The Keto Diet: Overview, Benefits, and Warnings
Over the past few years, the keto diet, or ketogenic diet, has become one of the most popular forms of dieting and weight loss. While weight loss isn’t in the cards for every dieter, it’s often the primary motivator.
Because the diet requires a drastic reduction in carbohydrates, we might feel spacey, flaky, and lost for a few days, but only at the start. By its conclusion, many dieters report a loss of weight and see an overall improvement in their mental clarity and physical health.
Getting on the keto diet might not make you a better person, but it will improve your relationship with bacon grease and cauliflower. It might also teach you about the addictive nature of carbs.
What Happens to Our Bodies During the Keto Diet?
As we starve our bodies of carbohydrates, our systems begin to get our energy from triglycerides in our stored fat. As our livers break down the fat and produce ketones (acids), our bodies enter the survival state known as ketosis. This is when our energy levels improve, and our weight tends to decrease.
Let’s be careful though. When the body is synthesizing fat, it can also produce excess ketones, which can be poisonous to the body, resulting in ketoacidosis. Good times.
My body goes crazy for foods that are high in carbs. I especially love pasta, which means giving it up is painful. When we eat carbs, our bodies rush to produce glucose and insulin. After a plate or two of spaghetti, I tend to feel a little high. Lucky me!
With carbs, glucose converts to bursts of energy, and then insulin processes it all in the blood and carries it throughout the body. For a while, carbs can feel wonderful.
When I completed my keto diet at 31 days, I had lost 15 pounds. During and after the diet, I experienced improvements in mental focus, memory, and energy.
Many people report losing lots of weight during their keto diet, while some don’t lose any weight at all. Luckily, weight isn’t the banner value of the diet.
What is the Keto Diet?
The keto diet consists of a straightforward set of rules:
- Remove carbs from your diet or drastically reduce your carb intake. This means no grains, rice, pasta, potatoes and their tubular friends, and no bread, flour, fruit, or sugar.
- You can eat meat, eggs, vegetables, high-fat cream, butter, nuts, seeds, avocados, berries, stevia sweetener, and all the other fats (high-fat salad dressing, coconut oil, sesame oil, saturated fats, and bacon fat). Yes, bacon fat. Lots and lots of bacon fat.
- Eat as much as you want from 11 am to 7 pm.
- Do not eat from 7 pm to 11 am every day.
- When planning your meals, include lots of fatty meats and oily proteins.
- During each sitting, eat your vegetables first and then your proteins.
The nutritional breakdown of your meal plan might look something like this:
- Fat: 70% of calories
- Protein: 25% of calories
- Carbs: 5% of calories
By forcing a fat-burn through the liver, your body goes into a state similar to fasting, known as ketosis. In some cases, this fast-paced fat-burn can be reinvigorating.
In many cases, the weight you’ve been struggling to lose for the past five years will appear to fall off magically. Please be aware that this is not the case for everyone.
Some people find the beginning of this diet to be very difficult. The spaciness and confusion that can result from excluding carbs from their diet can feel debilitating. If you struggle with letting go of carbs, pace yourself, and try to decrease your carb intake over time.
The Downside of the Keto Diet
When you stop eating carbs, your body and mind begin to exhibit a type of withdrawal. While your system is scrambling to grab energy from fat, your mind and body look for their sugar daddy – carbs.
While your body is transitioning to its new source of power, it might also produce flu-like symptoms, otherwise known as the Keto Flu, Carb Flu, or Sugar Flu. The resulting fatigue will cause you to feel like you’re running around steep mountain paths at very high altitudes. You might also feel sleepy and tend to whine like a 5-year old. It’s okay; mommy loves you.
In the midst of your Keto Flu, your mind might wander, mostly because your brain will miss the energy bursts that the carbs were producing. You might feel confused and won’t have quality mental agility for a few days. This is all temporary. Eventually, your mind and body catch-up to the new system of fat-burning and all sorts of beautiful things take place.
During this diet, you might experience a change in bowel function, including constipation. This can be attributed to your newly-found low fiber intake. Without carbs, you’ll need to get fiber from vegetables and psyllium seed husks.
Seriously, eat fiber-rich veggies and psyllium. This will make your trips to the bathroom much less painful and far more productive.
If you experience diarrhea during your diet, you might need to add probiotics to your meals, along with fermented foods like sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, tempeh, and miso.
While you’re at it, be prepared for a slower metabolism and stinky breath — just sayin.
The Benefits of The Keto Diet
Most people love the ketogenic diet for the benefits outside of weight loss.
Here’s a list of the most incredible takeaways:
- Increased energy
- Improved mental focus
- Increased mental agility
- Improved memory
- Reduced cholesterol
- Lowered blood pressure
- Regulated hormones
- Controlled epileptic seizures
- Lower insulin at healthier levels
- Increased sex drive
- Reversed insulin resistance
- Reduced feelings of stress
- More frequent feelings of happiness
- Reduced acne (Yup, the keto diet means fewer zits!)
Keto Diet Warnings and Conclusion
If you’re on the keto diet and you experience frequent urination, extreme thirst, high blood sugar levels, and high levels of keynotes in the urine, please see a doctor or go to an emergency room. These are symptoms of DKA, otherwise known as Diabetic Ketoacidosis.
Most common in type 1 diabetes, DKA is a serious condition, and it can make you violently ill. It might also kill you. Treatment involving fluid replacement has the highest rate of success.
To flush ketones out of your body naturally, drink extra water.
Keep in mind that the keto diet was never meant to be a long-term strategy for health and weight loss. Some doctors are not careful when prescribing this diet. Your keto friends might also be unaware of the diet’s potential risks.
If you’re frequently using the keto diet for weight loss or any of its other benefits, you run the risk of chronic disease, and potentially, premature death. Yes, it’s that serious.
In all cases and with all diets, be extremely careful, especially when limiting your carbohydrate intake.
The most comprehensive health and diet plans include exercise. Consult a western or naturopathic doctor to learn more about your limits and health risks related to dieting.
For the vegetarians and vegans in the house, it’s entirely possible to maintain your plant-based diet and be a keto rock star. While consuming fat is a normal part of the keto process, your fat can be from coconut oil, nuts, and avocados.
While getting on the keto diet has some compelling benefits, it might also cause you to become addicted to bacon memes.
The hidden fun of this diet is in the fat. With a little research and careful moderation, butter, pork fat, and coconut oil might become your new best friends. Go fat go!
Enjoy your diet and be safe!
About the Author
5 Ways to Ease Into a Healthier Diet
For many of us, taking the plunge into a healthier diet can be both overwhelming and confusing. One of the main reasons being that we think we need to take our new “diet” head on; restricting ourselves from our daily edible pleasures only to consume bland foods that we have been told are good for us. On top of that we have advertisements trying to pawn off products that are supposedly healthy, but do not even resemble real food in any way, shape, or form.
My first rule of easing into a healthier diet and lifestyle, is starting off in small steps. Start by reducing and replacing, instead of just restricting foods. Addicted to coffee? Try reducing the amount, buy fair trade and organic coffee, and instead of milk and sugar, try coconut milk and honey. Too much change too fast? No problem! Instead of having your usual five cups before breakfast, try four this week, next week try three and so forth. Go at your own pace and remember to lay off the guilt. Learning to love yourself, and allowing yourself to make mistakes, is all part of letting yourself be healthy.
Now don’t get me wrong, some people have an all or nothing attitude and it works for them, but a lot of people don’t; and most times will end up finding themselves giving up on their New Year’s resolution by March. Sound familiar? Then this is for you!
What exactly are the components of a healthy diet?
1. Eat Seasonally/Locally.
Eating seasonally and locally allows you to get the freshest foods available, and when we eat the freshest foods we are guaranteed to be able to consume the most nutrients. The closer it was grown to home, the less time it spent in a truck and the more you and your body will benefit from it.
2. Drink plenty of water.
Water composes 75% of your brain, 22% of your bones, removes wastes, helps covert food into energy, and helps your body absorb nutrients among many other valuable functions! Did you know that most of us can’t tell the difference between hunger and thirst? Next time you are hungry try having a glass of water and see how you feel 30 minutes after. You may be surprised.
3. Eat often, don’t skip meals.
Eat consistently throughout the day as opposed to having just three square meals. Make snacks ahead of time so you can have them on the go. Eating smaller meals throughout the day will help control your blood sugar levels, increase your energy levels and mood.
4. Tasty and Appealing.
Healthy food does not mean bland, tasteless and boring. Have fun with your food, play around with recipes, experiment with different types of herbs and spices. Not only will this enhance the flavour of your food, but it can also have some great added health benefits. Turmeric is great for inflammation, oregano and ginger are great for your digestive system. Connect with your food and create something that makes you feel great.
5. 80/20 Rule.
Let yourself indulge occasionally. If you eat a whole foods based diet most of the time, your body will be able to process that bad stuff once and a while! Remember that it’s OK to fall off the wagon now and again, as long as you are on it most of the time.
Try this yummy summer recipe!
Zucchini pasta with cilantro pesto
Ingredients:
- 3 organic zucchini
- Cherry tomatoes
Directions:
- With peeler, peal zucchini like you would a carrot (When you start to get to the core it will be harder to peel. Just save the core for future use)
- Cut cherry tomatoes in half
- Mix together in a bowl
Pesto Ingredients:
- Juice of 3 limes
- One bunch cilantro
- 1/2 cup cashews
- 1/2cup olive oil
Directions:
- Mix all pesto ingredients in a blender or food processor, if too thick or not breaking down enough, add a bit more lime juice and or olive oil.
- Pour pesto over Zucchini and tomato mixture
- Mix all ingredients together
- Add sea salt and pepper to garnish
- Enjoy!
