If you think that achieving fast and proper ketosis is only a matter of eliminating carbs from your diet plan, then we have some serious food for your faulty thought. You see, cutting down on carbs is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more to ketosis than just more fat and less sugar.
There is no denying the fact that Ketosis is a highly beneficial metabolic process that offers innumerable health benefits. However, an improper understanding and incomplete keto diet design can lead to frustratingly delayed ketosis which can further result in little to no weight loss.
Well, don’t let your heart miss any beats just now, cause we have got you covered.
We have prepared a highly insightful list of 7 effective things you can do to achieve ketosis faster.
So, pull up a chair, and start scrolling.
1. Go easy on the carbs
No matter how many times we tell you this, but one can still not stress enough on the importance of this basic principle. Since birth, our body has been trained to use sugar or carbs as the most prominent energy source. It’s not something that is biologically infused in our bodies, instead, it’s a routine that our body gets accustomed to because of our eating habits.
Hence, It can be perfectly normal and healthy for our body to use fat as the main source of energy too, but old habits die hard and that’s the reason why our body initially resists any sudden changes to keto and ends up delaying the process of ketosis.
When a person has a very low carb intake, then their body discharges all the stored glycogen which in turn results in insulin declination and fat assimilation. The liver works on this assimilated fat and converts it into Ketone bodies, these ketone bodies then take the center-stage by proving to be the primary energy source of the body.
However, ketosis’ unsteady duration of occurring differently in different individuals poses a fair amount of questions about it’s highly unstable and inconstant nature. For instance, some individuals have to go as low as 20gm carbohydrates per day to achieve ketosis, whereas some can achieve it in almost twice the amount.
Although, it’s only temporary and once you get into ketosis then you can always go on to steadily increasing your carb intake.
Apart from being a highly effective weight-loss solution, Keto is also believed to be a one-stop solution for numerous health problems. Limiting carbs has proven to be an efficient masterstroke for people suffering from type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Still, one should not try and exploit this complex medical diet by listening to handover opinions and should consult a medical practitioner before any therapeutic applications.
2. Don’t undermine the importance of regular exercise
The modern weight-loss methods have continuously been keeping meal plans at the center by fairly underestimating the importance of physical activity, a foolish decision to say the least. A good day at the running track can never be substituted by healthy eating at home and vise versa.
People need to realize that the arrangement between daily exercise and a healthy diet is not binary, instead, it’s a partnership that flourishes in togetherness.
Even in keto, it has been observed that the process of ketosis works much faster when it’s combined with a proper work-out regime.
When you work out during Keto, your body burns out all the stored stock of glycogen and as a result, your liver pumps up the production of ketone bodies so that your body has an alternative energy source to fall back to.
However, one should also remember that during the initial weeks of the keto diet, your body is still in a transitional phase where it requires some more additional time to get used to using ketones as the primary fuel. Hence, physical activities and work-out regimes should be put on hold during the initial weeks.
3. Add Coconut oil to your diet plan
Coconut oil comprises of a fat constituent called the “Medium-chain Triglycerides”, popularly known as MCT. As opposed to most fats that take a lot of time in getting assimilated by the liver, MCTs are fairly quick on the uptake. They are swiftly absorbed and are instantly converted to ketone bodies for energy.
The MCTs can help to accelerate the process of ketosis, and experts also believe that instituting some amount of coconut oil in the daily diet can turn out to be extremely rewarding for the patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders.
However, to avoid any digestive side-effects, one is advised to limit the use of coconut oil during the initial weeks, and the amount of coconut oil should increase gradually from a single teaspoon per day to a couple of teaspoons daily.
4. Focus more on healthy fat
It’s an open secret that a ketogenic diet is a very high-fat diet, and one has to consume as much as 75% of fat daily to comply with the keto rule of living. Although, it’s also a fact that consuming healthy fat can essentially enhance the ketone levels and can lead you towards much more complete and faster ketosis.
The medical keto which principally originated as the cure for epilepsy focused on squeezing almost 90% of the body’s daily calorie requirement from fats.
However, according to research, an exceptionally high intake of fat does not guarantee skyrocketing ketone levels, and people who consume 70% calories from fat have acquired the same ketone levels as the people who consume as much as 90%.
Now that we have understood the importance of consuming high amounts of fat for ketosis, we should also be cautious about the quality of the sources consumed.
The fact that so much fat is needed to be consumed logically limits the room for any carelessness. It’s imperative to regulate and consume only high quality, healthy fats.
Good fat sources like coconut oil, avocado oil, butter, lard, and tallow should be encouraged. Whereas, one should abstain from the consumption of food sources which are equally high in both fat, and carbohydrates.
A high-fat diet combined with high carbohydrates can completely derail your weight-loss plan and can result in more harm than good.
5. No harm in skipping lunch
As far as losing weight is concerned, we should not be underestimating the conventional methods. For instance, fasting or break from eating for a few hours between lunch and early dinner can work wonders for your ketosis. Our body undergoes a stage of moderate ketosis in between two meals, and we can capitalize on that by skipping lunch and giving our body some off time to perform ketosis.
It’s directed in medicinal keto to starve the patient of epilepsy for at least 26-28 hours before they finally start the diet, as it can help your body reach ketosis much quicker which can lead to a much faster seizure prevention system.
Intermittent Fasting or IF, combined with keto, has also proven to be a full-proof system to reach rapid ketosis. Furthermore, one can also resort to “Fat fasting” to pump up their ketone levels.
Fat fasting requires consuming an extremely high amount of fat with a very liitle carbohydrate intake. In fat fasting, as much as 85-90% of the calorie requirement is fulfilled with fat sources.
Although fat fasting is drastically low on protein, henceforth to avoid any disproportionate muscle mass loss, once should only practice fat fasting for not more than 5-6 days.
6. Don’t neglect protein
Protein is a tight rope, you shouldn’t overdo it as it can interfere with Ketosis. But eliminating it is also not a wise choice.
Ketogenic diet plan with excessive fat and minimal protein can be highly beneficial for cancer and epilepsy treatment, but as far as weight-loss is concerned it can be a futile practice. Protein helps in providing amino acids to your liver which are then responsible for the production of glucose for organs which can not simply work on just ketones. Organs like kidney and brain require adequate amounts of glucose to function properly and your body must keep on secreting the limited amount to avert any grave health issues.
You also require a substantially sufficient amount of protein to maintain muscle mass. During Keto, the body is already in a weight and muscle shedding arrangement, but you can still preserve the muscle mass by maintaining a regulated protein intake.
However, one should refrain from exploiting protein as that causes interference with ketosis and can also delay it.
7. Track your ketone levels and adjust your diet accordingly
As we mentioned earlier, Ketosis is highly unstable and inconstant in nature, there is no hard and fast rule for when a person will achieve ketosis. Its essence lies in its volatility and its duration of occurring will vary differently in different individuals.
Thus, it will be extremely helpful to track your ketone levels and keep modifying your diet as you move forward.
There is not one, but three types of ketones that are produced by our body – acetone, beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone, and these three ketones are measured differently through breath, blood, and urine.
Experts believe that one should not indulge in tracking every type of ketone value, and measuring only acetone value would be sufficient for people following the keto diet.
Ketone urine and blood strips can also be used to track down your levels but they are fairly expensive, and the results are not completely reliable.
Ketone measurement is a vital step as it paves way for the rest of the diet plan, you need to be regardful of your body’s reaction towards the keto diet and should adjust your diet as per the requirements.
We all know that suppressing all our desires of taste and cravings can be a hard thing to implement and constant dieting with no visible results can lead to a distressful situation stuffed with doubts and fears. So, it’s very important to be properly researched before you make any compromises with your daily lifestyle to achieve your health goals.
With the help of these 7 effective tips, you will surely be one step closer to accomplishing all your health goals by achieving effective ketosis faster.