Does The Keto Diet Work For Weight Loss? - Blog Kalori

Blog Kalori - Is the keto diet the magic bullet for all your fat loss problems? Let's talk about that (Does The Keto Diet Work For Weight Loss?).

How's its going guys, my name is Richie Kirwan.

And today we're going to talk about one of the most popular diets of the last 20 years, keto, assuming you haven't managed to avoid all forms of regular and social media for the last 20 years, in which case, I wholeheartedly tip my hat to you, you probably have heard of the keto diet or seen one of the many keto products, recipes or diet books that are flooding the market right now.

It's kind of a big deal.

And just like anything in the world of nutrition, and fitness, there's a whole lot of bad information about keto diets, too.

So hopefully, this article will clear up any of those myths for you.

So before we go any further, I really want to point out that I'm not here to tell you to try or avoid the keto diet.

I like to think I'm nutritionally agnostic, which means I don't really care about following or recommending any specific type of diet.

But I do care about the science that tells us the effects of that diet.

So the reason I'm doing this video is to help you understand how a keto diet actually works, what it does, and also, what it doesn't do, and why.

And one really important point, I'm only going to talk about the use of a ketogenic diet for weight loss.

So let's get started.

What is a keto diet?

First off, what does a keto diet even mean? Well, keto is short for ketogenic, and a ketogenic diet is one that causes your body to generate or make ketones.

You see, one of the main fuels of our body is glucose, which is a carbohydrate.

When we're healthy, our body does a really good job of keeping our blood glucose levels pretty stable to provide our body with energy.

When our blood glucose gets low, we can top it back up with glucose from our muscles, or from the food that we eat will also make glucose in our liver by breaking down some amino acids and fat.

But that takes a lot of energy to do so.

But if you don't eat carbohydrates, your body is missing one of its major energy sources.

So to provide energy for organs that normally use glucose like your brain, your body produces ketones as an alternative fuel, and that's when ketone levels in your blood start to get higher, and someone is classified as being in ketosis.

Ketones are basically another energy source that your body can use instead of glucose when it's scarce.

Now, one thing that's really important to point out here is that ketosis is not the same as ketoacidosis.

ketoacidosis is a serious condition that happens mostly in type one diabetics, when their blood sugar gets too high, starts to turn acidic, and then they can pass out or even die.

Like I said, it's not the same as physiological ketosis or your body makes ketones when carbs or energy.

How can you get into ketosis?

So how does someone get into ketosis? Well, the easiest way is to reduce the amount of carbs you eat, with many ketogenic diets recommending no more than 20 to 50 grammes of carbohydrates per day.

So where do carbs come from? Well, just think of all the foods that make you happy.

There's a good chance that most of them contain carbs, fruit, and starchy vegetables, like potatoes, pasta, rice, beans, bread, flour, sugar, cakes, ice cream, and all the good stuff.

They're all high in carbs.

As an example, one medium banana has around 27 grammes of carbs.

So having just two a day could knock someone out of ketosis.

How does exercise affect ketosis?

Technically. Now, if you do a lot of exercise, you could eat more carbs and still potentially be in ketosis.

Just because your energy output is so high, you'd be burning through those carbs and your body would still produce some ketones to meet some of its energy needs.

But in this video, we're going to talk about getting into ketosis by cutting carbs.

What can you eat on a keto diet?

So if you can't eat carbs on a keto diet, what can you eat? Well, here's the thing, you can still eat a wide variety of low-carb foods while following this diet.

Meat, fish, eggs, and oils are all completely carb free and tend to make up the majority of calories on a keto diet.

Nuts, berries, non-starchy vegetables, like spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, and many other salads, vegetables are also so low in carbs that you can add quite a few to your diet and still be in ketosis.

So think of it like this if you normally grab a burger and chips for lunch.

To make it keto, you just need to remove the bond from the burger and replace the chips with salad, which, in retrospect actually sounds pretty sad, but healthy.

Why start the keto diet?

So why would someone even want to do a keto diet? The simple answer is fat loss.

When people try keto diets, they lose weight, and they lose it especially quickly, at the start.

You see some of the initial weight loss is actually water weight.

And there's a very easy explanation plus each gramme of carbs in our muscles holds on to about three to four grammes of water, an average person can have as much as 500 grammes of carbs stored in their muscles, holding on to up to two kilogrammes of water, reduce your carbs a lot, and you'll see a quick drop in body weight.

But that's not body fat.

In fact, as a lot of that water comes from muscle mass can get a little lower on keto diets to quit training with weights can help to hold on to it.

And that applies to every diet.

If you are losing weight.

Weight training will help you hold on to more muscle mass, which improves your body composition long term.

So if you lose a lot of weight as water on a keto diet, does that mean that it's no good for fat loss? Absolutely not.

And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

You see a lot of people are under the impression that because your body makes ketones out of fat, being in ketosis means someone will be losing a lot of body fat.

But that's not necessarily true.

See, if you eat very few carbs and a lot of fat and calories.

You can be in ketosis, but not use any of your body fat at all.

You just use the fat that you eat to make ketones, which means you're not losing body fat.

Now, you absolutely can lose a lot of body fat on a keto diet, but it's not because of some magic ketosis fat-burning effect, people lose fat on keto, because drumroll please, they eat fewer calories.

Think back to the burger and chips I mentioned earlier.

By removing the burger bun and chips, you're easily turning a 1000-calorie meal into a three to a 400-calorie meal.

When people do keto, they have to cut a huge amount of foods out of their diet biscuits, ice cream, chocolate bars, cakes, pastries, pies, and breakfast cereal sandwiches are gone.

That's called automatic calorie reduction.

And it works.

And just in case you don't believe me, there have been a lot of studies showing that people actually lose the same amount of weight on both very low carb or low-fat diets when calories are reduced the same amount.

Does lower insulin cause weight loss?

At this point, you may be wondering about lower insulin levels while on a keto diet.

You see when we carbs our body produces insulin, a hormone which is absolutely essential for our survival.

A few of insolence functions are to decrease fat burning and increase carb burn, to burn off the carbs that we've just eaten, and to store carbs, either as glycogen in our muscles or as body fat.

This leads people to believe that if you want to lower your body fat, all you need to do is lower your insulin by not eating carbs.

This is called a logical fallacy, something that sounds logical and true at first glance, but isn't the case.

You see, we have lots of evidence that people can have high insulin levels and still lose weight as long as they eat fewer calories than ever, or as long as they're in a calorie deficit.

In fact, there was a series of famous experiments back in the 1940s and 50s, using what's called the rice diet, which was used to help treat people with a number of conditions like heart disease, hypertension, kidney disease, and even diabetes.

People under diet ate a lot of surprise, surprise rice, and some fruit with over 90% of the diet's calories coming from carbohydrates, meaning they were producing a lot of insulin, and you know what happened? They all lost weight.

So it's not the lower insulin on a keto diet that causes weight loss.

So you probably want to know if there's any advantage to a keto diet.

How does keto affect appetite?

Why else would people do it? Right? Well, one of the big advantages of a keto diet is its effect on appetite.

You see being in ketosis seems to help lower hunger hormones like ghrelin, which means people are less hungry.

If you're not hungry, you're probably going to eat less.

That's why some people swear by keto diets, it helps lower appetite.

And if you don't feel hungry, you're way more likely to stick to a diet long term, and lose weight.

Some people think that keto diets also offer a metabolic advantage by helping burn more calories than high carb diets.

The thing is, while some experiments have shown a difference in calorie burn, like ketogenic diet, the difference is so small that it's practically irrelevant.

Can you burn more fat?

Another thing you might have heard is that if you're on a keto diet, you need to eat fat to burn fat.

Now, while this is technically true, in that if you eat more fats, you will burn more fat for energy.

If you eat a lot of fat, you won't be burning body fat, and for many people, that's the end goal.

You see, if you eat so much fat that you eat more calories than you need, you will burn some of the fat calories that you eat.

And if you have more leftover, they'll get stored as body fat, you will burn all of your own body fat at all.

So remember, even on a keto diet, calories matter, what about ketone supplements, also called exogenous ketones.

Well, they're often marketed as a weight loss supplement, but bear this in mind, like I said earlier, ketones are a source of energy just like carbs, or fats, so they contain calories, adding more calories to your diet is not how you lose weight.

In fact, studies using some of the most expensive ketone supplements on the market showed absolutely no effect on body weight.

You see, you can take ketones and increase the levels of ketones in your blood, but you won't be burning fat to make them yourself and they don't work at all.

If you go to the gym and lift weights, you'll also be happy to know that you can still perform just as well on a keto diet.

Although you may feel a little tired at the beginning as you adapt to it.

However, keto diets may not help you improve your performance to the maximum for very high intensity activities like Sprint's you might see a drop in performance.

But for the average gym goer, that probably won't make a difference at all.

But for competitive athletes, keto is probably not the best approach.

Carbs really, really help with high intensity performance.

Does keto affect your health?

Now another concern is the possible health effects if someone decides to use a keto diet for weight loss, now this is where things get a little bit more complicated.

You see, if someone loses weight, we often see improvements in blood sugar and insulin, especially if they have diabetes.

improvements in blood triglycerides, they tend to drop which is good HDL or good cholesterol goes up, which is also good.

This happens with weight loss of any type, but the changes can be especially noticeable on a keto diet.

But the big problem with some keto diets is that LDL or what many people know as bad cholesterol tends to go up.

That can be a problem because high levels of LDL cholesterol can lead to heart disease over many many years.

One of the reasons for the high cholesterol is the high level of saturated fat from foods like water, and fatty and processed meats like bacon, which are really popular on keto diets, or at least some keto diets.

But here's the good news.

If someone follows a healthier keto diet pattern, high in green or salad vegetables that are high in fibre, and with mostly unsaturated fats from fish and olive oil, even nuts, a ketogenic diet can actually help to reduce LDL cholesterol.

So it's really important to remember that while calories matter, food quality also matters.

I really want to stress this point, because within the umbrella term of keto, which just means a diet low and enough in carbs to cause someone to go into ketosis, there can be many different ways of eating these different ways of doing keto can have significantly different effects on health.

And that's why we shouldn't assume that all keto diets are the same, just like we can have healthy and less healthy vegan stuff.

Any more keto questions?

So should you try keto? Well, that's completely up to you.

Try it, see how it feels, if you like it, and it feels like it's something that you can happily stick with.

Some people really do well on keto, some people who just love carbs, and if that's you, maybe keto isn't the best choice.

The most important thing to remember is that you don't need to do keto to lose weight, or control your calories, and you can use any number of diets.

The trick is to find the diet that you enjoy, and that you can stick to long term.

So did that clear everything up with the keto diet? As always, if you have any more questions, let me know in the comments below.

And if you have any experienced keto diet, let me know.