbs in 30 days? Maybe they were Dwarf athletes then...

"The percentage distribution of total daily energy macronutrients was 54.8% fat, 40.7% protein and 4.5% carbohydrates. The total amount of daily kilojoules was 8254.5 ± 1136. During the WD period the macronutrients were distributed in the following order: 46.8% carbohydrate, 38.5% lipids, 14.7% protein. The Western diet provided a total daily kJ 9520.7 ± 1080.71."

[Leida]

They are gymnasts, so presumably they are smaller males to start with, and already very lean (we are talking under 10%). Still that experience closely mimics what a lot of females experienced trying to 'lose the last 10 lbs'. While most of us do not have the luxury of training 4 hours a day, and we will likely keel over and die at the peak intensities like that by day 4, the common-place advice of 'eat more' is incorrect in the view of this study. Basically, you gotta starve creating huge caloric deficits to lose weight when you are lean. OR the caloric estimators need to slim down and stop spitting out the numbers in the 1800-2000 cals range for an average Jane who works out 5-7 days a week.