Keto For Beginners – Part 1

So what is the ketogenic diet?

The Ketogenic Diet

In a nutshell the ketogenic diet is a very low-carb, high-fat diet with moderate amounts of protein.  Sometimes people get it confused with the Atkins Diet which was big oh back I think in the late nineties, early 2000’s and that’s primarily focusing on low-carb but to my knowledge doesn’t have an emphasis on replacing the carbs with high quantities of fat.

When you limit your carb intake and replace carbs with fat, over a period of time, your body starts breaking down stored fat through a metabolic process called ketosis (more about this down below)

So basically the keto diet enables your body to burn fat for fuel.  But we’re going to nerd out a little bit more so you can get the full picture because understanding the science behind it will really help you internalize the impact it has on your body both from a losing weight/fat standpoint and also from a wellness perspective with what's going on internally.

First of all, let’s talk about some of the benefits that are showing up with a ketogenic lifestyle/diet.

Health Benefits of a Ketogenic Diet

When doing my research, I did read a lot about various benefits that people were experiencing on the ketogenic diet.  Some of the top benefits was reducing inflammation throughout the body, providing better mental clarity, reducing blood sugar spikes and crashes, helping to regulate hormones, and losing weight, just to name a few.

There’s also research that is showing that a ketogenic diet can lead to significant health benefits for those with Type 2 Diabetes and insulin sensitivity in addition to a ton of other diseases.

Studies are also showing a positive correlation with the ketogenic diet for improving blood pressure and raising HDL which is the "good cholesterol" versus a low-fat diet.

There's also promising research showing that following the ketogenic diet can lower inflammation in both the body and brain and there’s growing research showing that cancer cells which have a strong dependency on glucose are affected when there’s not enough glucose in the body to fuel them meaning when there’s less glucose present they can’t survive.

And that’s just scratching the surface on the benefits that are coming to light for a ketogenic diet.   Needless to say, I was super excited to embark on a new journey that would be good both for my body on the outside and the inside.

Let me pause right here and just note something that is very important to me for everyone to understand and I'm going to be doing more posts on this in the future.  Inflammation is so prevalent out there due to our diets and stressful lifestyle and while like stress, inflammation isn't a "disease" just like stress it causes so many horrible diseases that if we can intentionally focus on ways to lower and fight inflammation internally, that results in huge benefits as far as how we age, fight disease, and live our best life.  Ok...off my soapbox for now...

Your Body On Carbohydrates

So let’s talk first about what happens when you eat food that is high in carbohydrates because this was news to me and I thought I was pretty informed in the area of nutrition.  When you eat food, your body converts that food into energy, and when you eat carbohydrates, your body converts those carbohydrates into a sugar called glucose which is absorbed into the bloodstream with the help of a hormone called insulin. That glucose then enters your cells and provides energy to them.  (Insulin helps control your blood sugar levels and is produced by an organ in your body called the pancreas.)

That right there was something new that I learned when I started doing more research.  So think about it…you get up and eat breakfast. Say you have a piece of toast or oatmeal, your body is processing those carbs that you may think are healthy, as sugar and you’re getting a potential blood sugar spike that you may not have realized thinking you were making a healthy choice.

Now there are different types of simple and complex carbs and some foods have more carbs than others, but just the realization that if I eat oatmeal instead of eggs, my blood sugar would spike higher with the oatmeal than with the eggs gave me insight into what was going on inside my body even when I thought I was being healthy!

So another example, think about when you hit the candy bowl or eat one of those snack packs out of a vending machine.   What happens when you eat a bunch of carbs like that is your blood sugar spikes because you’ve got all that glucose getting pumped into your bloodstream, and then your pancreas pumps out insulin to control your blood sugar, and your body burns the sugar AKA glucose as a quick fuel.   Once it burns it up usually you'll feel a crash of energy or wind up getting more sugar cravings and the pattern continues.

That my friends is called a sugar rush.  That's why you can eat a snack pack of carbs and 30 minutes later be hungry again.

Any extra glucose that your body doesn't need at that time gets stored in the liver and muscles to be used at a later time for fuel and this stored glucose is called glycogen (that’s important – we’ll talk about glycogen in a bit).

So now that you have a clearer idea of what’s going on inside your body when you eat carbohydrates, let’s talk about how your body uses different fuel sources.

Fuel Sources

As I mentioned above, when you eat food, your body processes that food and uses it for energy otherwise known as fuel. When your body is looking for energy, it starts by looking for any glucose that’s hanging around in the bloodstream because out of all the fuel options, glucose is the quickest and easiest for your body to burn.  It's the path of least resistance for your body.

Then if it doesn’t find enough glucose, your body moves on to look for glycogen, which is the glucose that is stored in your liver and muscles.

The best analogy for your body and the fuel sources I've seen is think about the last time you went camping and went to go start that campfire to roast s’mores.  When you start that campfire, you need something dry that will light quick, right?  So you hunt for some dry leaves, pine needles, newspaper, etc.  Then once you get that lit, you generally root around for some twigs and dry pieces of small wood to get the fire going a bit stronger and once those pieces of wood get going for a bit, then you can set a nice big piece of firewood on top and since the fire is more established, instead of the log snuffing out the fire, the fire is burning strong and steady enough to light the larger piece of firewood and then you have your fire burning bright for the rest of the evening.

With me so far?  Ok great…in this example, carbohydrates are like the dry leaves, pine needles or newspaper.  Protein is the twigs or small dry pieces of wood that help keep the fire burning, and fat is the big piece of firewood.

So like your body, when you start a fire, you want to start with what will burn the fastest with the least amount of energy.  Pine needles/dry leaves require just a spark, right?  They are dry and they light up super quick and they burn out super quick.  To keep them going you have to keep adding more pine needles or some twigs.

Then you have protein, or your twigs, that light up after a bit and then continue to burn longer than the pine needles, give off some heat but it will require either more pine needles to keep the flame going or once the fire gets hot enough, putting a log on it to keep the fire going for the long haul.  So like the fire, if you just have carbs or protein, they burn up relatively fast and continuously need to be replaced for energy.

Now to get the big piece of firewood lit, you can't just light it first, you have to let the heat build from the fire and then get the log lit and once it's lit it can go much longer and burn much hotter than the other 2 sources of energy.  So in your body, when we get to this state where we are burning fat for fuel instead of protein or carbohydrates, we are in a metabolic state called ketosis which is where the body is now burning fat for fuel.