The Ketogenic diet is taking the world by storm. There has been an explosion of evidence that eating keto is beneficial for essentially all the major health problems that plague our country and the rest of the world – such as Alzheimer’s disease, Diabetes, Obesity, and Heart Disease, and other conditions such as Seizure Disorders, Addiction, and even Cancer.
Let’s focus on obesity, since it is the cause of many of the other problems listed. Obesity is a carbohydrate intolerance disease. This means that if you are overweight or obese, your body is not able to tolerate the amount of carbohydrate that you have been consuming. Carbohydrate equals sugar. For example, one slice of bread equals 3 teaspoons of sugar, which is about 12 grams of carbohydrate.
The problem is that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is EXTREMELY high in carbohydrates. Basically, our bodies did not evolve to be able to tolerate the amount of carbs that we are consuming daily. The Keto diet only allows for 20 grams of carbohydrate per day. If you read food labels or google the carb content of common foods, you will quickly see how many carbs are in commonly consumed foods – and it is a LOT. Even too much fruit is a problem since it is high in the sugar fructose.
Our bodies can function on two basic forms of fuel – carbohydrate and fat. The way our bodies are designed is that if carbohydrate is available, we will always burn that first. So – the typical high carb diet that most people eat never allows for fat burning, and mostly causes fat storage because of high insulin.
When you consume carbohydrates, the blood sugar increase causes insulin to rapidly rise as it tries to bring the toxic sugar back down – and high insulin is the hormone that causes fat storage. Protein causes blood sugar to rise less, but fat consumption doesn’t cause it to rise very much at all. So, when you eat a high fat, moderate protein, and very low carbohydrate diet – the Ketogenic diet – your insulin stays low, and your body becomes able to burn fat for fuel. This means that if you are overweight you will lose weight, if your blood pressure is high it will go down, the brain/liver/kidney damage from high sugar stops, seizures may go away, cravings not only for food but even drugs and alcohol diminish, Type 2 Diabetes can be reversed, and even cancer cells can be starved – since cancer is mainly fueled by sugar.
When your body is burning fat for fuel your liver makes ketones, which can be easily measured in urine with ketone test strips, or in the blood with a ketone testing meter. When you are in ketosis, all kinds of good things start happening – your fat starts to melt, your blood sugar and blood pressure stabilizes, your appetite decreases, your cravings and inflammation diminish, and your energy improves.
When the ketogenic diet is combined with Intermittent Fasting, your health improves even faster because it initiates an intracellular clean-up process called Autophagy. Essentially, Autophagy means your cells are recycling damaged parts – which turns out to be critical for anti-aging and cancer prevention. Once you are in ketosis, fasting becomes much easier. You can start with skipping breakfast, and then later try eating dinner-to-dinner once or twice per week. It turns out that just reducing calories slows your metabolism and can hurt your chances of losing weight in the long run, but not eating at all – fasting for periods of time – actually speeds up your metabolism and improves weight loss.
If you would like help starting the Ketogenic diet, call us at Optimal Health Spectrums. We understand the diet and can assist you as your health improves and you are gradually able to stop all kinds of medications that you may be on – blood sugar medications, blood pressure medications, and more. The ketogenic diet could be the answer to your weight and health problems that you have been looking for!