If you're in the market for a new weight-loss eating plan, you may have heard the buzz about the keto diet. Lots of celebrities, including Kourtney Kardashian, swear by it for its ability to help followers shed pounds fast. While nutritionists remain skeptical about its long-term health benefits, many people love keto because it lets you eat delicious meat, dairy, eggs, and veggies while avoiding carbs and sugar. Those who follow a keto diet eat mostly fat, limited amounts of protein, and almost no carbs (say goodbye to the bread basket, fam). Acceptable foods include meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables that grow above the ground, nuts and seeds, fats and oils, and some dairy products. No-nos include fruit, grains and starches, legumes and beans, desserts, sweetened drinks, low-fat dairy, and sweet sauces. Most of the diets also advise its followers to stick to water and skip diet soda, even though it's artificially sweetened. If all of that sounds complicated, don't worry. Some of your favorite cookbook authors have also developed recipes for your dining pleasure. They come in a range of styles and difficulty levels, too. We found the best keto cookbook for you, whether you're a diehard chef or a kitchen novice.
While some of that fat will come from fat you eat (and you have to eat quite a bit of fat to get into ketosis), some of it will likely also come from your body’s fat stores. And burning your body’s fat stores is exactly what everyone looking to lose weight needs. In particular, if you have what’s called “poor metabolic flexibility,” your body may not be very good at switching back and forth between burning carbs and burning fat for energy. If that’s the case, then the most common result is that you don’t burn much fat at all, you get cravings for sugar and carbs, and you have a hard time losing weight. A keto diet plan is not the only or even a perfect answer to this problem, but it is a good answer. By following a keto diet plan, you force your body to burn fat, and you don’t switch back and forth, so your body stays in fat-burning mode all the time.
Please note that a low carb or Paleo diet could also be a keto diet! If you’re eating a diet with low enough amount of carbohydrates to trigger ketosis, then that diet is technically keto, even if your plan says it’s paleo or low-carb. This is one of the reasons it can be hard to answer the question “what is a keto diet? ”, because the keto diet can be done several different ways. I highly recommend you check out our Paleo diet vs. ’ll help you understand the difference between the two diets better. I still remember when I used to count calories. I was constantly hungry! My salads didn’t satiate me, and toast just made me hungrier! I used to go to sleep hungry and upset because I could never seem to eat less than 1600 calories. What I didn’t know back then was that my diet was actually making me hungrier. When we mix carbohydrates and fats in the same meal, we actually want to eat more.
It’s the reason that you could eat cake or cookies until you’re sick (because they’re full of sugar and fat from butter), but you usually won’t do the same with steak (which is mostly protein with some fat). Remember how I talked about “poor metabolic flexibility” above? Well, if you have poor metabolic flexibility, then eating carbohydrates is almost always going to make you hungry an hour or two after a meal. So while you’re eating more calorie-dense fats on a keto diet plan, most people find that they end up eating less overall (in terms of calories), without trying as hard. And they’re less hungry, which usually also means they’re happier and less moody. Generally, if you’re less hungry when you’re on a diet, you’re more likely to stick with it, so your chances of losing weight long term are higher. One aspect of losing weight that many people don’t talk about is that your existing health conditions may be making it really tough to lose weight.
That may well be why your friend or spouse can do a diet for a month and drop 20 pounds while you gain 5 pounds following the same plan. It’s not that you’re doing anything wrong with, and there may not even be anything wrong with that way of eating (for weight-loss purposes), but there may be some underlying health conditions that are making your body cling onto that extra weight. A keto diet plan may help certain health conditions (like type 2 diabetes, gut dysbiosis, sleep disorders, fatigue, etc.) and may make it easier for you to lose weight. There’s also research into using a keto diet to cure/prevent cancer (see Dr Seyfried’s research for more) and brain disorders like Alzheimer’s (see Dr. D’Agostino’s research for more). Is A Keto Diet Safe? Doesn’t My Body Need Carbohydrates? There’s often a misconception that our body somehow needs carbohydrates. But the fact is our body can live without carbohydrates just fine as long as you eat plenty of good fats and protein. As Mark Sisson writes, there is actually no requirement for any “essential dietary carbohydrates” in human nutrition. However, our brains do require glucose (a form of carbohydrate).
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