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| If it's been 6 to 8 weeks and Keto still isn't working, it's time to re-evaluate what you're doing. |
Are you struggling to make a Keto Diet work for you?
Maybe, you read one of the Atkins books or did some research online and after reading about the blessings of nutritional ketosis, you decided to give it a try. You even picked up a bottle of Ketostix to check your urine for ketones.
You made it through Atkins Induction or the first 14 to 21 days reasonably well. The sticks said you were in ketosis, but now you're having second thoughts about your decision.
Your energy has tanked, you're starving all the time, and despite the fact that you know you're in ketosis, the pounds just aren't coming off.
Ketogenic diets are one of the hottest weight-loss plans available today. They promise an easy way to correct hormonal imbalances, improve cholesterol markers, control excess hunger and cravings, and reach your weight-loss goals without a lot of effort.
But the truth is, Keto doesn't work for everyone.
Ketogenic diets are designed to do certain things like dropping your insulin level and helping you get control of your cravings and snacking habits. However, if you don't fall into the category of being insulin resistant, and don't struggle with hunger, going Keto can be an uphill battle.
Especially, if you've bought into the myth about having to eat a minimal amount of protein and 80 percent of your calories in fats to make Keto work.
That much fat isn't realistic.
Nor is it a true ketogenic weight-loss diet.
The figures and ideas tossed around the web today were actually created as a maintenance diet for endurance athletes.
To lose weight on Keto, you have to do what any weight-loss diet asks of you: eat fewer calories than your body needs to function, so your body will dip into its fat reserves to make up the difference.
If you've been trying to lose weight by restricting carbs and ketosis didn't work like you thought it would, here's what you can do to get the scale moving in the right direction.
Before deciding if ketosis isn't for you, take a few minutes and determine if you're really doing a ketogenic diet.
Most people doing Keto are not really doing Keto. They are actually doing something called a Fat Fast created by Dr. Atkins for those who are metabolically resistant to the state of ketosis.
While the word Keto is often used as a generic term to describe those in the state of optimal ketosis, most dieters who use the term Keto are referring to a low-carb high-fat diet created by Dr. Phinney.
Especially, if you've bought into the myth about having to eat a minimal amount of protein and 80 percent of your calories in fats to make Keto work.
That much fat isn't realistic.
Nor is it a true ketogenic weight-loss diet.
The figures and ideas tossed around the web today were actually created as a maintenance diet for endurance athletes.
To lose weight on Keto, you have to do what any weight-loss diet asks of you: eat fewer calories than your body needs to function, so your body will dip into its fat reserves to make up the difference.
If you've been trying to lose weight by restricting carbs and ketosis didn't work like you thought it would, here's what you can do to get the scale moving in the right direction.
Make Sure You're Really Doing Keto
Before deciding if ketosis isn't for you, take a few minutes and determine if you're really doing a ketogenic diet.
Most people doing Keto are not really doing Keto. They are actually doing something called a Fat Fast created by Dr. Atkins for those who are metabolically resistant to the state of ketosis.
While the word Keto is often used as a generic term to describe those in the state of optimal ketosis, most dieters who use the term Keto are referring to a low-carb high-fat diet created by Dr. Phinney.
This Keto Diet has caused a lot of confusion within the low-carb community because Jimmy Moore, a popular low-carb blogger, took Dr. Phinney's maintenance diet for athletes, used those optimum percentages on himself, and started to lose weight.
When this happened, many of Jimmy's readers decided to join him, and within a very short period of time, the Keto Diet was born.
The problem?
This tweaked version of Dr. Phinney's maintenance diet required you to eat:
But the percentages did work for Jimmy because percentages can be deceiving. The body doesn't work with percentages. It deals in absolutes, so it's the grams of protein, carbs, and fats that matter most.
Go below the amount of protein grams that your body needs to repair damaged tissues and worn-out protein structures, and you'll go into a state that Dr. Phinney refers to as ketone starvation.
Ketones building up in the bloodstream will be very high, but protein won't be enough to prevent the body from using muscle or organ tissue to get the amino acids it needs for life.
As a result, the body will begin to take certain precautions to protect your health, and slowing down or stopping fat loss is one of those adaptions.
In addition, if you're consuming all of the fat your body needs to function well, it has no reason to rob your fat stores, so first, make sure that you're doing keto correctly. Don't just buy into the ideas about ketosis that you read online.
The average ketogenic diet contains a maximum of 65% fat, and most dieters find they have to cut their fat intake by much more than that to see success. When losing over 100 pounds a few years ago, I had to cut my fat intake down to 60 grams a day.
That was the only way to get the pounds to come off.
So if you've been eating 80% of your calories in fat, cut down on the amount of fat you're eating and see if the weight starts to come off. If so, then you have the culprit. Keep doing what you're doing.
If that doesn't work, then you need to take a second look at how much you want to weigh.
Ketogenic diets are not designed to help you lose belly fat, and they are not designed to help you get shredded, especially if you are already at goal weight or only slightly above.
Losing the last 10 or 15 pounds is difficult on any weight-loss diet, but those pounds will be almost impossible to lose doing Keto. This is because the caloric deficit you need to lose only 10 pounds will drive your calorie level down lower than is typical on a low-carb diet.
Keto isn't magic.
You still have to eat fewer calories than you can use on a daily basis. To lose a single pound of body fat, you'll need to short-change your body 3,500 calories a week, which comes to about 500 calories a day.
In addition, the closer you are to ideal weight, the harder your body will fight to defend its fat stores, and the faster the body will adapt to calorie deprivation.
Restricting carbs doesn't change the law of thermodynamics.
In fact, it can make it more difficult since low carb uses the starvation pathway. While that might sound drastic, this alternative pathway allows the body to walk away from a defective glucose metabolism and start burning fatty acids for fuel.
However, if you are insulin sensitive instead of insulin resistant, which is highly likely if you only have 5 or 10 pounds to lose, you'll also be fighting against how you feel on Keto.
If you have not been overeating fat, or you only have a few pounds to lose, you might not be insulin resistant.
You might be insulin sensitive.
Another misconception that is common within the low-carb community is that everyone who is overweight or obese has insulin resistance and trouble digesting carbs.
This simply isn't true.
And it's even less true for those who only have less than 40 pounds to lose.
The body uses the carbs you eat first, before it turns to amino acids or dietary fats. In fact, in the presence of carbs, most of the fat you eat finds its way into your fat cells, where it waits patiently until the body needs to use it.
This is why high-carb low-fat diets work well. There is less fat in your diet to get clogged up in your fat cells. Fat cells are not storage depots. Fats constantly flow into and out of your fat cells, as needed. They are consistently in flux.
When you eat, food is broken down into glucose and amino acids. Fats are pretty much already in a storable form, so there isn't much done with them.
Since glucose causes your insulin level to rise, even the glucose that comes from vegetables and salads, almost all fats you eat are stored for later use.
Whether your body actually gets around to using those stored fats is determined by your basal insulin level and how many calories you're taking in and using on a consistent basis.
Basal insulin is dependent on the number of carbs you eat consistently, so when you go Keto, your insulin level tends to fall rather quickly. For those who are insulin resistant, this is a nice benefit because it makes body fat more accessible for use.
Insulin resistant people have an easy time on Keto because the liver never sees your insulin level as high, even after meals. It believes that your insulin is always low.
This keeps stored fat easily accessible to the liver, and why some of the stories and testimonies about low-carb diets often sound too good to be true.
When this happened, many of Jimmy's readers decided to join him, and within a very short period of time, the Keto Diet was born.
The problem?
This tweaked version of Dr. Phinney's maintenance diet required you to eat:
- 15% of your calories in protein
- 5% of your calories in carbohydrates
- 80% of your calories in dietary fats
But the percentages did work for Jimmy because percentages can be deceiving. The body doesn't work with percentages. It deals in absolutes, so it's the grams of protein, carbs, and fats that matter most.
Go below the amount of protein grams that your body needs to repair damaged tissues and worn-out protein structures, and you'll go into a state that Dr. Phinney refers to as ketone starvation.
Ketones building up in the bloodstream will be very high, but protein won't be enough to prevent the body from using muscle or organ tissue to get the amino acids it needs for life.
As a result, the body will begin to take certain precautions to protect your health, and slowing down or stopping fat loss is one of those adaptions.
In addition, if you're consuming all of the fat your body needs to function well, it has no reason to rob your fat stores, so first, make sure that you're doing keto correctly. Don't just buy into the ideas about ketosis that you read online.
The average ketogenic diet contains a maximum of 65% fat, and most dieters find they have to cut their fat intake by much more than that to see success. When losing over 100 pounds a few years ago, I had to cut my fat intake down to 60 grams a day.
That was the only way to get the pounds to come off.
So if you've been eating 80% of your calories in fat, cut down on the amount of fat you're eating and see if the weight starts to come off. If so, then you have the culprit. Keep doing what you're doing.
If that doesn't work, then you need to take a second look at how much you want to weigh.
Are You Already at Ideal Weight?
 |
| For those with only a few pounds to lose, Keto won't work as well. |
Ketogenic diets are not designed to help you lose belly fat, and they are not designed to help you get shredded, especially if you are already at goal weight or only slightly above.
Losing the last 10 or 15 pounds is difficult on any weight-loss diet, but those pounds will be almost impossible to lose doing Keto. This is because the caloric deficit you need to lose only 10 pounds will drive your calorie level down lower than is typical on a low-carb diet.
Keto isn't magic.
You still have to eat fewer calories than you can use on a daily basis. To lose a single pound of body fat, you'll need to short-change your body 3,500 calories a week, which comes to about 500 calories a day.
In addition, the closer you are to ideal weight, the harder your body will fight to defend its fat stores, and the faster the body will adapt to calorie deprivation.
Restricting carbs doesn't change the law of thermodynamics.
In fact, it can make it more difficult since low carb uses the starvation pathway. While that might sound drastic, this alternative pathway allows the body to walk away from a defective glucose metabolism and start burning fatty acids for fuel.
However, if you are insulin sensitive instead of insulin resistant, which is highly likely if you only have 5 or 10 pounds to lose, you'll also be fighting against how you feel on Keto.
Are You Insulin Resistant? Or Insulin Sensitive?
If you have not been overeating fat, or you only have a few pounds to lose, you might not be insulin resistant.
You might be insulin sensitive.
Another misconception that is common within the low-carb community is that everyone who is overweight or obese has insulin resistance and trouble digesting carbs.
This simply isn't true.
And it's even less true for those who only have less than 40 pounds to lose.
The body uses the carbs you eat first, before it turns to amino acids or dietary fats. In fact, in the presence of carbs, most of the fat you eat finds its way into your fat cells, where it waits patiently until the body needs to use it.
This is why high-carb low-fat diets work well. There is less fat in your diet to get clogged up in your fat cells. Fat cells are not storage depots. Fats constantly flow into and out of your fat cells, as needed. They are consistently in flux.
When you eat, food is broken down into glucose and amino acids. Fats are pretty much already in a storable form, so there isn't much done with them.
Since glucose causes your insulin level to rise, even the glucose that comes from vegetables and salads, almost all fats you eat are stored for later use.
Whether your body actually gets around to using those stored fats is determined by your basal insulin level and how many calories you're taking in and using on a consistent basis.
Basal insulin is dependent on the number of carbs you eat consistently, so when you go Keto, your insulin level tends to fall rather quickly. For those who are insulin resistant, this is a nice benefit because it makes body fat more accessible for use.
Insulin resistant people have an easy time on Keto because the liver never sees your insulin level as high, even after meals. It believes that your insulin is always low.
This keeps stored fat easily accessible to the liver, and why some of the stories and testimonies about low-carb diets often sound too good to be true.
If you're severely insulin resistant, you can lose a lot of weight in the beginning of your low-carb diet.
Insulin sensitive people, or those who have partially healed their insulin resistance by going Keto, have a much harder time losing weight because the liver determines your blood glucose level by the level of insulin in the blood.
The liver doesn't see your blood sugar level directly.
If insulin is high, like right after meals, then fat mobilization will be put on hold until your insulin level drops.
This fall in insulin rarely occurs until your blood glucose level falls below 100 mg/dl, which is why Intermittent Fasting works extremely well for those who are insulin sensitive or only mildly insulin resistant.
In addition, people who are insulin sensitive might feel horrible when they go Keto. This is because they are not burning fats for fuel as easily as those who are resistant to insulin.
Genetics also plays a role here.
To be able to burn an excessively high dietary fat intake takes an upswing in the enzymes needed to burn fats. Insulin sensitive people do not always have the ability to up-regulate those enzymes. While a few do, most do not.
If it's been a good 6 to 8 weeks since you started Keto and you still feel lethargic and worn out, then you probably don't have the ability to make enough fat-burning enzyme.
There is no way to force your body to burn more fat, so if you have this problem, you'll need to either:
1) Move to a low-fat low-carb diet;
OR
2) Switch to a more moderate-carb plan where less dietary fat is required on a daily basis.
I personally do not feel good on a ketogenic diet.
I need a more generous amount of carbs, as well as less fat than you'd find on a typical low-carb diet. While I can't do Atkins Induction, I do have pre-diabetes, so I almost always eat less than 120 carbs a day.
Up Your Carbohydrates and Lower Your Fats
Just because Keto didn't work for you, that doesn't mean that the only alternative is to go on a high-carb low-fat diet.
Weight loss is dependent on energy coming in being less than the amount of energy you use throughout the day, so upping your carbohydrates to a more moderate level of 60 to 150 carbs a day and bringing down your dietary fats enough to give you the calorie deficit you need will work for most people.
This is a different approach than our prior advice on how to return carbs to your diet because those who've been low carbing for several months will need to up their carbs more slowly than those who have only been restricting carbs for a couple of months.
In addition, if Keto isn't working for you, and you feel tired and thrashed, you'll want to raise your carbs more quickly than those who are ready to go on.
From a physical standpoint, as long as you don't exceed your maintenance calories for your current weight, the only weight gain you'll experience from returning carbs to your diet is the water and glycogen you lost during the very first week.
Nothing you gain will be body fat, so you can choose whether to return the carbs all at once or up them a bit more slowly.
The more carbs you return to your diet, the lower in fat you will have to go to retain a caloric deficit, so don't try to take your new high-fat habits into your moderate-carb diet with you.
That will backfire rather quickly.
Either keep track of your calories by weighing and measuring your food, or keep track of portion sizes and cut back that way. I've tried both of these methods and both of them work rather nicely. In fact, I lost 40 pounds a couple of years ago by cutting down on portion sizes alone.
I didn't track a single thing other than to figure out what a meal that contained 300 to 400 calories looked like.
Walking Away from Keto is Not Failing
Ketogenic diets do not work for everyone, so please keep that in mind if you decide that Keto isn't right for you. Most of the time there are physical reasons that are beyond your control.
While emotional eating attachments to carby foods and food habits can certainly threaten your ketogenic diet, most of the time, people find Keto so filling and satisfying that the problem is almost always a physical one.
Walking away from Keto isn't failing your diet.
Sometimes, it just makes logical sense to do something else. Doing what doesn't work isn't practical, so take charge of your health by giving your Keto Diet some serious thought and consideration and then do what you need to do to reach your goals.
If that requires you to walk away and readjust your carb and fat intake, then so be it.
That's why Just Do You is here for you.
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