What Do You Need to Dial in Keto?

What do you need to do to dial in a ketogenic diet in a healthy way. So let's talk about a few of the main things that you want to focus on.

So the first thing to focus on is making sure that your diet primarily consists of whole foods as close to nature as possible. So you can get away with getting into ketosis and being in ketosis on a more processed diet. But that's not going to take you very far over the long run. So making sure that your diet consists of I like to say around 80% Whole Foods as close to nature as possible, you can think of foods that had to face at some point or have grown from the Earth at some point. So foods that I had to face at some point are going to be foods that are, you know, animals, right? Animals, meat, fish, you can think of dairy, dairy comes from cows. So anything that's had a face at some point would be considered a whole food, or anything that's grown from the Earth at some point is going to be your vegetables, your fruits, things like that. Basically, anything that is not packaged or processed.

So that's going to be probably the main thing that you want to focus in on, I would say, 80, if you look at your day, and 80% of your day is made up of foods that have failed at some point where I've gone from the Earth at some point, then you're probably doing pretty good. So the next thing I focus on in terms of doing keto in a healthy way, is making sure that you're getting enough protein. So I know that you know, a lot of people tend to say that if you're following a ketogenic diet, you have to lower your protein intake. But in my eyes, and from my experience, lowering protein intake is actually not the best thing you can do. You want to make sure that you're getting adequate protein from high quality sources throughout the day, because we know that protein is super, super important for many different processes within our body.

So making sure that we're maintaining satiety, and you know, feeling full throughout the day, making sure we're retaining our muscle mass and lean body mass protein super important for that important for longevity, there's so many different reasons. But that's one of the biggest mistakes I see that people make is not consuming enough protein throughout the day. So if you're thinking about okay, so what is enough protein, right, so I like to kind of categorize this, and then three different ways that you can think about it. So the first one is thinking about protein intake in terms of your body weight, so grams per day, what does that mean? So in terms of your body weight, if you are on the leaner side, and you have a lot of muscle mass, and you don't have a lot of body fat, I like to keep protein around point eight to one gram per pound of body weight per day.

So that's kind of an easy way to think about that. If you have more body fat, or if you have more weight, then that might be like one gram per pound might be a little bit too much. So I like to think about this in terms of height. So if you have more body fat or more weight on you, thinking about how much protein to consume per day, all you would have to do is take your height and centimeters. And that would be the amount of protein in grams to consume. So if you are 160 centimeters, 160 grams per day would be a good place to start. And then the next way is a little bit more practical in terms of just if you're not if you don't do any of these number of things, that you can think about the meals that you eat, having about a fist size, maybe a fist and a half to two fist depending on how big your fists are at each meal per day. So you know, if you think about chicken breast, for example, six ounces of chicken breast is probably for me like a fist and a half. If you have bigger fists, then obviously you got to titrate that up and down. But that's gonna be an easy way to see how much protein you want to get at each meal.

And then in terms of a snack that can be like just a fist size. But those would be kind of the ways that I determine how much protein throughout the day and to make sure that you're getting sufficient amounts of protein. Because again, that's one of the biggest mistakes that I've seen in my coaching experience is people eating too little protein when it comes to a ketogenic diet. So another thing to think about is making sure that you're getting enough healthy fats in throughout the day. So fats are very, very necessary for anybody no matter if you're following a ketogenic diet or a high carb diet, or wherever it may be. Fats are essential for making sure that you're absorbing vitamins. So we have different vitamins that we're consuming in our foods, right. And the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, those can actually only be absorbed properly in your body if they come with fat. So if you don't have any fat in your diet, you're not going to be absorbing those vitamins. And so that's a quick tip like if you are supplementing with vitamin D, for example, making sure that you're consuming that along with a fat source is going to be super, super important to make sure that you actually absorb that vitamin D. So that is very important to think about making sure you're getting enough healthy fats throughout the day.

Fats are very, very essential are very, very important to make sure that we are maintaining our essential fatty acid levels. So making that we're getting enough Omega sixes in our diet. So just focusing on making sure that you're getting enough healthy fats throughout the day. So avocados, I love avocados, olive oil, olives, those are going to be more of your mono unsaturated fats. And then in terms of saturated fats, things like butter, coconut oil, the fats that you find in animals, so animal meats have saturated fat as well. And don't fear saturated fats. There's a lot of misinformation about that out there as well. Saturated fats are not the devil. But you want to make sure that you are getting enough of a combination of monounsaturated fats and saturated fats. And I would also think about just titrating down the more processed fats.

So thinking about like vegetable oils and things that are made in the factory. So factory made fats versus you know, fats that come from an animal or come from the earth, you can kind of distinguish those and that way if they're, if they come from a factory, they're probably highly processed and probably not the best source of fats versus if they're coming from an animal or from you know, a fruit or vegetable. Thank you so much for watching. If you want to learn more about nutrition, fitness or metabolic flexibility, you can check out our website Matt Flex life.com. There you can find our podcast, Netflix and chill our nutrition and exercise programs, our latest blog posts, free recipes and much more