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Protein Sparing Modified Fasting AKA: PSMF or “Cut fat intake and up protein to break stalls” – with or without Keto Chow

This entry is part 8 of 9 in the series Keto Basics

The concept of a “Protein Sparing Modified Fast” or PSMF can sound a bit complicated at first, but it can be a fantastic way to break through a stall and cut body fat. PSMF isn’t for everyone and, depending on how you implement it, isn’t typically used for extended periods of time. You’re doing a sort of “fast” that’s designed to keep muscle protein intact (or “spare” it) while still letting your body consume stored fat for energy. The PSMF subreddit sums it up as:

PSMF is a ketogenic diet designed to jump-start a weight loss program (either for rapid fat loss for a body builder or those with some weight to lose) or break a stall. It is a modified fast and as such is not a lifestyle. The idea is basically to only eat to prevent lean muscle loss (protein).

The Basics of PSMF

With a typical Ketogenic diet you will be getting 20-50g of carbohydrates as an upper limit, with anywhere from 90-160g of protein (depending on goals, activity, and other factors), with fat as a variable that can come from the food you consume or from your body’s fat storage. For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using numbers from Maria Emmerich’s Macro Calculator. I’m setting the calculator to give numbers for a 220 lb, 40-year-old female with 35% body fat that we will call “Jane”; YOUR numbers will be different so please make sure you pull up the page and enter in YOUR measurements. The Calculator says that if Jane wants to lose weight quickly, she should use 2 different calorie/fat/protein/carb combinations (click to embiggen!):

If Jane had selected regular “Fat Loss” instead of PSMF, it would have told her to do 1659 calories with 118g of fat, 130g protein, and 20 total carbs. There are a few important points that I would like to cover here:

You will notice that we are ALWAYS talking about grams of stuff, we are not using percentages for the fat/protein/carbs. Macro percentages are ONLY used for treating epilepsy and even then it’s more properly done with a 4:1 or other ratios of fat calories to other calories instead of percentages. If you’re looking at a “Keto Macro Calculator” that uses percentages it isn’t going to be useful, that’s why we consistently recommend Maria’s calculator over all others.
If you have looked at other “Keto Macro” calculators, you may notice that the amount of protein recommended is WAY higher. Craig Emmerich covers a lot of the old fear that people used to have about protein and why it’s unfounded in his presentations about PSMF given at Keto Salt Lake 2021 – I highly recommend checking it out.
The text above the figures reminds you that protein in a MINIMUM, get at least that much and you can go over if you stay below the calories (by getting less fat).
Right there in the calculator results, it explains the basic setup of how to do PSMF “Add 1-3 days a week of PSMF to speed up fat loss or break stalls. Then Fast Fat Loss macros above on the other days. If doing this two or more weeks in a row, add an overfeeding day each week with 400-600 additional calories of protein and fat.“
Maria recommends you stay under 10g of TOTAL carbs. You will quickly find that 10g of total carbs and 30g of total fat will necessitate a major change in how you eat on your PSMF days (hello chicken breast!).

How you can use Keto Chow for PSMF

OK, we’ve covered some of what PSMF is and how to do it. How can you use Keto Chow as a tool to help you be successful with PSMF? First things first: we need to address the TOTAL carbs situation.

Most flavors of Keto Chow contain around 7.6g of total carbohydrates. If you wanted to use 3 meals of Keto Chow on your PSMF days, that would be 22.8g of total carbs before you even add any other food and 22.8 is more than 10! Here’s the thing about the total carbs in Keto Chow: 5.71g of that is acacia and xanthan gum fiber (mostly acacia). Acacia gum is some REALLY cool stuff, especially for a keto diet. There’s a long explanation of the benefits of acacia gum on keto on this page, but the short version is: your body can’t digest acacia gum, but your gut bacteria DOES and it turns the former carbohydrate into short-chain fats. Carbs in -> turned into fats = happy gut biome with energy for your intestinal cells. All of this is why I, personally, do not count acacia gum (or xanthan gum) towards my total carbohydrate limit. With that acacia and xanthan gum quantity removed, the result is 1.8g of fiber and lactose carbohydrates – let’s call it 2g just for fun. 6g of carbs from 3 meals of Keto Chow still leaves me with 4g and that’ll be taken up by the incidental carbs in mostly meat that I’m eating to cover the rest of my protein goal after 3x Keto Chow meals made with 10g of butter each.

Enough about me, let’s go back to Jane and her goals! Jane needs to get 159g of protein, under 30g of fat. For Jane, that means 78.6g of protein from 3 meals of Keto Chow (or 52.4g if she uses 2 meals of Keto Chow – the number of meals of Keto Chow is entirely up to you!). Jane will be 80g of protein short doing 3x Keto Chow, but she knows that she got a full 100% of her vitamins and minerals because of the Keto Chow. How can Jane get that additional 80g?

It’s time for Cron-o-meter!

We love Cron-o-Meter around here! More info here about using Cron-o-meter to track your net carbs. The key difference between Cron-o-Meter and most other tracking programs like MyFitnessPal and Carb Manager is the Cron-o-Meter uses a curated database. That means every entry you find has been verified to be correct. I switched from MyFitnessPal after I tried entering butter into my tracking and there were 7 different entries that were wrong, one even said “butter (net carbs)” butter has 0.01g of total carbs per tablespoon, it doesn’t need a “net carbs” entry! Anyhow, the intricacies of Cron-o-Meter are beyond this particular blog post, but Jane took the numbers from Maria’s calculator and put them into Cron-o-Meter as custom targets:

Jane goes ahead and enters the food she’s planning to eat that day. In this case, it’s 3 different flavors of Keto Chow, along with the 10g of butter that she’s having in each meal to make sure that she will be able to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins in the meals:

Wait a minute: the fat is a little high when she uses 10g of butter in each shake! 10g of butter has 8.1g of fat and each of the skinless chicken breasts also 6.1g of fat. Let’s change the amount of butter in each Keto Chow to 7g. That will make for 21g of butter in total. Jane still wants to get around 10g of fat per meal so she can either have a chicken breast as part of 2 meals, or actually split up the 2 pieces of meat into 3 portions and have 2/3 of a breast with each meal. Check out Jane’s targets NOW!

That looks REALLY good. Jane is half a gram over on fat and 3g over on protein, but both are exceptionally close to her targets. For her non-PSMF days, Jane could take the approach of maybe doing 2 Keto Chow and having some beef for her 3rd meal. In fact: Jane decides to go to have 2 of the same 7g of butter Keto Chow shakes she had the previous day and then she’s going to go to Texas Roadhouse and get a 12oz Prime Rib along with a side salad.

Honestly, that’s phenomenal. Jane has a good plan in place! Additional PSMF Resources:

Craig Emmerich presentation about PSMF given at Keto Salt Lake 2021
Maria and Craig PSMF information
2Krazy Ketos – Protein Sparing Modified Fasts
The PSMF Subreddit

Why Should I Track on Keto & with What Tracking APP?

Why should I track what I eat on keto?

Writing down what you eat is like seeing a day’s worth of food laid out before you. You can identify your good habits (such as eating three daily meals and choosing healthy snacks) and your bad habits (such as unhealthy snacking). You can write it down on paper, track on a computer spreadsheet, take notes on your phone diet-tracking website or app.

The advantage of an app is that it tracks portion sizes, food weights and measurements and/or calories are typically calculated for you. And most importantly for all of us on keto, net carbs. And with the right APP like Cronometer or Carb Manager, your net carbs are already figured out for you on most foods and that’s super helpful!

In fact, the first thing I recommend for anyone starting off their keto journey is to track their foods. Until you learn how to best hit your ratios properly, tracking is the key.

Not only seeing what I eat but when I eat can be beneficial. So a food log combined with tracking my food can be helpful as well. Combining that with journaling about my feelings at the time of eating or my mood surrounding my eating behavior can be beneficial to help me in reevaluating my eating habits and dietary choices. Believe me, this really helps when trying to work on the “why”…but that’s an entirely different post.

Each time I turn to my personal trainer or doctor complaining about a weight loss stall the first thing they ask me is, “are you tracking what you are eating.” Most of us do not realize how much we are eating on a daily basis. Tracking on an app gives me the data I need to determine exactly what I need to meet my ratios or calorie goals. And if the stall continues, the first thing they ask me for is to review “what” I have been eating. Maybe the types of food are the problem and being able to show them exactly what I’m eating is very helpful. I never know when I may have an intolerance for a specific food until I’ve tracked what I’m eating and associated it with an ongoing issue.

By reviewing and evaluating how you ate, you can adjust and move forward. Tracking can help you control your hunger and reduce your calories if needed. The number one reason I love using a tracking app is also the key to success when eating out. By planning ahead and using a tracking app, you can determine what to eat before you’re faced with choices, good and bad.

Now let’s talk about what tracking app is the best to track on keto.

We all know Chris loves the Cronometer, he’s talked about it on the FB Live broadcasts as well as written a great post about it [read about it here]. Many of our staff at Keto Chow are fans and use this app. He has a lot of valid reasons why this app continues to be among one of the best around. Many people love the ability to share recipes. They have verified foods, rather than user submissions on Cronometer as well. For me, I thought it was a bit challenging to use and didn’t really appeal to me upon my initial use of it. When I first started using the Carb Manager App I fell in love with the dashboard that showed my current ratios at a glance. It also gives food an overall grade (I’m all about simple). I find it’s very user-friendly and I like the water tracking feature the best (I like visually appealing things…aka cute).

And of course, we’re curious and wanted to know what our Keto Chow customers are using to track their foods. So we posted this last week on Facebook and Instagram and we received some awesome feedback.

The majority of those that replied seemed to be using the Carb Manager App, although a few sounded like they were switching over to Cronometer after reading some of the comments. Here are some comments:

Julia Carrasco-Kendzora I use carb manager mainly for scanning labels when my weight loss stalls, then I count total carbs.

mytinyketolife I ????????????? Cronometer!! It has a Keto option that I can edit & has an amazing amount of food options. I can also make my own recipes.

A few of our friends even compared Cronometer and Carb Manager against each other and posted this feedback for us:

Lindsey Marie Austin While I was using both apps the macros almost NEVER matched up! Cronometer seems much more reliable to me.

Then much to our surprise some of you listed some other keto tracking apps we weren’t even aware of like Keto.app – Keto Diet Tracker, Keto diet & Ketogenic recipes App, Lose It! and Total Keto Diet App. We didn’t have time to download these and test them against one another. Maybe Chris can analyze them in his spare time. And with keto gaining popularity I’m sure you’ll see a lot more Apps becoming available.

Now I’m not recommending you track your foods forever. It doesn’t hurt to evaluate what you put into your body. Your body is one of the most amazing machines ever made and understanding how to best fuel it is a science.