
Fitness
What this Dietitian ACTUALLY Thinks About a Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss
What this Dietitian ACTUALLY Thinks About a Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss
As a dietitian, my healthy diet rule number one is this:
Don’t exclude an entire food group.
But guess what?
The keto diet eliminates multiple food groups!
I found that many people were so effusive in praising the keto diet and I thought they needed to get their heads examined.
Why would anyone go on a highly constraining weight loss diet?
I figured it was probably far from effective and it seemed downright unhealthy.
So that was my thinking before I decided to go knee deep into this diet and started learning its ins and outs.
After thorough analysis, personal experimentation for several months, and the feedback I’ve received from a good number of people who have been following this diet diligently, I have no choice but to eat a little humble pie and declare the following:
Keto diet WORKS like one heck of a charm!
I no longer deem it “downright unhealthy,” though it does possess its share of flaws.
I’ll share with you a couple of prominent issues with this diet, but rest assured they can be dealt with pretty easily.
I’ll share the solutions too, of course.
The third problem, however, is a rather enormous one.
But as an experienced dietitian with the right connections, I have a solution for that as well—stay tuned…
First, I want to let you in on the upsides of the keto diet.
Benefit #1: Helps You Lose Weight Really Fast
Keto diet should be your weight loss diet of choice if you’re interested in shedding off a bunch of excess pounds as quickly as possible.
The speedy weight loss is made possible due to the keto diet’s effectiveness in getting rid of surplus water from the body.
How does that work?
As you’re well aware, the glucose in our bodies is stashed away in glycogen along with water.
What the keto diet does is it drains our glucose supply and once depletion starts, the water surplus goes out too.
And here’s another interesting tidbit:
Over the last 3 decades or so, multiple studies were done on ketogenic diet in relation to endurance performance.
While those studies could not clearly conclude that keto diet is able to improve one’s endurance, they did discover that test subjects that adopted this diet were able to achieve noticeable weight loss results faster than those that did not.
Benefit #2: Does Not Make You Feel Hungry
Inability to deal with that dreaded feeling of hunger is one of the major reasons why countless of people failed at dieting for weight loss.
Keto diet solves this problem by subduing a hormone in the body known as ghrelin, which is the hormone responsible for making us feel hungry.
A study on this matter was done some time back in 2013.
Needless to say, this is just the weight loss diet to embrace, especially if you’re one of those who simply can’t fight off your hunger urges.
Now, here are the downsides of the keto diet based on my personal experience as well as the experience of several others.
Problem #1: Makes You Prone to Constipation
This is bound to happen because the keto diet is after all, a diet that’s very low in carbohydrates.
Foods that are loaded with fiber e.g. certain types of veggies, breakfast cereals, fruits, wheat, and more can’t be incorporated into the keto diet.
Solution:
Eat plenty of fiber-rich veggies that are low in carb such as mushrooms, bell peppers, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, zucchini, etc.
Problem #2: Diminishes Your Intake of Calcium and Vitamin D
Keto-approved foods are deficient in calcium and vitamin D.
In the long run, this will endanger the health of your bone system.
Solution:
Get a high quality calcium supplement such as Bluebonnet’s Calcium Citrate Magnesium and vitamin D3.
Problem #3: Extremely Hard to Sustain (Its BIGGEST Problem)
Yes, keto diet is notoriously constraining and the failure rate is said to be close to 100%…yikes!
Most people throw in the towel due to the lack of exciting dishes.
Solution:
Get this keto diet cookbook, which is totally FREE.
This genuinely awesome cookbook was put together by a few of my good friends—my “connections”— and it has a ton of super exciting keto-approved recipes such as Cream Cheese Pancakes, Bacon Guacamole, Cheesy Taco Shells, Raspberry Scones, and well…way too many to list here!
Go ahead—click this link and check it out yourself. They won’t make it free for long.
