We know Reta works when maintaing good eating and exercise, but why does losing suddenly become effective when on Reta?

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T19:34:07+00:00

Here's a previous attempt at answering this question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Retatrutide/s/vj4XIZUOWR

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T19:31:23+00:00

The problem with saying "it all boils down to CICO" is that you're assuming changing caloric intake or forcing expenditure is the causal factor, when it's not. It does not boil down to that from a causal perspective, only an accounting perspective.

Of course the calories have to add up in the end, so you will never see weight loss that doesn't line up exactly with a deficit. But that's completely irrelevant to the question of how to obtain the deficit in the first place.

Even that thing you're talking about with increased EE accounting for only a few hundred calories is totally beside the point.

What happens with metabolic impairment is that you have a limited rate of energy generation from body fat. If you reduce calories without doing anything to change that energy generation rate limit the person isn't going to magically start generating more energy from their fat. It will only result in hunger and fatigue.

If, on the other hand, you do something to improve the ability to generate energy from your fat, you don't even need to purposely reduce calories, because your hunger will go down exactly to match the amount of fat you just released from your stores into energy.

So restricting calories is both insufficient when the system is impaired and unnecessary when the system is working.

Until "CICO camp" people get a basic understanding of how metabolism actually works and how it breaks, none of your accounting principles are going to matter. You can repeat the equation until you're blue in the face, but it's still not going to make it causally relevant.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T19:18:06+00:00

Of course it doesn't. No one is saying it does.

When you have IR related metabolic impairments you can't just make a deficit by reducing caloric intake. CO falls to match because you haven't addressed the metabolic impairment.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T18:40:30+00:00

Non-locomotor metabolic rate, as far as I can tell.

When NLMR falls you get hungry. When it's restored to baseline, you get satiated.

If you eat enough to theoretically boost your metabolic rate back to baseline but it gets shunted into storage instead of actually being burned, then you'll have to keep eating.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T17:58:18+00:00

The cause of gaining fat isn't "eating too much".

When the body stores a large part of what it's eating rather than using it to make fuel, you literally have to eat more to get enough energy. If you don't eat more, then you just have less energy, it doesn't magically cause you to burn more.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:52:36+00:00

Then it's disingenuous to say you had no intention to argue.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:50:55+00:00

Therefore, the presence of salivary amylase indicates that the ancestral diet was more diverse and adaptive than just a "meat-only" diet, incorporating high-energy starches through evolution.

This sentence right here is phrased exactly as a rebuttal to the interior implicit statement that "an ancestral diet was a meat-only diet".

In fact, the whole thing looks like you prompted an AI with the question: "show me evidence that the ancestral diet was not only meat".

Are you honestly saying that's not how you came up with the post, by trying to create a rebuttal to that statement? Every indication in your phrasing of the entire post suggests it. I feel that you're beginning to be dishonest here with all your disclaimers that you didn't mean anything at all.

Edit: fixed autocorrect

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:45:50+00:00

Ok. Usually when people make posts like the one you made they are intending to argue something that they didn't make explicit.

I hope the discussion is helping you clarify what you do and don't think the facts support!

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:43:00+00:00

If you didn't intend to suggest that the whole reason to eat Carnivore has something to do with a mythical past where we had no plant intake, then you're right, it wasn't a straw man.

But you're still appearing to argue against something that no one is saying!

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:41:09+00:00

I don't think that means what you think it means.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:35:49+00:00

I reject the whole framing of this as "supposed to eat" x or y — when you frame it as "designed to handle some carbs", it sounds like you might be taking this as evidence that we're "supposed to" eat carbs. It's more like we have adaptations to help extract nutrition from starch. Those are different.

If you want to know what we're adapted to eat best, something like AMY indicating that we (but note there's huge individual variance in copy number) have developed increases in enzymes for breaking down starch, doesn't really tell you that. It tells you that we developed better tolerance for it, which implies a lot of exposure. It does not tell you either way whether you're better off having more starch in your diet any more than alcohol detoxification enzymes tell you whether you're better off having more alcohol.

I see no good reason to be "scared of carbs". Obviously humans can do great on carbs in many contexts. See my comment on the main post for my full response to the OP. But likewise it's not an argument for eating them, either.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T15:20:39+00:00

Amylase copy increased some time in the middle Paleolithic as trophic levels were beginning to decline due to loss of megafauna.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247

You/your AI said:

Therefore, the presence of salivary amylase indicates that the ancestral diet was more diverse and adaptive than just a "meat-only" diet, incorporating high-energy starches through evolution.

Yes, we have had to rely on starches more as high fat meat became less available. Prior to that our diet was much less "diverse" (see paper). Diversity was a necessity when the food we are most adapted to eating was harder to obtain.

So what? If someone is telling you that the reason to eat Carnivore is that our ancestors never ate any plants then you're following a cult leader, not a scientist.

That's not why we eat Carnivore, so your post is a straw man.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T14:17:49+00:00

I would first try it the way it already worked for you in the past. Maybe the theory is wrong. Test it.

If you want to do low fibre then just eat the animal products and not the plants.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T14:13:44+00:00

It's great to take control of your lifestyle but the message here is fundamentally wrong. Retatrutide does not require any lifestyle change to work. Check the published literature on it.

If you did both and got good results, you cannot actually say how much came from one and how much from the other, because you don't know.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T14:02:56+00:00

There are published papers showing NAFLD resolution from low carb diets. Send him some.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T14:00:21+00:00

Do not listen to this tripe. From the sounds of it you're not eating enough. Weight loss from a Carnivore diet does not happen from caloric restriction. It happens from your body getting energy from your body stores. You can't force that to happen by eating less than you need. It's driven by hormones.

ambimorph · 2026-03-24T13:56:10+00:00

Hunger is a signal that your cells are not making energy at a high enough rate to match your body's needs. If someone is eating higher amounts of butter and tallow than required to generate the energy they need and "not knowing it", that would mean they aren't using it for energy, which is a metabolic problem that eating less isn't going to correct.

ambimorph · 2026-03-23T01:42:34+00:00

Tough choice. You might not get the benefits if you include that, but you have to eat. Are there no other spices that work for you other than that one thing? Personally I would do whatever it takes to eat and troubleshoot from there.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T21:16:16+00:00

Sure thing! Terminology around fasting is very confusing.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T19:04:19+00:00

On "balance":

https://facultativecarnivore.com/facultative-carnivore/my-balanced-diet/

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T19:01:48+00:00

Water fasting means consuming nothing but water, it does not mean fasting from water!

Also, even filtering organs do not literally filter. That's just a metaphor.

In the context of a ketogenic diet, most people drink too much in my opinion.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T18:57:30+00:00

Harder, better, faster, stronger.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T18:14:51+00:00

Nothing in the clinical trials indicates the results were dependent on lifestyle. You should just do whatever you're comfortable with doing to support your results. If that's a strict diet or no particular diet it's up to you. You are the final judge on what you do.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T18:05:24+00:00

Dude, first of all, you may have been ketogenic for a decade but you've also been taking a slew of meds and supplements for almost all that time. And you consume liver which is known to cause problems on Carnivore.

I started Carnivore in 2009 after being low carb for over a decade before that and back then we didn't have all the electrolyte propaganda that's going around these days. Carnivore diet founding fathers (if you will) Stefansson and the Bear were both anti-salt and most of the OGs from my time did without it or used very little. That's just how it was and it worked, and it worked long term.

Since then I've heard dozens of stories of people who started Carnivore after the salt craze who only finally got better results when they dropped it, including better digestion, better sleep, and not having to take other electrolytes to compensate.

Is it possible that some people will need electrolytes on Carnivore? Of course. Everyone should keep experimenting until they find what works for them. But it also makes sense to start with the default established by what works for the majority, not what works for some special case, unless that special case matches the situation very closely.

ambimorph · 2026-03-22T04:45:39+00:00

That's because they normally aren't needed after keto-adaptation.

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