Keto for Body and Weight Management
Everyone’s body is slightly different and reacts uniquely to foods, diets, lifestyle and exercise. That said, the food that we eat and timing will determine how we metabolise or store this food energy.
Your weight loss journey is just that, YOURS. That means you need to work at a pace that suits you. If that means starting slow and cutting out sugar, processed foods and flour and working up to keto then that is what you need to do. If it means losing at a slower pace so that you feel more comfortable with all the change then that’s what you need to do. Keto is a really healthy sustainable way to lose weight and live. You need to think of it as a lifestyle change and not a “crash diet” to get you to your goal. And while keto is a great way to lose weight you need to be in the right frame of mind to do so. Focus on your health, make small attainable goals (a few that have nothing to do with the scale), and stay positive. This is the key to success!
Weight Loss
Fasting -IF, TRF or Non Snacking allows the body to use stored sources of energy – blood sugar and body fat.
What happens when we eat:
When we eat, we ingest more food energy (calories) than we can use at the time. The hormone insulin goes up, telling our body to store some of that energy, either as sugar in the liver (glycogen) or body fat.
Sugar: Individual glucose (sugar) units are linked into long chains to form glycogen and stored in the liver. This energy store is easy-to-access but limited in storage capacity.
Body Fat: Dietary glucose and protein in excess of glycogen storage capacity is turned into fat for storage by the liver in a process called de-novo lipogenesis (literally, “making new fat”). This form of energy storage is more complicated, but there’s virtually no limit to storage capacity.
These two food energy storage systems complement each other. Glycogen is easily accessible but has limited storage space. Body fat is more difficult to access but has unlimited storage space.
What happens when we don’t eat:
The energy storage process goes in reverse when we don’t eat (fasting). Insulin levels fall, telling the body to start burning the stored energy, glycogen and body fat.
Glycogen is used first because it is the most easily accessible. It’s broken down into individual glucose molecules and moved into the bloodstream which distributes it to other organs and tissues for energy. Once glycogen stores are depleted, the body will start breaking down body fat for energy.
A very low carbohydrate diet reduces dietary glucose limiting glycogen production. This forces the body to burn body fat primarily when not eating.
The body only really exists in the fed (insulin high) state or the fasted (insulin low) state. It cannot exist in both states at the same time.
Either we’re storing food energy, or we’re burning stored energy. It’s one or the other. It’s a natural cycle. Feeding and fasting. Fasting and feeding. One follows the other as naturally as night follows day and day follows night.
If feeding and fasting are balanced, then there should be no net weight change. You don’t gain weight and you don’t lose weight. National surveys indicate that this was the dominant eating pattern in the 1970s before the obesity epidemic. Three square meals a day, no snacks. If you ate breakfast at 8 am and dinner at 6 pm, that is 10 hours of feeding and 14 hours of fasting every single day.
If feeding (insulin high) predominates, then we gain weight. If we start eating the minute we roll out of bed and don’t stop until we go to sleep, we spend all our time in the fed state. Over time, we’ll gain weight because our body spends insufficient time in the fasted state, where it burns that stored food energy. National surveys show that this is the current dominant eating pattern, in the midst of an epidemic of obesity unseen in history. The median time people spend eating is now close to 15 hours a day. Virtually the only time people fast is when they are asleep.
If we want to lose weight, then we simply need to increase the amount of time spent burning food energy. That’s intermittent fasting coupled with a more Nutrient dense diet. It essentially allows the body to use its stored energy. After all, that’s what we stored it for. It’s a completely natural process.