The Goal of KetoAF

(Old material modified from the Facebook group -- see KetoAF: not what you think! for an index of the Facebook posts.)

The goal of KetoAF is to arrive at eating to satiation where your body is deriving its energy as much as possible from fat, and as little as possible from protein, ideally without having to track anything, but relying solely on your hunger signals.

When one overeats protein, the metabolism responds by using protein as energy, even if there is enough fat available. Because the body can only incorporate so much protein, the remainder must be metabolised. This means that simply matching fat at 2:1 (or 80% — see the macros post) can sometimes simply result in the fat being stored instead of used.

This protein burning can put us in a vicious cycle, because the metabolic state (regulated by hormones) that uses high protein levels is more glucose dependent than fat dependent. It's less ketogenic as a byproduct of that. So it then predisposes you to use incoming protein as energy.

The way to break the cycle is to lower daily protein and provide enough fat to manipulate the regulating hormones into the fat prioritising mode.
However, initially this would mean you have to actually limit protein to below what you might be inclined to eat. Likewise, especially if you have difficulty using your own fat for energy (more on that elsewhere) you may need to eat more fat than you're used to eating.

This process can be like an additional keto-adaptation where you may crave more protein for a few days as your hormones adjust. And the additional fat may require digestive adjustment.

A good initial guess for how low to go in protein is described in the "macros" post. In that post I also briefly describe the "fat-first" method, which seems for many to work to get the right metabolic state at the meal level, literally by eating fat first until you reach "fat satiation".

Exactly how much protein you need and can tolerate and how much added fat you need is an individual, empirical question, and that's why it's important to eventually move to eating to satiation, which should normally be a very good indicator of needs, so long as protein hasn't overwhelmed the system out of the ketogenic state.

The ultimate goal of KetoAF is to be able to eat intuitively at ketogenic levels.