Losing Weight With A Keto Diet

Losing weight with a keto diet can be the way to achieve long term weight loss. Keto is a diet plan as well as a lifestyle that has been shown to help people lose weight, get healthier and keep the weight off.

Keto Diet and Obesity – Why You May Need to Lose Weight Before You Begin The Keto Diet

The keto diet simply refers to a kind of diet that requires that people who want to go along its path limit themselves to eating very low carbohydrate foods only. Essentially, the keto diet plan entails eating foods that will provide the human body with a very small quantity of glucose, meaning just enough to fuel the human body’s energy needs, helping you to lose weight. The human body will thus use the glucose for other functions apart from fueling itself and keeping it energized.

Since it is very low carbohydrate in nature, the keto diet has been compared to a starvation mode, whereby people are deprived of carbohydrates, the most common source of energy in our daily lives. However, unlike a starvation mode, when on the ketogenic diet you are not deprived of food but only allowed to limit the number of carbohydrates that you take in. And since there is a limit to the number of carbs, it also means that the amount of carbohydrates consumed will be lesser than the number of calories consumed. So, when all is said and done, ketones are produced because there is enough fuel or energy for the human body to function normally. Ketones are released as a by-product of the breakdown of fat.

What Is Ketosis?

The concept of ketosis was first studied more than 40 years ago and at that time, it was found to be associated with severe overweight. For instance, in the study, mice were fed with high fat diets but after a short period, they were found to be ketotic, or ketoctic, which resulted in the fact that they were obese. Another study showed that diabetic rats given unlimited amounts of dietary fat showed signs of ketosis and after a subsequent period, their weight loss was remarkably helped. In this case, the ketones were primarily responsible for weight loss. But ketosis can also be caused by nutrient deficiencies.

However, as suggested earlier, a healthy diet is one where your daily calorie intake is well-balanced between carbohydrates and proteins. The problem with a keto diet is that your body begins to consume fewer carbohydrates as it uses up the fatty acids as its main source of energy and the overall imbalance causes you to become malnourished. In addition to being malnourished, your body starts using more muscles to digest the fatty acids resulting in weight loss. You can prevent this from happening by consuming large quantities of water regularly and moderately replacing high-calorie foods with low calorie alternatives. However, you may still have to manage your daily calorie intake in order to prevent the ketosis from occurring.

As mentioned earlier, keto diets cause a state of ketosis or Fatigue. This happens because your body tries to eliminate the excess glucose in your blood by breaking down the muscle tissue for energy and as a result, the muscle tissue gets damaged. Once this happens, you will notice that you are tired all the time and this can limit your activities considerably and you may even have to give up strenuous activities like sports. If you want to keep yourself physically active and at the same time keep yourself from succumbing to the ‘ketosis’ that happens when you consume too many carbohydrates, you should consume more protein and high quality fats.

Losing Weight Is The Goal

There is a common misconception among people that they need to eat only fats and proteins in order to lose weight. However, you should remember that you will also need to eat carbs in large quantities in order to gain weight. Carbohydrates provide a lot of energy to our body and as a result, our body uses more muscle tissue as an energy to digest the food as opposed to digesting the fat and therefore, we gain weight. If you want to gain weight and avoid keto diet complications, you should eat carbs and some protein. Of course, you will have to eat these in moderation and you may need to increase your daily calorie intake in order to facilitate your body’s ability to absorb protein and carb as well as eating more fat.