Is Too Much Butter Bad on Keto? Adding It For Workout Energy

One thing that is broadly misinterpreted by new dieters and the media is the fascination with fat intake. Most people on a ketogenic diet looking to lose weight need to manage their intake of dietary fats to ensure overall fat loss.

Unfortunately, the facts are still that to lose weight you must manage your caloric intake, there is a certain amount of fats for energy that must be eaten to maintain hormone levels but after that, there is no reason to over-consume.

Is too much butter bad on Keto Diets? The ketogenic diet limits your carbohydrate intake so your energy needs will have to come from your body’s fat stores or your fat intake. Many interpret this as a license to eat butter and fats, for those who are bigger though you need to limit your fats if you want to encourage body fat loss.

Lets cover some more of these answers and information in more detail to help you understand why butter isn’t an enemy but it isn’t the friend many take it to be also. Sometimes the devil is in the details, especially where diet and results are the topic.

Increase Happens Due To Less Saturated Fat Worry

Lets be brutally honest here, the largest increase happens because butter isn’t bastardized as are none of the saturated fats on a ketogenic diet. This opens up people to use butter in cooking and in recipes once again and to start making foods they haven’t had typically, due to worries over the saturated fats.

I know when I started the ketogenic way of life I had a markedly large increase in my butter consumption as I was told through reading that you could cook eggs and other things in butter without issue.

As time went on and weight was being lost I began to understand the concept helps people start but the extra calories add up and lead to eventual stalls.

Don’t Stress Out Over Saturated Fats

Saturated fats have been demonized to us for decades, unfortunately the reason for that demonization has slowly started to come to light over the information age.

Recently many documents from sugar industry leaders showed a strategic plan to make sugar look healthy by making fat look dangerous. These documents show how much money has played a part in our dietary history and how little your health has played into decision making.

Worry About Carbohydrate And Fat Intake Together

Much of the issues around fat intake center around the body and oxidation damage, the interesting thing about carbohydrates is that they are the cause of the oxidation in our body in most cases.

Oxidation isn’t the only issue though as a high carbohydrate intake means you will shunt all fat into storage as your body is a smart survival tool.

Carbohydrate intake keeps insulin higher than normal, please note you always have insulin in your body, carbohydrates don’t make it appear.

While insulin is higher the body is forced into using the carbohydrates to maintain a blood sugar level that will not kill you, but the opposite problem begins which is the cells aren’t open and available for fat to be processed into ketones for energy.

Butter Is Not A Carbohydrate

This is the mentality of many keto diet followers, that somehow calories don’t matter as long as they don’t come from carbohydrates. This is also why we need to lead a charge as to when attempting weight loss adding calories isn’t the way to a successful attempt.

Butter is a very good saturated fat overall for consuming, when and if, your overall body fat is low. If you have a low body fat you will need to consume more fat as there will be less available from your body to be utilized.

Once again, the devil is in the details, when attempting to lose weight versus maintain or gain you have to vary the food input. You can’t magically overeat foods and lose weight, that is not how any of this works.

Forgetting To Understand That Calories Matter

In the end the total caloric input will determine your success, it is next to impossible to understand all the output of energy your body creates but you are able to manage the input.

So many times people say “I’m eating at a deficit but not losing weight”. This means you AREN’T eating at the deficit you THINK you are, the online calculators are an approximation, not some god-given perfect value.

What I would suggest is measuring and tracking over a week and using that to evaluate your caloric intake versus loss or gain. If over the week you had about a 1500 calorie deficit you will have lost around a half a pound. If you lost more then this your deficit was greater, if you lost less then you had a lower deficit.

Use this information to readjust for the next week whether its adding or removing calories, then check again at the end of the week to see progress and adjust again until you are pretty close to YOUR personal number.

Butter Chugging Ketogenic Diets

The butter chugger movement is very large in the ketosphere due to the fact that the macronutrients are listed as, typically, 70% fat. This leads people to the thought that they need to get their calories and macros and then actually consume 70% dietary fat each day.

A traditional medical ketogenic diet was incredibly high in fat to treat issues with epilepsy, this had a side effect of causing weight loss also. My issue with this weight loss is that it is more a loss of lean mass and fat mass, as you lose the lean mass though you lower your BMR which then causes you to need to eat less to get the same results.

I believe in my reading and learning that the so-called “starvation mode” where you use fewer and fewer calories is due to the underlining condition of loss of lean body mass overall. The loss in lean mass means fewer calories burned while idle, lowering protein intake can cause catastrophic issues down the road.

Reasons Why Butter Chugging Yields Poor Results

As I stated above, I believe minimizing your overall protein intake will cause you a slow but continuous lean muscle bleed off. While you don’t drop BMR instantaneously it is a demon in the background.

Once you lose a certain amount then the “way I did it doesn’t work anymore” is encountered, as the weight loss plateaus.

Then the next step as always is to lower the calories yet again to “kick start” weight loss once again, unfortunately, this now leads to more lean mass loss and an eventual plateau yet again.

Slowly but surely this decreases your caloric intake and increasing causes more issues and stopping you from getting where you really wanted to go.

Convert To Nutritional Ketosis Model

Instead of living the butter life, with high fat, and bad results, I suggest you choose the nutritional ketosis model to garner the results you want with proper strategy instead of marketing.

This means losing out of “fat bombs”, losing out on the mass amounts of butter and oils, but gaining results and looking your best.

If you would like to learn more about nutritional ketosis then check out our article surrounding it here. This will make you understand why you need to change your ideas and trade in dogma of the public for quality results.

Final Thoughts on Is Too Much Butter Bad on Keto

No one way of a ketogenic diet is “right” or the correct one for your life. Please make sure to take into considerations your personal goals and wanted results.

If you don’t set these upfront you could find that you lost no or little weight and that it may be a large part of your muscle and lean mass that was lost.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t avoid butter but it is in a measurable and useful manner, I don’t add it to coffee and other foods as it doesn’t cause “fat loss” or “weight loss” in any fashion. Old reliable calories when being managed will provide weight loss and all the benefits you are looking to achieve.

Please like and share this with friends and people who you know are on a ketogenic diet or looking into making the jump so they get smart information first!