As you learned, Carbs are the preferred source of energy for the body. If you don't give enough carbs to the body, it starts burning fat to make Ketones that can be used as a fuel.
Keto diet is a low carb, a high-fat diet that can push your body to use fat as a fuel. Due to the lack of carbs, the liver converts fat to fatty acids and ketone bodies. A ketogenic diet can cause a great reduction in your blood sugar and insulin levels. This, along with the increased ketones, has numerous health benefits.
One of the common concerns with the keto diet is the belief that eating fat will make you fat. Since you are not eating carbs, it's very critical to eat a good amount of fat to push the body into ketosis. One of the common mistakes I noticed is that people try to move to keto diet but they still continue to eat enough carbs (thereby not letting the ketosis to kick start) or they take very less fat (and that impacts the whole hormone harmony and also body metabolism).
For effective ketosis, it's recommended to eat about 50-60 carbs per day (max is 100). Also if you eat fewer carbs, you will cut out on the junk foods which helps weight loss. Another big advantage of a keto diet is that insulin spikes will be less as your carb consumption is less (carbs produce the highest insulin spikes compared to fat or protein)
Gluconeogenesis
Note that everybody will respond to ketosis in a different way. In this blog post, we learned that our body will get energy from :
Food that we eat (glucose),
Glycogen stored in the muscles,
Ketones (where the body can burn fat to generate ketones - if we are on high fat low carb diet)
There is one more phenomenon called as Glyconeogesis where the body can use amino acids (protein) from the food and muscles and use it as a fuel. If you are on a very high protein diet (with low carb), this can happen. We don't need to worry too much about this.
Some research indicates that before getting into Ketosis, our body does gets into Gloconegenisis for 1-2 days where it starts using the protein/amino acid before switching to fat (Ketones).
Personally I am not a very big fan of keto diet as it’s hard to follow a low carb high-fat diet for long (and I don’t recommend that usually in the program).
- Saurabh
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