How to Keto Diet
By A. Abrams April 24, 2019
If you have never heard of the keto diet (short for ketogenic diet), this article breaks down the facts to keep you well-informed and eating healthy.
Keto Basics
Keto dieting involves eating a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that offers many health benefits including weight loss.
The ketogenic diet, interestingly, also can benefit conditions of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and even Epilepsy.
While this article on ketogenic dieting is filled with keto nutrition education, it is best for general information. If you are looking to change your diet, you should speak to your doctor about options that are best for your health.
The Atkins diet came first, but the keto diet is similar to it in the aspect of low-carb dieting.
By intensely limiting your intake of carbs and replacing those ingredients with fat-rich foods, you are fulfilling the requirements of the ketogenic diet. Simple! This drastic reduction in carbs puts your body in a state of ketosis.
This, in essence, basically means that your body’s metabolism gets really efficient with burning fat for your energy instead of carbs. This fat is also converted into a substance called ketones within your liver – ketones supply energy for your brain.
The high reduction in carbohydrates can benefit you with much lower blood sugar and insulin levels.
Formula for Weight Loss
The ketogenic diet is a great way to lose weight and reduce risk of onset diseases. So many people follow the keto diet because of the success of others who have lost weight with this plan, and also that their is not a requirement to count calories as long as you are following the formula for the standard ketogenic diet:
75% fat, 20% protein, 5% carbs
This is a very low-carb, moderate-protein and high-fat diet. With a focus on macronutrients, this diet places 3/4 of your food intake entirely in the trust of fats.
This diet has proven so successful in fact, that one study found that people who keto diet lost 2.2 times more weight than people on a calorie-restricted, low-fat diet.
Helping Diabetes with Ketogenic Dieting
Because diabetes is involves drastic changes in metabolism and high blood sugar with impaired insulin function, the keto diet can significantly benefit those with a diabetic diagnosis.
Losing excess fat can help improve your conditions if you are a Type 2 diabetic. It can also reverse pre-diabetes as well as Metabolic Syndrome.
A study on keto diets and people with diabetes found that 95.2% of participants who were diabetic and followed the ketogenic diet were able to stop or reduce diabetes medication, while the group of diabetics on a higher-carb diet had only 62% that were able to drop their medication or reduce it.
Again, ask your doctor about your options before starting any drastically different diet, especially with a diabetic diagnosis.
Keto Meal Preparation
Eating ketogenic meals involves cutting back on carbs and increasing fat intake. It can be difficult to find meals that can fit into your day that meet keto requirements, so meal prepping is an easy way for you to keto diet. FitEx Meals offers many ketogenic meals to help you reach the goal of fulfilling the keto diet.
We offer meals like Keto Chicken over Cabbage Succotash, Keto Chicken Parmigiana, Keto Cheeseburger Bowl, and more.
Keto meal prep can be hard to figure out when you’re doing it all on your own. That’s why meal prep plans like FitEx Meals can really benefit someone who wants to do the Keto diet but lacks the time to find recipes, plan meals, go grocery shopping, and cook meals. Have meal prep delivered straight to your door including all of our regular high-protein, low-fat meals, as well as breakfast meals and ketogenic meals.
If you have ever had the opportunity to check out our menu, you may have seen that the protein content in our keto meals is higher than the fat content. Don’t let that confuse you – it is a common misconception that eating more protein than fat will prohibit you from entering ketosis mode, but the only threat to your body entering ketosis is consuming too many carbs.
Protein helps with fat loss. This macronutrient is more satiating than fat, so eating higher protein keto meals will actually help you feel full for longer periods of time. Protein is more nutrient dense, and people tend to overeat when protein is low.
According to Perfect Keto, burning your stored body fat for energy is the most effective option for losing weight on a keto diet rather than the fat you are consuming in your food. Therefore, by consuming more protein and less fat, your body will burn your fat stores and you will lose weight more quickly than if you consumed more fat than protein.
Additionally, if you are exercising and working out frequently, higher protein levels are necessary to consume in order to maintain muscle mass.
Check out our menu for next week’s meal prep delivery by clicking here. You can see the current meals available in our Grab-and-Go cooler by clicking here.