Not losing fat on Keto/Carnivore? Try eating less protein.

Common keto/carnivore diets are extremely high in protein - that may be fine for some, but probably isn't fine for everyone.

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The Sacred Macro

Note: this article focuses on keto/carnivore diets. It might not apply to you if you don’t do one of those diets, and might therefore not be interesting.

If there is one thing that almost everybody can agree on, it’s that Moar Protein Moar Better.

Ever since the 1996 book Protein Power, one thing’s been clear to everybody but vegans: Protein is King.

Honestly, I suspect that the name is largely a result of everybody still being scared to death of saturated fats. Had they called the book Fat Power, or Suet Power, or Cream Power, nobody would’ve bought it. People were still too scared of fat to even consider the idea.

(If you want to get a kick, read the criticism on the Wiki page for Protein Power. Too much protein might give you ketosis, and even bad breath!)

At the time, the Eades’ were up against some really bad science, some really bad institutional “knowledge,” and they had to pick their battles.

But we’ve largely overcome the stigma against protein now, and I fear that keto and carnivore have capsized the boat in the other direction.

Protein? Protein’s good, right? Something with muscles?

Extricating the Infant with the Soapy Residue

The suggestion that moderating protein by any amount could be a positive thing is seen as blasphemy, even dangerous.

Don’t believe me?

Drama tweet is dramatic.

In which I apparently endanger Tweeterers

In the image, a Tweeterer is chastising me and using me as a bad example. Why? For telling somebody that lowering protein from more than 1.38g/lb of body weight to a mere 0.82g/lb of body weight is fine. For reference, studies show no benefit of more than 0.64g/lb of body weight for even professional bodybuilders, including those cutting for contest, with a safety margin of up to 0.82g/lb of body weight.

Maybe the person asking the question was a professional bodybuilder in contest prep and just forgot to mention that fact, but probably not. So cutting down to the level of such a bodybuilder is almost certainly totally fine.

But no, any suggestion that protein intake should be lowered is sacrilege.

Crazy, right? Eating <30g of protein per day for most of 6 months? At this point it’s been 8 months of mostly that little protein, and not only am I still alive, I’ve lost over 50lbs and my blood markers are largely great.

Yes, I’m a bit low on a handful of things that eating more red meat would definitely solve, like B vitamins. But after 8 months of criminally low protein, that’s still nothing even close to dangerous and can be fixed with a simple supplement. Or, of course, somebody could eat super low protein for a half a year and then just switch back to get all the nutrients again.

In which I apparently endanger Redditists

Besides that dangerous tweet, I was banned from r/keto for reporting about my diet, with the mod calling me “dangerous” for its low protein content. The original ketogenic diet is, of course, 90% of calories from fat, leaving practically no room for protein.

But “internet keto” really is an extremely-high-protein diet, and carnivore typically even more so, since many low/moderate protein, but high fat foods, like dark chocolate, dairy, coconut, and avocado are removed.

Eat Insane Amounts of Protein Just Short of Rabbit Starvation

The common carnivore advice to “eat fatty meats to satiety” almost necessarily leads to a diet extremely high in protein.

Ribeye steak, the cut of meat most typically recommended and preferred by modern day carnivores, has between 75-150g of protein per 1,000kcal, depending on the source and fat levels. 80% ground beef has up to 150g per 1,000kcal. That means eating these meat to satiety, eating roughly my TDEE of 3,200kcal/day, will yield 240-480g of protein per day.

That is an insane amount of protein. And that’s if you always eat all the fat on the ribeye, and eat all the fat rendered out during the cooking process.

In percentages, that would be 30-60% of energy from protein. It is widely acknowledged that consuming more than 35% of calories from protein can lead to health problems, with many recommendations capping out at 25%. It is thought that more than 35% of energy from protein can lower testosterone and increase cortisol. There is a Wikipedia page for Protein poisoning.

Early side effects of overeating protein include nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue. It can eventually lead to death.

“But nobody is eating that much protein!”

350g of protein is 40% of 3,500kcal, and is enough to support a 580lbs bodybuilder. No, there aren’t 580lbs bodybuilders.

Aren’t they, though? If you hang out in keto/carnivore communities long enough, you’ll hear the recommendations to newbies over and over. “Eat fatty meats to satiety!”

When people ask which cuts they should buy, they’re recommended ribeyes and fatty ground beef. Many people even recommend going higher protein and lower fat if you want to lose weight on these diets, and staying with sirloin and other, leaner cuts.

That might be great if you’re 7ft tall and lift a million pounds. But for a normal, overweight, somewhat sedentary person, that’s a pretty bad recommendation.

It can work, of course. Not everybody who eats ribeyes gets rabbit starvation. But a ton of people aren’t losing any weight on keto/carnivore, and the answer is usually to do it harder. Cut out that last bit of dairy! What, you’re still eating green vegetables? Worst of all, the recommendation to stay away from fat and eat leaner cuts for a while, because calories, you know.

Now, if that works for somebody, I’m not knocking it. But it’s not working for a large percentage of people. I don’t have official statistics, and I doubt anybody does.

But intuitively, from hanging around these communities for the better part of a decade, I’d say that 20-35% of people on Reddit-keto or carnivore aren’t losing much fat if any.

Many report that “eating fatty red meat to satiety” doesn’t work for them, because they never reach satiety. The meat leaves them ravenous. They are often advised to go even higher in protein, and lower in fat.

And when I suggest the possibility that eating 160-180g of protein per day as a regular sized woman might be a bit high, people lose their minds. According to Menno Henselmans, well-known bodybuilder and science nerd, that amount of protein is enough for a bodybuilder weighing between 250-280lbs, cutting for a contest.

Drama drama drama!

Remember, 35% is on the border to the official threshold for protein poisoning. Yea, yea, she’s not dead. But she was complaining about an elevated HbA1c, so maybe let’s at least consider the idea that eating bodybuilder-level protein is a bit much?

Just because vegans complain about animal protein doesn’t mean the optimal level is infinity.

What if the vegans are right about something?
What if there’s such a thing as too much protein?

The Experts Are Saying

In one instance I even had renowned keto expert Stephen Phinney quoted against me, as if Phinney is recommending these high protein levels.

But what does the author (with Jeff Volek) of The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living actually suggest?

The recommendation in the book is 0.6-1.0g protein/lb of LEAN BODY MASS. Not total body mass, lean body mass.

That means that with my 150lb of lean body mass as a 6’1 male I should be eating between 90-150g of protein per day. Since I’m not very active and don’t lift weights at all, I should probably aim for the lower end.

You can get your actual lean body mass via DEXA scan, but Phinney also provides a (somewhat confusing) reference table in this post: How much Protein do you need in Nutritional Ketosis? His recommendations here are confusing because the talks about “reference weight,” a weight considered ideal for a given height, and “ounces of protein,” which are pieces of meat, not actual protein. But the results are roughly the same: a 6’1 man has a “reference weight” of 160-174lbs, and Phinney ends up recommending 87-158g of protein per day for such a man.

Probably at most 1lb of red meat.

But a pound of fatty red meat only has maybe 1,000kcal, where am I going to get the rest of my energy? With a total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) of 3,200kcal and a resting metabolic rate (RMR) of 2,300kcal, I’m out of 1,000-2,000kcal, depending on if I’m currently losing weight.

Keto AF / heavy cream diet / actual ketogenic diet

Should one be in the unfortunate position of being unable to eat endless amounts of ribeyes, there is hope.

Various people have come up with crazy ideas that allow them to eat a keto or carnivore diet that actually meets the protein levels suggested by Phinney or Henselmans.

The one thing these have in common is that they seem shockingly high in fat even to people very familiar with an internet-keto or carnivore diet.

Eat Meat. Not too Little. Mostly Fat.

Amber O’Hearn of the appropriately-named mostly-fat.com has coined the term Keto AF. (AF stands for Animal Fat, of course.)

Amber herself recommends people who get into carnivore simply eat “fatty cuts to satiety,” just like the common mantra. In fact, I’m thinking she might’ve coined that phrase.

But if you follow her on Twitter, you’ll soon realize that she recommends a lower-protein/higher-fat approach to a large percentage of people who found that eating too much protein doesn’t work for them.

Amber still recommends a carnivore-style diet of only meat and animal fat, including beef trimmings and suet, which is the fat found around the cow’s kidneys.

The idea of adding beef trimmings and pieces of solid beef fat seems foreign to you? But something similar to that is required if you want to do carnivore with non-insane protein.

Some Keto AF carnivores do actually eat pure beef trimmings or suet.

Is this “eat fatty meat to satiety?” Maybe. But it’s probably not what most people imagine when they get into carnivore.

Pictured is a typical meal posted by cambridge_pt on Twitter (with generous permission to use his photo). He let me know that he, personally, does fine on very high protein, but he mostly eats moderate-protein/high-fat these days:

cambridge_pt:
I’m often attracted to extremes, either all-in or not at all and I’d done the protein end of the spectrum comprehensively!

I felt great, but satiety meant very high food volumes. I could eat 3kg of beef mince in a day sometimes. I went very low fat at one point, eating mussels, white fish and very lean beef to hit 350-500g/day protein. It was a very expensive way to run a glucose based metabolism.

Carbs weren’t an option, but energy from fat was and so I swang wildly to todays other extreme ;-)

Can I add butter instead of eating pure beef fat?

Adding butter to your ribeyes works, but it would take A LOT of butter. Remember, as a 6’1, sedentary male with a 3,200kcal TDEE, to get “adequate” protein, I would be eating about 1 ribeye per day for about 1,000kcal. Do I then eat a whole brick (225g/half pound) of delicious, golden Kerrygold butter to get the other 2,000kcal? Do you put a whole brick of butter on your steak every time?

Heavy Cream to the Rescue

Maybe I would eventually acquire a taste for eating a whole brick of butter with my meat. I do enjoy butter, but currently can’t eat more than a slice or two at a time before I become nauseated.

But I find that heavy cream is uniquely tolerable in high amounts, at least for me. Whipping it gives a dessert like texture. You can put it in the freezer for a sort of ice cream. Heavy cream in coffee makes the coffee taste better. You can even slightly whip it into a milkshake consistency. With gelatin, it becomes a pudding.

In a sense, then, ex150 is almost Keto AF but with the majority of energy added as whipped cream, and cream in coffee. While I am not 100% carnivore, the only difference is 60g of green vegetables and tomato sauce.

The Low-Carber’s Dilemma

At the end of the day, we’ve cut out one entire macro-nutrient, and of the remaining 2, one is limited to about 35% of energy intake. That means we have to get at least 65% of our energy from fat. Probably quite a bit more, unless we’re very active weight lifters or bodybuilders.

Ever since the agricultural revolution, most people have gotten the majority of their energy from carbohydrates.

Going low-carb/keto/carnivore throws us back to the hunter gatherer days, and reports of the eskimos tell us many of them dip their strips of meat into boiling seal blubber, and other extremely fatty parts of the animals are consumed.

To achieve those levels of fat, we can’t stick to mainstream, contemporary ideas of what a plate of food looks like. The average person gets about 50% of their energy from carbs, and we’ll have to fill that half of the plate with fat, preferably saturated and maybe monounsaturated in a reasonable ratio.

What are the negative effects of over-consuming protein?

To my knowledge, no carnivore has died of excess protein lately. But there are definite, measurable effects.

For one, many people on carnivore complain about elevated blood sugar. I wear a CGM for fun, and I can definitely tell you that eating high protein for a while keeps my average blood glucose elevated - for weeks.

It’s not an instant spike in direct reaction to a meal, like with carbs. But on a “normal to high” protein keto diet, not even full carnivore, my glucose would consistently be in the high 90s, often hovering just under 100. Over 100 mg/dL fasting glucose is considered pre-diabetic.

Many other carnivores or ketoers complain of the same thing - if I’m eating almost no carbs, why is my fasting glucose so high?

Why, indeed.

A common argument against this is that gluconeogenesis, the body’s ability to generate glucose from protein, is demand driven, and doesn’t kick in unless the body needs that glucose.

That’s cool, but then how are carnivores pre-diabetic eating zero carbs? Clearly, something is happening. You can of course claim that being slightly pre-diabetic on a carnivore or keto diet isn’t actually bad, but it wouldn’t be weird to be slightly skeptical and worried.

Is high fasting glucose on a high-protein diet connected to not being able to lose weight?

I would say it’s not entirely clear, but at least in some, that seems to be the case. Diet experimentation led me to a super-low-protein diet for weight loss, after all.

There are also various studies on the topic, and, interestingly, it seems that the 3 BCAAs (branch chain amino acids), or even specifically the amino acid isoleucine, are implicated.

BCAAs associated with diabetes and obesity

Uncovering how low-protein diets might reprogram metabolism

BCAAs are associated with obesity and diabetes (in mice and humans), and if you cut out the BCAAs from a protein diet in mice, the mice lose weight. So it seems to be the case that not all protein is obesogenic, but BCAAs are.

They have discovered a little-known but robust pattern across both animal models and humans. Diets high in the three branched chain amino acids, BCAAs, are associated with diabetes, obesity and other metabolic illnesses. Conversely, diets low in BCAAs can counter these metabolic ailments and even extend the healthy lifespan of rodents.

It’s not yet entirely clear just how BCAAs control metabolism, although restricting them seems to encourage faster metabolisms and healthier blood sugar control. And due to the immense complexity of diet-related research in humans, the full effects of BCAA restriction in people aren’t yet known.

Is it just isoleucine and a bit of valine?

The adverse metabolic effects of branched-chain amino acids are mediated by isoleucine and valine (in mice)

There are three Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs): leucine, valine, and isoleucine. This paper constructed various diets missing each specific one. They found that isoleucine is the biggest culprit, and valine has a modest effect. Leucine didn’t seem to produce the obesogenic effect at all.

Low-protein diets promote metabolic health in rodents and humans, and the benefits of low-protein diets are recapitulated by specifically reducing dietary levels of the three branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Here, we demonstrate that each BCAA has distinct metabolic effects. A low isoleucine diet reprograms liver and adipose metabolism, increasing hepatic insulin sensitivity and ketogenesis and increasing energy expenditure, activating the FGF21-UCP1 axis. Reducing valine induces similar but more modest metabolic effects, whereas these effects are absent with low leucine.

Protein restriction works in controlled human trials

Decreased Consumption of Branched-Chain Amino Acids Improves Metabolic Health

Protein-restricted (PR), high-carbohydrate diets improve metabolic health in rodents, yet the precise dietary components that are responsible for these effects have not been identified. Furthermore, the applicability of these studies to humans is unclear. Here, we demonstrate in a randomized controlled trial that a moderate PR diet also improves markers of metabolic health in humans. Intriguingly, we find that feeding mice a diet specifically reduced in branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) is sufficient to improve glucose tolerance and body composition equivalently to a PR diet via metabolically distinct pathways.

Mice! It’s all mice!

No it’s not. They tried it in humans. And, after years of experimentation, I settled on a low-protein ketogenic diet to lose 50lbs. Coincidence?

While certainly not all findings translate from mice to humans (e.g. mice are naturally herbivores, unlike us), the effect is reproduced in humans, and fits many anecdotes from the keto and carnivore community. The part about BCAAs or even just isoleucine specifically is interesting, and I wonder if that translates to humans as well.

It seems that some people react badly to excess protein or BCAAs. Elevated blood sugar, obesity, diabetes.

Now, is that genetic? Or are these people in some sort of metabolic state or context that could change, at which point they could enjoy infinite ribeyes?

Some people, like Brad of Fire in a Bottle, think that BCAAs are part of an evolutionary signal that tells the body to save energy and fatten up for the winter, akin to a bear preparing for hibernation.

While his theory seems to make sense, I’m often skeptical of evolutionary biology claims like that. Sometimes there’s no evolutionary reason for something. Sometimes, stuff’s just broken.

But if we know that low protein is a button, we can try pushing it.

I think that’s my only claim here, which doesn’t seem that crazy:

If you can’t seem to lose any weight eating high protein, maybe try eating lower protein. Especially if you have elevated blood glucose on a zero-carb diet.

Irrational attachment to infinite protein

In summary:

• There are zero known benefits of more protein after 0.64g/lb of lean body weight, or 0.82g/lb with an extra buffer just in case. Even for professional bodybuilders.

• The naive carnivore recommendation of “eat fatty meat to satiety” leads beginners to vastly overeat protein vs. fat.

• Many people eat protein amounts more adequate for 300lbs professional bodybuilders on a lot of dope.

• The keto experts recommend protein amounts that are mere fractions of what many people routinely eat.

• Many ketoers/carnivores on a high-protein diet routinely have pre-diabetic fasting glucose of >100mg/dL.

• A large percentage of people can’t seem to lose weight despite going high-protein keto or even carnivore. Are these the same people with the high average glucose?

• Any suggestion that there might be an upper limit to optimal protein intake is immediately and reflexively rationalized away.

I just think this is terribly irrational. If high protein works for someone, great. If not, try moderate or even low protein. Your muscles aren’t going to fall off in a few weeks.