The ketogenic diet has been gaining popularity within the last 5 years. With television shows and magazines promoting it as the new fad diet, where weight loss occurs rather quickly. The reality is that it has been an upscale battle to view the ketogenic diet as a nutritional diet to treat the epidemic of diabetes and cardiac disease prevention.
As we now know carbohydrates and sugars are the leading cause of high blood sugars and elevated cholesterol. This is mainly caused by an abnormal amount of insulin spiking throughout the day.
When following the ketogenic regimen for around 2-3 months you will allow your body to become physiologically efficient at utilizing fat as energy. I do not know anyone who doesn’t wants to burn fat whenever they want by simply allowing your body to become a fat burning machine!
Through out my stay as the Wellness Nutrition Coordinator I have had patients have concerns about the ketogenic diet being high in oxidative stress. The truth is yes it does cause our body oxidative stress, but over the course of a month what studies have shown is that that oxidative stress will decrease! This means your body is getting better at dealing with stress, something you should be excited about. This adaptation is a benefit of ketosis.
The longer you allow your cells to be fueled by Ketones the more genetic activation that will occur. That means that our own genetic makeup will become more efficient!
This is due to Histone Deacetylase inhibition. As our body is in ketosis the body will be superb at utilizing fats for fuel.
Whenever we work out in either cardio or resistance training and are doing keto, our body will primarily use fat stores rather than carb stores! Now this will not occur unless you are fat adapted.
This blog is to educate our patients about the benefits of nutritional ketosis and in my experience most patients carb cycle incorrectly. They either do a low carb keto genic style diet for 4-5 days out of the week and load up on carbs on the weekends. This is not metabolically feasible as you are not allowing yourself to adapt to the oxidative stress we mentioned before.
The correct way to cycle in and out of keto and get the benefits of both worlds would be to follow a strict keto diet for 2-3 months then you can have a 2–3-week window of bringing low glycemic carbs back into your diet. After those few weeks of allowing some carbohydrates back into your diet it will allow your body to become metabolically flexible. The recommendation is to go back into a strict keto diet for those 2-3 months after and continue the protocol as recommended.
Stick with Low Glycemic carbs when cycling out of keto and add foods rich in Butyrate’s. ( Need to increase list)
· Sweet potatoes
· Butter nut squash
· Artichokes
Low inflammation Carbs (Need to increase list)
· Potatoes red or white
· Parsnips
Avoid a bunch of white rice/ grains/ lectins/ processed and junk foods!
Lectins are present in most plant foods but especially high in:
Legumes, such as beans, lentils, peas, soybeans, and peanuts
Nightshade vegetables, such as tomatoes and eggplant
Dairy products, including milk
Grains, such as barley, quinoa, and rice
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