2,400 calories from the dreaded carbs then?
So, does every one start fat burning if they don't eat for a day or so?
'Cos I know I've skipped meals for longer than that, so do I turn keto or something?
Everybody burns a bit of fat nearly every day.
If you lose a pound in weight then normally you have burned off some fat.
The big difference is between burning a bit of fat, fasting for a day (when you burn more fat plus stored glucose) and eating very little carbohydrate for a week or so.
Your body prefers to burn carbohydrate when it is freely available.
It takes a couple of weeks to switch over from burning carbohydrate plus fat to burning mainly fat. This is keto adaptation and it can easily go back the other way.
Think of it as a Summer and Winter thing - back in the day before we had Tesco.
In the summer we ate anything we could get our hands on including fruits, roots, shoots and grains. Plus any meat we could catch. The aim was to put on as much fat as possible while lots of food was available.
Running on carbohydrates as much as possible to save that wonderful fat.
Come Winter and all the fruit is gone from the trees, everything is covered in snow, nearly all the plants have died or are hidden in the frozen ground. Then we hunkered down and started burning that stored fat to see us through the winter.
So we lived two lives; carbohydrate guzzler and fat storer then fat burner.
Fat was so precious that the body would refuse to switch over to fat burning immediately and only really start burning fat after a couple of weeks without food.
Then along came Tesco and now you can have high energy carbohydrates all the year round and store up loads of fat.
Still takes that couple of weeks to switch over to burning all fat, though, and doesn't take long to switch back to burning glucose from carbohydrates.
So if you are off carbohydrates for a couple of days then you are only on the first step to going keto.
At that stage a lot of people get "carb flu" where they aren't getting the carbs they are used to but aren't managing to burn fats properly.