I saw this post on Facebook yesterday from David Perlmutter MD and I thought I’d add some perspective to it.

Why?  Because, at first glance, it seems insane!  Especially when you think about the past 40 years of fat phobic misinformation that we’ve had rammed down our throats.  I can just hear you now – “You want me to eat 80-90% fat!!!  You’ve got to be nuts!!!!  That would be disgusting!!!!”

So let’s dissect this and see if we can make more sense of it.

Let’s work with a 2000 calorie high carb low fat diet.   The first thing you’ll start to notice, as you shift to a low carb high fat or LCHF Ketogenic diet is that you’ll eat less because of two major hormones that you’ll be more sensitive to.  Improved Leptin sensitivity will reduce how hungry you are and improved insulin sensitivity will stop locking away everything you eat into your fat stores and stop barring your access to them, which in turn will also make you less hungry.  So now let’s say you’re only eating 1600 calories.

So 80% of 1600 calories as fat is 1280 calories or 142gms of fat in the day.

A good rule of thumb on an LCHF Ketogenic Diet is to have

5% carbohydrates , which is 80 calories or 20 gms.

15% protein, which is  240 calories or 60 gms.

Those figures aren’t set in stone but they’re a good place to start.   To make the math easier, let’s divide that by 3 for 3 meals a day.

This brings the per meal amounts to:

47 gms fat = 47mls or basically 3 Tablespoons

7 gms carbohydrate CHO

20 gms of protein

We’ll disregard snacks for ease of math.  It’s likely on 3 meals like this a day that you may not snack anyway.   Sometimes I’ll just have 2 meals a day plus snacks.

So what does that look like in a real meal?

Let’s take breakfast.  Here’s my breakfast this morning.

2 eggs = 10gms of fat and 12gms of protein

2 small slices of bacon, 30gms each =  59 gms of fat and 1 gm of protein (surprising but that’s what it says – bacon nutritional content )

1 teaspoon of lard or beef fat = 5gms of fat for frying.

1 & 1/2 cups of cooked above ground veggies = approximately 8 gms of CHO and 4 gms of protein

SO we have:

Fat:   74 gms = 666 calories = 87%

Protein:  17 gms = 68 calories = 9%

Carbohydrates CHO: 8 gms = 32 calories = 4%

The bacon made this a higher fat meal.  You could have used salmon or another egg and have a little less fat and a little more protein.   But I think you can see the point.  80-90% fat is simple, easy and enjoyable:)!  

Let’s know if this was useful in the comments box below.  I love hearing from people.

p.s.  remember the salt.  You’ll need to make sure you’re getting at least a teaspoon a day.

Update April 2015

As much as I love bacon and people like Prof Tim Noakes and Nina Teicholz state that the science is not proven that nitrates and nitrites are bad for you, there are other people like Dr Joel Wallach, who has been on the right side of the butter argument for 40 years that says that they are definitely not good for you.  So, over to you to decide on that one.  Then there is the issue of frying.  Butter when it goes brown is being oxidised so I fry in lard or some other animal fat.

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