If you want to know how to calculate fat percentage (or fat to protein ratio) from your daily calories, OR your protein percentage, here’s the answer! Over the past three years I’ve eaten a high fat version of the carnivore diet a couple of times and this was something that confused me initially. Here’s a short video I made, once I worked out how to do it, on how to calculate your fat to protein ratio or you can check out the written version below.
How much fat is a ‘high fat’ Carnivore diet?
The most common number is 80% of calories from fat and 20% protein which is commonly described as 80/20, or thereabouts. It can be a little more or less. I’ve seen the occasional person doing 90/10 or 90% fat. But that’s a lot!
Why Do a High Fat Carnivore Diet?
A higher fat version of the carnivore diet can have benefits for some people, especially women. More fat definitely can help with mental health and hormones. Particularly when we’re not yet fat adapted. That was my personal experience, but for some of us it’s possibly not the best long term approach and I’ll write more on that another day.
Eating a high fat diet for a while can also help you become fat adapted. Your body will generally make more ketones if you’re eating large amounts of fat and no carbs, so that helps your cells to begin to learn to use ketones rather than glucose. But make sure you’re monitoring your blood glucose and your ketones if trying this, because unless you’re tracking, you don’t actually know what’s going on in your body.
If you don’t have one already, buy a dual blood glucose and ketone monitor like this one.
When we first embark on a high fat carnivore diet, trying to work out how much fat we should be eating can be confusing! So here’s an easy way that I found to work this out. It’s simple once you know how.
How to calculate fat percentage for high fat Carnivore
Track your food intake in an app such as carbmanager or cronomoter . You can use either one, and they can be used on either your computer or phone. To use on the phone just download the free version of whichever you decide from the app store.
Then you’ll need two numbers. Your grams of fat for the day and your total calories.
Then to calculate your percentage simply multiply your total fat in grams by nine, then divide the answer by your total calories.
For example – if your grams of fat for the day was 156 and your calories were 2100, the equation goes like this
156 (grams of fat) x 9 = 1404
Then divide 1404 (the first total) by 2100 (total calories) and your answer is 0.6685 or 66 (almost 67) %
For protein and carbs you can do the same thing except you multiply your grams of protein by 4 or if for some reason you want to do carbs, same deal – multiply by 4 then divide by total calories.
Easy!
