If you’re just starting a keto diet, you might be asking, what is a keto diet? Well, we’re here to try and help you understand the basics of a keto diet.
The ketogenic diet is a very low carb, high fat diet that shares many similarities with Atkins and other low carb diets. The keto diet plan involves drastically reducing carbohydrate intake and replacing it with fat . This reduction in carbs puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis . Your body becomes incredibly efficient at burning fat for energy . It also turns fat into ketones in the liver, which can supply energy for the brain.
Added health benefits from the keto diet plan also come from the reductions in blood sugar and insulin levels. During the ketogenic phase, your body is burning lots of fat as fuel . Every time you add more carbs, it gives the body carbs to burn instead of fat . So you’ll want to manage your carb intake according to how much weight you have to lose, and how fast you want to lose it .
With low carb, you have more freedom and flexibility to have some of the foods you want – such as fruit or starchy carbs like potatoes . When you slash the number of carbs when following a keto diet plan, you’ll be increasing fat intake and will have to be pickier about where your carbs come from. For example, you might really want bar-b-que chicken, but you’ll get sugar free sauce to coat it with so that you don’t blow all your carbs on a few chicken tenderloins . The key is to have a meal plan that has healthy carbohydrates and a good balance of vitamins and minerals.
Keto dieters must keep in mind there is a difference between refined carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates before they start tossing out essential nutrients. Refined or processed carbohydrates are what we find in our high glycemic foods index. Most are found in snack foods, breads, desserts, pastries, white rice and pastas. You’ll want to minimize consumption of refined carbohydrates in order to stick with a keto diet. This index research tool can help determine which foods are healthiest for a keto diet.
To determine glycemic index numbers, doctors observe how healthy people’s blood sugar levels change after ingesting carb-containing foods. By measuring these changes, they can determine where a food falls on a scale of zero to 100, where 100 represents pure glucose and zero is a food with no sugar at all. A low glycemic index diet can improve your overall health and help prevent certain illnesses. But remember, determining the glycemic index ratings for individual foods is an imperfect science. It’s going to be different for each food, depending on how it’s processed or prepared, but its a good way to determine what kinds of foods have a lower glycemic index and trying to make sure that there’s a good portion of these in each meal.
