Whether you’re trying to lose a significant amount of weight or want to make sure that your body is as healthy as it can be, among the more effective diets that you should consider is the keto diet. This type of diet allows your body to get into a metabolic state known as ketosis, which will help you burn calories at a much more rapid pace than usual. Before you get started on this diet, the following guide will provide you with everything you need to know about how this diet works and what types of benefits you will receive.
What Is the Keto Diet?
The keto diet is centered around consuming high amounts of healthy fats and low amounts of carbohydrates. When you correctly follow this diet, you’ll receive an ample amount of health benefits. While the main goal of this diet is to assist with weight loss, you should also be able to improve your overall health at the same time. When looking to begin this diet, you will need to focus on heavily reducing your carbohydrate intake, which will need to be replaced primarily by fat. When you make these changes to your diet, your blood sugar levels should drop substantially.
There are several different types of keto diets that you can follow when trying to lose weight, which include a standard diet, a targeted diet, a cyclical diet, and a high-protein diet. The standard diet allows you to consume a moderate amount of protein, very little carbohydrates, and a large amount of fat. If you’re calculating the amount of protein, carbs, and fat that you need in your diet, the percentage would be five percent carbs, 20 percent protein, and the remaining 75 percent for fat.
As for the targeted diet, this diet will allow you to eat a small amount of carbs after a workout. The cyclical diet uses a schedule where five days of the week follow the keto diet with the remaining two days being high in carbs. When looking specifically at the high-protein diet, this option comes with a slightly different percentage breakdown when compared to the standard version of the diet. You can consume five percent carbs, 35 percent protein, and 60 percent fat.
What Are the Benefits of a Keto Diet?
When you’re thinking about following this diet, it’s important to understand just how beneficial the diet can be to your health. Along with the fact that it will help you lose weight, it can also assist with keeping diabetes at bay. Keep in mind that diabetes is linked to alterations in metabolism, poor insulin function, and very high blood pressure. This diet will allow you to improve each factor that can heighten your chance of suffering from diabetes. For instance, losing excess weight will automatically make it less likely that you develop type 2 diabetes, which is something that can easily be done with the keto diet.
Recent studies have also shown that this diet can improve sensitivity to insulin by nearly 75 percent. If you’re currently suffering from diabetes, it’s important to note that this diet has been found to be very effective at allowing the affected individual to heavily reduce the amount of diabetes medications they’re using or to stop taking these medications altogether.
The health benefits of the ketogenic diet don’t stop there. When you follow this diet, you should be able to significantly reduce your chance of developing heart disease. Some of the risk factors for heart disease that can be improved when following this diet include blood sugar, blood pressure, body fat, and cholesterol levels. The many additional health benefits that you’ll receive with this diet include benefits for:
- Brain injuries
- Various types of cancer
- Parkinson’s disease
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Epilepsy
- Acne
- Polycystic ovary syndrome
In general, the loss of weight that you display when you follow this diet for a lengthy period of time should make you a much healthier person.
Will the Keto Diet Help Me Lose Weight?
The ketogenic diet is among the most effective diets available to you for losing weight. Because you’re consuming a significant amount of fat as opposed to carbs, you’ll feel full much sooner when eating, which should help you eat less even when you’re not counting calories. There are many additional reasons why you can lose weight easily with the ketogenic diet. For instance, a higher protein intake makes it easier to burn calories.
Lessening your carb consumption makes it so that you have less food options for your next meal, which should allow you to lessen your caloric intake. Likely the most notable reason for weight loss with this diet is the gluconeogensis process, which happens when the body turns protein and fat into carbs that are used for energy. Additional reasons for weight loss include better sensitivity to insulin, an increased ability to burn fat, and less fat storage.
What Is Ketosis and How Long Does It Take for My Body to Become Keto-Adapted?
Ketosis is a standard metabolic process that occurs when the body hasn’t received enough glucose to convert into energy. Glucose is commonly found in carbohydrates. When you enter into this metabolic state, your body will instead burn any stored fats, which means that some of your excess fat will be burned so that your body can have enough energy. Numerous studies have shown that getting into ketosis on a regular basis allows for quicker weight loss when compared to other diets. If you eat fewer than 50 carbs each day, it will take anywhere from 2-4 days for your body to become keto-adapted, which means that you will enter the ketosis state.
What Can Put My Body Out of Ketosis?
If you’re attempting to maintain a keto diet and want to avoid getting out of the ketosis state once you’re in it, you’ll need to make sure that you avoid eating more than 50 carbs per day. Eating more carbs is essentially the only thing that can put your body out of ketosis.
Is the Keto Diet Calorie Restrictive?
Technically, this diet is unique in that it doesn’t directly require you to restrict calories. However, not being able to eat many carbs should indirectly cause you to eat less calories, which will also help with weight loss.
Is the Keto Diet Good for an Active Lifestyle?
If you’re wondering if this diet will pair well with your active lifestyle, it all depends on what type of active lifestyle you lead. For instance, endurance athletes have found that they perform better with this diet. On the other hand, sprint and team athletes could experience a drop in their overall performance.
What Is the Difference Between a Low Carb Diet and Keto?
The only difference between a low-carb diet and a keto diet is the amount of carbs that are consumed on a daily basis. With the ketogenic diet, you’ll need to eat less than 50 carbs per day. As for the low-carb diet, you’ll consume around 75-100 carbs per day, which isn’t quite enough to put you in the ketosis state.
Can I Do Intermittent Fasting on Keto?
If you’re considering combining intermittent fasting with the ketogenic diet, there are actually notable health benefits of doing so. By lessening your caloric intake on certain days, you should be able to burn even more calories. You can also reach the ketosis state quicker. When fasting, your body will start to burn fat instead of carbs, which is the primary goal of ketosis.
With this guide in hand, you should have all the information you need to successfully maintain the keto diet, which will help you reach your weight loss goals with relative ease.
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