Keto Dieta
You’ve probably heard about the keto diet, even if you may not know precisely what it entails.
It’s an ultra-low-carb, high-fat diet that has shown promise in managing Type 2 diabetes and weight loss.
But what’s all the fuss about? Is it really safe? Are there long-term effects, and can it help you lose and keep weight off?
We’ll explore the keto diet in this special report so you can decide whether this lifestyle change is correct for you.
The full name is the Ketogenic Diet because it forces your body into a ketogenic state.
The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carb diet initially invented in the 1920s to treat childhood epilepsy.
If you go on a ketogenic diet, you’ll get around 80% of your calories from fat, which the body burns as fuel when it can’t get carbs.
You’ll also drop your carb intake to about 5% of total daily calories and get the rest of the 15-20% from proteins.
This is a drastic departure from what we all learned in school as a healthy, well-balanced diet typically consisting of 20-35% protein, 45-65% carbs, and only 10-35% fat.
While you follow a keto diet, your body will become very good at burning fat, which is precisely what you want when trying to lose weight.
It also helps turn your fat into ketones in your liver, which your brain can use for energy. This diet is known to drastically lower blood sugar and insulin levels, where diabetic benefits come in.
There are two basic types of keto diet: standard and high protein.
The standard diet is the one discussed above, with around 70-80% fat, about 20% protein, and only 5-10% carbs.
Just as it sounds, the high-protein keto diet tweaks the proportions to add more proteins.
You drop the fat to around 60% and increase protein to 35%.
Bodybuilders and athletes often need more carbs for fast energy, so sometimes they’ll tweak and play with that carb percentage.
Some will also follow a cyclical keto diet, the standard diet for a certain number of days, followed by a couple of higher-carb days. It’s often also called “carb cycling.”
Others will increase the carbs they consume right before a workout (a targeted keto diet).
The standard and high-protein diets have been studied far more extensively than the cyclical or targeted diets, so in this special report, we’ll mostly talk about the standard diet.
How (and why) This Works
To better understand how a keto diet works, look at your digestive system and how it responds to fewer carbs.
When you eat carbs in anything from the fruit and vegetable families (including products made from grains, like pasta, bread, and crackers), your digestive system breaks them down into glucose.
Glucose provides energy for the body, and the digestive system isn’t particularly picky about where the glucose comes from.
It’ll digest a healthy salad like a candy bar, so it’s up to you to decide what to feed it.
This glucose is stored in two ways: glycogen in the liver and muscle tissue and as adipose or fat.
When your body can’t get sufficient carbs to turn into glucose, it will burn fat instead.
This metabolic state is called ketosis because one of the by-products of this fat-burning is the production of ketones, which can also be used for energy.
If you want to be super-scientific, you can get breath and urine tests that will show the presence of these ketones and prove that you’re doing the diet correctly.
Most people just follow along and trust that it’s working. You can also tell your body is producing ketones by the following side-effects of the process: increased thirst or dry mouth, urination, and a decreased appetite.
The most effective way to get your body into ketosis is to follow a ketogenic (keto) diet where you severely limit your carb intake (remember that 5%).
That’s around 20-50 grams a day. You consume fats and proteins like meat, fish, eggs, nuts, and healthy oils (like coconut or avocado) the rest of the time.
Limiting your protein intake is essential because if you overeat protein, your body will sneakily start turning some of it into glucose, which it likes better than fat.
You can also enter ketosis by intermittent fasting, such as limiting your meals to eight hours during the day and fasting for the remaining sixteen hours.
The Top Benefits of a Keto Diet
As previously mentioned, the keto diet was initially created to help with childhood epilepsy. It’s still used today, and children can have 30 to 40% fewer seizures by rigorously following the diet.
In addition to this disorder, the keto diet has been studied in several other conditions.
