The Ketogenic Diet: Keto For Beginners

If you care or read about nutrition at all, you’ve probably heard of a ketogenic diet by now. If not, here’s a quick explanation of keto for beginners. 

The terms ketogenic and keto refer to the same diet. Put simply, it is a diet where you eat high fat, low carb foods, and restrict your carbohydrate intake to a very small amount.

Eating very few carbs causes your body to stop using glucose or sugar as fuel (because you are no longer eating sugar or carbs). You then start burning your body’s fat as fuel.

Technically, with this absence of blood sugar, your body starts breaking down stored fat cells into molecules called ketones, and beings to using them as fuel. This process is called ketosis.

So essentially, to effectively use the ketogenic diet, one would eat very little carbs (usually <50 or even <20) in order to start burning stored fat as energy.

Ketosis is usually reached over the course of 2-4 days of eating somewhere between 0-50 carbohydrates per day. Reaching ketosis can require more or less carbohydrate restriction depending on the person. Most people’s bodies stay in ketosis until they start eating carbs again.

How to Start – Keto for Beginners:

A ketogenic diet is clearly very low in carbohydrates, and typically high in fats and proteins. An easy way to start is to eliminate any starchy carbs like bread, pasta, soda, and sugary drinks.

Stick to whole, clean foods like meats, fish, nuts, veggies, eggs, butter, oils, and drink only water, black coffee, and tea without sugar.

Drinking only water and no-sugar drinks is the very first and best thing you can start doing. It will make everything else easier.

Even if you aren’t in ketosis right away, doing these things will make it easier to refine your diet going forward.