The ketogenic diet (often referred to as “keto”). Today I speak about my keto experience and the basics of a ketogenic diet.
What is the ketogenic diet?
I’m no stranger to self-experimenting, playing around with my diet and trying to optimise my nutrition. I’ve been practising intermittent fasting for nearly 4 years now, but there’s a specific diet i’ve been meaning to try - the ketogenic diet.
Firstly for those who don’t know the ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high fat diet (LCHF) with many health benefits.
It involves drastically reducing carbohydrate intake, and replacing it with fat. The reduction in carbs puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis.
When this happens, your body becomes incredibly efficient at burning fat for energy. It also turns fat into ketones in the liver, which can supply energy for the brain.
Benefits:
Ketogenic diets can cause massive reductions in blood sugar and insulin levels. This, along with the increased ketones, has numerous health benefits, such as: the potential to fight against diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and even cancer.
There are also four different classifications of the ketogenic diet. The standard ketogenic diet is accepted as reducing your carbohydrates intake to 5% carbs, with just enough protein (20%, let’s say) and the rest coming from fats.
The basic principle around ketogenic diets is that our bodies first port of call for energy are carbohydrates or glucose. Think about a fridge, the fridge is analogous to carbohydrates because they’re easy to access. Then we have the freezer, equivalent to fat, it’s more difficult to access, as we have to bend down or walk to the basement. The flip side is that there’s more energy in there. #Classifications
Other classifications of ketogenic diets are higher protein, or more advanced models like targeted kept which is manipulating carbohydrate consumption around workouts so that one has greater athletic performance and potentially a greater ability to gain muscle (as this is one aspect of your body composition which is harder to progress in).
There is also cycling ketogenic, or carb-cycling which is just alternative days of ketogenic dieting, but for now we’re sticking to the standard model.
Dietary restrictions:
The basis of ketogenic diets are avoiding carbohydrates and yes this includes fruit.
Foods you should avoid:
Avoid carb-based foods like grains, sugars, legumes, rice, potatoes, candy, juice, alcohol, unhealthy fat and even most fruits
Foods you should eat:
Base the majority of your diet on foods such as meat, fish, eggs, butter, nuts, cheese, full-cream (no-milk) healthy oils, avocados and plenty of low-carb veggies.
Side effects:
Keto-flu. As your body is adapting you may find yourself with flu like symptoms (ket-flu)
Fatigue, lethargy, urine smell, breathe smell, constipation
Tips:
Many doctors recommended added salt when starting out as your body adjusts.
Magnesium is also important.
Increase your fibre intake, eat a lot of spinach and other green vegetables as well as plenty of water (not too much)
You can also purchase exogenous ketones which kick-start the state of ketosis in the body, but I think this is unnecessary for someone just beginning.
Remember that a caloric deficit is always required for weight loss to actually occur.
In terms of alcohol, small amounts of red wine can be acceptable on the diet, or hard liquors (which of course I don’t recommend).
Eating out. Simply order a normal meal but replace the carbohydrates with extra vegetables.
Foods I’ve been eating.
90% chocolate Almonds A lot of salmon. Occasional grass-fed steak Olive oil Olives Grass-fed butter, Spinach Mixed green vegetables
My personal experience (WEEK 1)
I think my experience has been very smooth; for one I made sure to slowly reduce the amount of carbohydrates in my diet in the previous week in order to not “shock” the body.
I’ve also been practising intermittent fasting for years, which is essentially a close cousin of ketogenic diets and mimic some of the effects.
For the first two days I felt a little fatigued, but after the third day I found my cognitive processing to increase greatly.
Another point is that I think i’m going to have to reduce my fasting windows to something less extreme so I can actually consume to appropriate amount of calories.
I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m using the ketogenic diet simply to self-experiment and see if my body, but more specifically, mind prefers it for being more productive and focused.
Concluding points:
But it’s a great diet for losing weight, firstly of course because of the reduced insulin levels, but also for other reasons such as increased protein intake and increased fibre which are going to help you reduce your appetite.
If you are losing weight combining this with intermittent fasting is an incredibly powerful formula one could say to drop weight quickly.
Overall it’s been interesting so far. I’m really excited to see how this plays out as it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
All the best.
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