Keto Guidelines

ou can technically be on a ketogenic diet and be eating, you know, McDonald's burgers with cheese and not the bun, or eating like pounds of butter in your coffee and things like that every morning, and yeah, maybe you're in ketosis. But the benefits of keto in my, my just over the years that I've noticed, it really comes down to the individual.

First of all, like where they're at in their health journey and what their goals are. A lot of the women that I work with have had just a lot of food focus that they've been, they've been, it's been hard for them to get away with because they have these sugar cravings or they have these cravings for, for higher carbohydrate foods that just can never dissipate. And then when they try keto, it helps to mitigate some of those cravings, it helps to regulate their blood sugar levels a little bit more throughout the day. And it's not that carbs are bad in the sense or anything like that. It's just kind of going back to Okay, what's your what's your goal, and what have you been struggling with.

And so when it comes to keto, I think the biggest thing again, goes back to protein to a lot of people, like we have to think about keto, it came about as a treatment for kids who had epilepsy, right, it was literally a metabolic state that your body can go into not just a diet, right, it's literally changing the way that your your brain uses its fuel sources, right. And that's what it was founded on is to help kids it actually helped kids reduce their seizures, because they went from using and relying on glucose for fuel to rely on ketones for fuel for that's to treat a disease state. And so they had to have very high ketone levels to be able to do that. And so they had to bump their fats up really high, and bring their carbs and their protein down very low to be able to do that, right.

But if we're talking about kind of your average person, and just looking to get some of the benefits of keto, whether that's coming from blood sugar regulation, whether it's coming from, you know, going actually into a state of ketosis and using ketones for fuel to help with maybe focus throughout the day, or mental clarity throughout the day, one of the biggest pieces that people miss make a mistake on is again, coming back to that protein, at least this is what I've seen in my practice over the last six plus years, is they reduce protein so low, because they think that they need to skyrocket their ketones super, super high and have super, super high fat. And I think that's where the issues are coming in. Because you know, being in a state of ketosis is literally reducing your carbs, and or fasting, it's a fast mimicking diet. And so you don't need to bump your fats up to astronomical amounts to get into safe ketosis. Yes, there, you know, increasing healthy fats can be great.

But I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make is they, they go way on one end, and they don't think about kind of the moderation of the protein side of things even a little bit higher protein too. So typically, it's all going to kind of come back to the individual. And I like to talk I like to kind of look at, first of all, if the goal is to get into a state of ketosis, like I mentioned, you can do that by simply reducing your carbohydrates to a certain amount. Typically, for most people, they can get into a state of ketosis by having around 50 grams of total carbohydrates or less per day. So if that's the main goal, and you want to test out like your body's ability to get into ketosis, and how you function through that, reducing your carbohydrates to about a total of 50 grams per day, setting your protein around 0.8 to one gram per pound of body weight, and not being afraid of protein is probably the second thing that I would do. And then basically filling in the rest of your calories with fat.

And that will depend on what your main goal is, is your main goal to maintain your weight is your main goal to lose body fats, you know, because we know that we have to be in a calorie deficit in order to do that, are you looking to gain body fat so it's really setting those carbohydrate kind of taught like around that 50 grams to start, some people can are more metabolically healthy than others, and they are more active than ever. So they can actually have upwards of maybe 75 to 100 grams of carbs even more depending on how active they are, and still actually maintain that state of ketosis if that's the goal, but in general, about 50 grams total carbs, setting your protein then filling the rest in with fats, your body has the ability to use its own body fat stores, you know, obviously you both know fats are important, right? We fats are important for hormones, especially healthy fats, right?

Not like the McDonald's cheeseburgers without the button, right? Maybe that's once in a while thing for you, but you know, an everyday thing is probably not going to be not gonna be great for overall health. So exactly what you said focusing on the carbohydrates, and even implementing potentially some fasting that in itself can help get you into that state of ketosis. The fats are really there to help with, you know, nourishing, you know, all the different processes that fats are important for hormones, things like that. But we can use if we have a lot of fat on our bodies, like we can use that body fat for fuel that turns that turns into keto through the process of keto Genesis