Gaining Weight on Keto and Biome?

[circular]

I've posted elsewhere that I have gained belly fat doing keto, so now I am mildly 'skinny fat'. I've attributed this to being limited in the amount of exercise I can do, which is certainly reasonable, except that I've never gained weight quite like this. It could also be due to an oophorectomy last year. On the third hand, I looked back at my UBiome results this morning. I know biome science is in its infancy, and the quips about firmicutes = fat (digest fats well) and bacteroidetes (digest fats poorly) = skinny are oversimplified. However, I was reminded that mine look like this:

Firmicutes: 83.24%
Bacteroidetes: 12.54%

Bacteroidetes compared to Selected Samples:
0.42x
Firmicutes compared to Selected Samples:
1.33x

I wonder if my biome is sabotaging my keto efforts. These are old results and my diet has changed so I should retest this (except I'm not sure I want to pay to do it until the science is more advanced, methods more standardized etc.

I'm also wondering how whether the biome is digesting fats in my intestines could affect my body's fat load (according to statements online). Do firmicutes digest the fats and release the fatty acids for absorption, while bacteroidetes cause the fats to be excreted? Doesn't make sense to me. I thought I was digesting my own fats, or both?

Anyone else on keto have these results?

[apod]

I notice this effect, mostly in my legs with a more pear-shaped fat distribution. Although, the abs certainly become fluffier as BF% goes up.

When I'm cycling carbs / calories, I'm pretty happy with a light amount of CR (which often happens naturally down to single digit BF%.) WIth strict uninterrupted keto, I find myself much less satisfied with CR and craving a surplus most days. I would imagine this effect in the hypothalamus would drop off somewhere in the 14-18% BF zone for me.

More than the microbiome, I tend to blame very low levels of leptin and lower thyroid hormones when eating low cal + low carb, where I'm hormonally just a little hungrier if I'm not keeping calories up. WIth IF, it sort of makes sense to me that if I'm becoming very skilled at burning body fat for energy that I would also need to be very good at storing energy as fat to burn later for fuel, particularly from a survival-stance.

I do notice a leaning out effect when eating more MCT oil (despite this seemingly having little effect on my caloric intake / tdee / hunger.) I'm thinking this energy must be difficult to store leading to higher thermogenesis, carbs are more likely to be stored as glycogen in combination, and it might have a positive effect on thyroid hormones (and leptin?) I've been experimenting with keeping my electrolytes higher while eating lower carb, thinking that maybe I'm often just craving the salt / potassium from food.

I've been curious to do a gut panel, just for kicks... but I'm not sure if the data is actionable or meaningful (short of finding some sort of h. pylori / pathogen on the results.)

I came across a pretty cool project the other day that applies a deep learning algorithm to optimizing the diet around weight / body comp.

[circular]

Unless things have improved O'd say the gut panel is just for kicks and to help the researchers. There's an article online where someone sent their sample to two biome companies and got different results. I had some sort of coupon where I got mine from UBiome free before reading that. At least their database must be much bigger now for comparisons using their methods. My diversity was 79th percentile which isn't too bad I guess, in the context of the testing population, whoever they are