So you’ve committed to the keto diet, so one of the first things you’ll want to do is calculate your calories and macros (fat, carbs, protein). To help with the math, you’ll want to use a macro calculator. I personally like the Keto Calculator which was created by a /r/keto community user on Reddit.
Step 1 – Enter Personal Data
This is where you enter your sex, weight, height and age. Now, here’s something for us lipedema ladies to take into consideration. What do we enter for our weight? Do we enter our weight, as it is on the scale today? Or do we enter the weight we’d be if you could take all of the lipedema fat off your body (or what you’d weigh post liposuction if you’re planning it)?
I’ve personally found that it’s better to try to estimate what you’d weigh without the lipedema fat since it’s not metabolically active. We do burn a little bit of extra energy hauling around the extra weight, but it’s not massive. Maybe a handful of extra calories an hour. In the course of the day, not too dramatic.
Step 2 – Determine Your Energy Expenditure
With these calculators, it’s ALWAYS better to enter sedentary. Even if you have a stand up job, even if you walk all the time at work or work out 5x a week, enter sedentary. Then if you’re massively working out, or if you’re losing too fast, you can up your calories by a hundred or two calories.
Step 3 – Enter Your Body Fat Percent
Again, you might want to try to estimate what your body fat percent is without the lipedema fat. This of course is just an estimate and if you guess too low you can always up it later.
Step 4 – How Many Carbs Can I Eat
Remember,want to be in ketosis. If you only eat 20g of net carbs a day, you’re guaranteed to get into ketosis relatively quickly (3-4 days). Some people can get into ketosis and up upwards of 60-70g of net carbs.
If this is your first time trying keto, I highly suggest for the first 2-4 weeks you stick at 20g. At about 4 weeks (sadly it could be closer to 6-8 for some people) when you’re adapted to keto, then you can start playing with your net grams and redo this whole calculation.
Step 5 – How Much Protein?
The rule of thumb is .8 grams per KG or .3 per pound of body weight. This is for those of you who don’t exercise and truly are sedentary. However, if you exercise regularly, you might want to bump that up to 1g per kg of body weight or .5g per pound.
This is the thing you have to keep in mind, keto is a moderate protein diet. Unless you’re really pounding the weights, you don’t have to eat gobs and gobs of protein on the keto diet. And, eating too much protein can be bad. Either the excess will be turned into sugar (not exactly ideal on a keto diet) or kidney problems. However, don’t let this scare you! The keto diet isn’t a high protein diet, it’s moderate and unless you’re into body building, aiming for around 70-80g of protein a day will more than likely be more than sufficient to keep your muscle intact and hunger at bay.
Step 6 – How Much Fat?
I know that this is probably going to be a tough one to digest (sometimes literally) since you probably grew up with “low fat” being drummed into your head. Well, try to forget that because the keto diet is a high fat diet and you’re looking at over 100g of fat per day.
So how much fat? Well, if you’re using the keto calculator, you just choose the deficit you want and the calculator will add the remaining amount of calories as fat calories. You’ll want to play around with it a bit but chances are if you’re about 5’5 then you’ll be good at around 1800 calories a day. If you’re 5 foot, then you’ll probably want to end up somewhere around 1200-1300 calories. As I said before, you can play with the deficit percentage to land yourself into the calorie range that you want.
Thoughts About Calorie Range
Yea, you probably thought having to keep track of calories was a thing of the past. Nope, CICO (calories in calories out) still applies, even with lipedema. If you eat more than you burn, your body is just going to produce normal fat.
What I have done, and it’s been a process of trial of error that has taken well over 6 months, is find out my maintenance level. This is where you neither gain or lose weight, you just stay the same. Once I found this, I put myself at a deficit of about 200 calories. This way if I accidentally miscalculate, I’m not going over my maintenance.
I also tend not to eat back the calories I burn (I wear a heart rate monitor with chest strap as it’s more accurate than machines, but that’s a whole different conversation) unless I’m starving.
Tracking Your Calories and Macros
I’ll make a whole post dedicated to this, but you’ll want to find some sort of program to track your daily calories and macros (this does mean you need to weigh and track your food). A lot of people in the keto community just use My Fitness Pal (MFP for short), I use the PC version of Fitday (they also have a web based) and there are macro tracking programs that I haven’t heard of and haven’t tested out.
And that’s it! Once you have this all figured out, you just need to eat low carb food and remember that carbs are a limit, protein is a goal and fat is as needed to fill you up!
PetraAnn
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