How To Do The Keto Diet

How To Do The Keto Diet

The keto diet is a low-carb diet that forces your body to use a different and surprising fuel: fats. Instead of relying on glucose from carbs, this diet relies on something called ketone bodies. The liver produces ketone bodies from fat stores. If you can get your liver to do the heavy lifting of fat-burning, it could mean game over for obesity and type-2 diabetes, and victory for weight loss. But this “rewiring” of the way your body has been burning calories all these years is a little tricky. You’ll need your liver to start making ketone bodies in a state of ketosis. You’ll need a few days of keto diet like eating before this can happen. Keep in mind, eating too much protein can interfere with ketosis also. Too much protein can potentially be converted to glucose and shut down or slow down the ketosis transition. This is what Keto Dieting and Intermittent Fasting can be a game-changer for weight loss.

What Are The Health Benefits of Keto Diet Plans

In the short term, Keto diets come with a host of benefits. Your blood sugar and insulin levels may drop. You may see heart health benefits as you lose weight – have less weight to carry around really provides the ole ticker some great benefits. If you can stick with it, you may see huge weight-loss benefits in the first 3 to 6 months. It’s not clear whether this weight loss is due to reduced calorie intake and satiety from protein, or if there are changes in the body’s metabolism. You may end up with some ‘interesting breath” due to the acetone produced in ketosis. But that may seem like a small price to pay for the other potential benefits of low-carbs including improved skin quality, reduced PCOS symptoms, and even benefits for reducing some cancers and degenerative disease.

Popular Keto Diet Plans

Some keto diets have been used and studied extensively, and so they’re the easiest to follow with how to do keto diet plans.

• Standard Keto diet: This super-low carb, moderate protein and high-fat diet restricts you to only 10% carbs a day, with 20% protein and 70 % fats. In a 2000-calorie diet, that would typically translate to around 40 grams of carbs, 75 grams of protein and 165 grams of fats in a day. For context, remember that a medium-sized banana has around 27 grams of carbs.It’s beneficial to exercise on the standard Keto plan as there is slightly higher carbs allocated for this program. Some may say 40g over the course of the day is too high, so it’s a personal choice and comes down to how strict you are on yourself and how well you can stick to keto dieting.
• High Protein Keto Diet: This diet is even lower in carbs – only 5%. The protein you’re allowed is 35% and the fats you’re allowed is 60%. You can’t go higher in protein or ketosis will slow down.

There are other kinds of diets for athletes and bodybuilders, such as the targeted ketogenic diet, and the cyclical ketogenic diet. Fun fact: the diet was originally developed to treat epilepsy. You’ll find doctors still recommend it to kids with the disorder.

What Can You Eat on Keto Diets?

The Keto diet tells you how much of each macro you can eat. It also suggests some food sources you can get these nutrients from. My Action Product offers a No Bullsh!t Clean Keto Diet Plan that you can follow. It’s designed to maximise fat loss, covers a wide range of options to follow for the person that tends to be quite busy. I digress! For your fats, which will make up the bulk of your meal, you can turn to healthy unsaturated fats such as olive oils, avocados, seeds and tofu – often these are used in Clean Keto Dieting. Some saturated fats from butter, coconut and palm oils, cocoa butter and lard are also encouraged and this is fats that have been integrated into the Dirty Keto Dieting Programs. Grass-fed butter and heavy cream are also okay. You’ll notice that there isn’t any distinction between lean proteins and red meat. You’re allowed to get your proteins from steaks, sausages, bacon, turkey, chicken, red meat and ham. You can eat fatty fish like mackerel, salmon, trout and tuna. Omega-3 whole eggs or pastured eggs are also on the list. Other foods you’re allowed to have are low carb veggies like tomatoes, peppers, onions, leafy greens. Avocados are great, and unprocessed cheeses like goat cheese, blue cheese, cheddar etc. are also okay. Just in that list alone – you can see why Keto Dieting has blown up around the world as fundamentally, one of the greatest dieting programs ever! Who would’ve thought, Bacon, Eggs and Avocado for breakfast and the word Diet would be in the same sentence!

What You Can’t Eat on Keto Diets!

Of course, you can’t eat a lot of carbs, especially refined carbs. That means sugary foods, rice, pasta and other grains, legumes or beans, fruits (small portions of berries are okay), root veggies, tubers, low-fat mayo, ketchup, barbecue sauces, alcohol and sugar-free foods aren’t allowed in the keto diet either. These foods won’t help your body reach ketosis. As is evident, you’re not eating a lot of veggies or fruits on the low-carb diet. So you’ll have to make sure you get your micronutrients – vitamin C, zinc, magnesium, potassium, calcium – from supplements. For any of our dieting phases, we trust a brand of products that are manufactured to the Pharmaceutical Grade GMP’s, their facility is FDA Approved, so they have all the essential nutrients to back up your Keto Diet. USANA Cellsentials is the multivitamin option and can be purchased with the dietary plans or purchased separately USANA Cellsential Products

What’s The Difference Between Dirty Keto and Clean Keto?

There are Keto diets for those who have the time to make themselves whole-food meals. This is called Clean Keto. Then there’s the shortcut, lazy version, called Dirty Keto. Dirty Keto lets you eat lower quality, packaged or processed foods. So, if you’re following Clean Keto, you may eat a grilled steak and a salad of kale, spinach broccoli and asparagus or some avocado options in there too. But if you don’t have the time to make yourself a healthy salad with high-fat dressing, you may end up ordering a double bacon cheeseburger minus the bun. The Dirty Keto diet isn’t ideal, because you end up eating less green veggies along with additives like MSG and trans fats. You may also end up with a high salt intake, which causes health issues. Science tells us that processed foods eaten over a period of time also can lead to heart disease. What’s best for you? Generally, it’s a personal choice. If someone is Obese and they have a habit of eating high fat carby foods. Taking baby-steps into habit changing could work for you. Opting in for the dirty keto and when you get motivated – because you see you’ve lost 70lbs (30kg) in 3 months, you can switch camps and gently move into the Clean Keto Dieting Plans and start to focus on cleaner eating. Remember – the objective isn’t about free reins to eat bun-less burgers and bacon – we are interested in ensuring you lose weight, but improve your health!!!

Sample Clean Keto Meal Plans

You can get started on your Keto diet with these meal plan suggestions. But, the MAP Plans are way more structured and have been designed specifically by a Qualified Health Professional

Plan A

• breakfast: egg, tomato, spinach and basil omelette
• lunch: a keto smoothie with almond milk, peanut butter, spinach, cocoa powder and stevia with sliced strawberries on the side
• dinner: salmon with asparagus sauteed in butter

Plan B 

• breakfast: milk pudding with chia seeds, nuts, topped with blackberries and coconut
• lunch: shrimp and avocado salad
• dinner: chicken stuffed with cream cheese and pesto, with grilled zucchini

Healthy Keto Snacks

If you feel peckish between meals, you can snack on cheese, olives, 90% dark chocolate, a handful of seeds or nuts, beef jerky, cottage cheese and strawberries, full-fat Greek yogurt mixed with nut butter, guacamole and bell peppers, delicious “fat bombs” that you can make and store in advance.

The Bottomline

There are a few different ways to do the keto diet. But you shouldn’t try any of them without first understanding if they are right for you. Keto diets are high-fat (some high in better fats) and in the long run, saturated fats and trans fats can lead to high cholesterol levels which are linked to heart disease. Short-term keto diets can be very helpful with weight-loss if you’re obese. But you could be missing out on important macro-nutrients if you stay on a Keto Diet long term, so micro-nutrient supplementation is important. Whether or not you can sustain a keto diet for a few months, it shouldn’t be at the cost of your mental peace. Many people drop off keto diets out of boredom or frustration due to lack of carbs. In the end, a combination of sporadic keto diets with a more sustainable balanced diet may be the best way to move forward with your weight loss and weight management goals. Check out the MAP – My Action Project No Bullsh!t Clean Keto Diet Plans to fast track into weight loss!