Essential Tips For Success On The Keto Diet
The ketogenic, or keto diet, has become one of the biggest trends, thanks to a lot of research into the benefits of a low-carb diet for your health. This diet requires you to cut out a large portion of carbohydrates in your diet and replace it with healthy fats. When you restrict carbs from your diet, you readjust your body to run off both dietary and body fat as its main source of energy. Adopting a low carb, high-fat diet has been shown to provide several health benefits like reduced inflammation, improved brain function, and rapid weight loss. Just the thought of cutting out carbs from your diet can put off a lot of people from trying this way of eating. Luckily, there are several tricks that you can implement immediately to help you to start the low-carb, high-fat diet with minimal effort.
Try Intermittent Fasting
Intermitten fasting is one of the most effective tips that you can put into action straight away to ge into ketosis and help you to lose weight. Intermittent fasting means that you don’t eat or drink anything that contains calories for an allotted period of time, although you can enjoy calorie-free keto tea for keto diet.
Intermittent fasting can manipulate your body’s mitochondria in similar ways as the ketogenic diet to increase your lifespan. When you don’t consume calories for a few hours, your body starts to deplete all of the excess glucose that is stored in your body from eating carbs.
To start burning fats for energy, which is the point of a keto diet, your body needs to burn through any glucose that is in the body. There are several types of intermittent fasting protocols that will help you to get into ketosis faster.
If you’re new to fasting, skipping breakfast is an easy way to start. If you are already keto-adapted, fat-fasting is a common way to get over a weight loss plateau. This is when you consume 80-90% of your calories from fat for a set period of time, for no more than three to five days, while limiting everything else. Doing so will allow your body to speed up its metabolism to burn more fat.
Decrease Stress
Chronis stress will hinder your body’s ability to enter ketosis. This is because the stress hormone cortisol elevates your blood sugar levels, which will prevent your body from burning fats for energy because there is too much sugar in the blood.
If you dealing with a lot of stress at the moment, starting the keto diet might not be the best bet.
It is better to start this plan when you can keep stress to a minimum and you can devote a lot of your time towards staying in ketosis.
If you want to start the keto diet now, it is still possible. Just make sure you take some steps to reduce the stress in your diets, such as getting enough sleep, exercising on a regular basis, taking time to do something that you enjoy, or adopting relaxation techniques like meditation, or yoga.
Prioritize Your Sleep
Poor sleep will increase the levels of your stress hormones. This can prevent you from getting into fat-burning mode.
Maintaining a proper sleep schedule on a keto diet where you go to bed at the same time everyday will help you to get better quality sleep.
It is critical to get at least seven to nine hours of sleep every night. If you are getting less than that, try adding an extra half an hour every night until your reach your sleep goal.
A lot of studies have found that not getting enough sleep can really hurt your ability to lose weight.
Sleeping in a cool room and keeping the room dark will help you to get into a deep, restorative sleep more often.
If you have trouble sleeping, a natural sleep aid like melatonin can help a lot too.
Add More Salt To Your Diet
A lot of people worry about eating a lot of salt, as we have all been taught that our daily sodium intake should be very low, but this is typically only the case on high carbohydrate diets.
This is because higher-carb diets usually have naturally higher levels of insulin. When your insulin levels are high, your kidneys will start to retain sodium.
When you adopt a low-carb, high-fat diet like the keto diet, insulin levels are much lower and your body will excrete more salt since there are no carbs present in your body to cause an insulin spike and hold onto the sodium. When you’re in ketosis, add an extra three to five grams of sodium in your diet.
This will help you to avoid imbalances in electrolytes. The healthiest way to get more salt into your diet will include:
Adding Himalayan sea salt, or pink salt, which contains natural trace minerals to your water throughout the day
Drinking organic bone broth
Sprinkling pink salt on your meals
Eating low carb foods that naturally contain sodium like cucumbers and celery
Eating salted macadamia nuts
Exercise Frequently
Maintaining a regular exercise schedule while you are on the keto diet can help you to boost your ketone levels and help you to transition into a low-carb, high-fat lifestyle much quicker than you could without exercise. To get into ketosis, your body needs to get rid of any glucose that is present in the body.
Exercise needs different types of energy for fuel, including carbs, fats, and amino acids. The more you exercise, the quicker your body depletes its glycogen stores. Once your body has used up its glycogen stores, it will seek out other forms of fuel and will turn to fat for energy through ketosis.
Make sure you incorporate a proper workout routine that includes both high-intensity exercises alongside low-intensity steady-state exercises, like walking or jogging. Doing this will help you to balance your blood sugar and aids your body in entering ketosis, making the diet more effective.