What Is A Keto Diet?
Lacey What is Keto?
Keto or the ketogenic diet is a very low carb, high fat diet. It reduces the amount of carbohydrates you eat while replacing it with fat. Standard keto diets don’t limit your protein intake as they’ll usually stay under 20% of your overall diet anyways, but high protein ones do as they require 35% of protein in your overall diet. Otherwise keto diets will have you refrain from sugary, processed, or carb heavy foods.
How does it Work?
The standard keto diet is made up of 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs. Generally when you think of losing weight you’d think to reduce your fat intake, but with keto it is very different. Carbohydrates are actually much worse for you in terms of weight gain, so when keto almost cuts them out, it alone does so much for your body. Then it replaces those carbs with fat to induce what is known as ketosis.
Ketosis is the state of your body when it starts to produce ketone bodies out of fat and using them for energy instead of carbohydrates. This makes your body very good at utilizing and burning fat, which makes weight loss a breeze. Also keto diets are helpful in the long term because they help to suppress appetite.
History Of The Keto Diet
Originally the keto diet was made to help cure epilepsy in the early 1920s and 30s. Before then fasting and potassium bromide was used to treat it, but taking potassium bromide slowed mental capabilities in patients. Instead doctors tried a diet rich in fat and low in carbs then paired it with some fasting. They found that using this diet made the liver produce ketone bodies which causes the body to go into ketosis.
So Does it Work?
The keto diet works wonders for those looking to lose weight or even reduce seizures for those suffering from epilepsy. Although when you first go on the diet you’ll likely lose a lot of weight very quickly but then it’ll slow down. Don’t worry about this, when you’re on a keto diet it reduces the body’s stores of glycogen and water so really you’ll only be losing water weight for the first month or so. After that though you should still see your weight reducing as your body slowly uses up its fat stores.