How To Start Keto Diet For Beginners

What is the ketogenic diet?

A ketogenic diet involves reducing the amount of carbohydrates you eat and replacing them with fat. This carb reduction puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis. Your blood sugar levels get lower and your liver turns fat into something called ketones.

During this process, you become very efficient at converting fuel into energy, shifting the body’s metabolism away from carbs and towards burning fat and ketones.

Benefits of a ketogenic diet

There are lots of benefits to “doing keto”

1. Shed the pounds

Cutting carbs is a great weight-loss strategy. Some studies that keto diets help people lose weight rapidly through a combination of water loss and fat burn. But after six months on a keto diet, the weight can start creeping back on as people revert to their old ways of eating.

2. Beat the belly bulge

You may have heard that not all fat is the same. Something that’s particularly harmful is visceral fat – that’s the stuff stored around your abdomen that can lead to high inflammation levels, as it’s lodged around your vital organs. Low-carb diets are found to burn visceral fat very effectively.

3. Improve those health stats

Keto diets have been shown to raise ‘good’ cholesterol, balance blood sugar levels and lower blood pressure readings.

4. Exercise like a boss

In a study into the effects of carb intake on exercise, those on a ketogenic diet tended to have ‘extremely high levels of fat oxidation’ during marathon running… In simpler terms, they became fat-burning machines and showed no more fatigue than runners on high-carb diets.

5. Soothe your digestion

Some aspects of the keto diet can promote good gut health, like the elimination of processed carbs. Just make sure you’re adding enough fibre to keep your digestion healthy. Example of low carb, high fibre foods are things like flax seeds, almonds, broccoli, avocados, cauliflower and blackberries. Most people need about 30g of fibre per day. Check labels to make sure your intake adds up to what you need throughout the day.