Low Carb or Ketogenic
As mentioned in my post, How Many Carbs is Low Carb, a ketogenic diet or lifestyle IS low-carb. Keto, ketosis or ketogenic is a lifestyle that focuses on eating VERY low-carb (VLCD) in an effort to force the body to create ketones.
The difference between a simple low-carb diet and nutritional ketosis is the production of ketone bodies. Ketone bodies are a specific type of fuel created as a byproduct of your body burning stored fat.
With all the talk about keto and ketosis these days’ people have lost sight of the fact that a simple, low-carb diet is a great way to manage blood sugar, burn fat and lose weight. You do burn fat even when ketones are not produced. Put another way, ketones are NOT necessary to burn fat. Ketones are created as a BYPRODUCT of fat burning. You are already burning fat as fuel before ketones are created. Let me say that again:
Ketones are a byproduct of fat burning.
Ketones do NOT cause the body to burn fat.
The body has different sources of fuel. There is a hierarchy of use for these fuels and it has to do with how fuel is stored. If there is no ability to store something, then it must be used. The smaller the available storage capacity for a fuel, the more preferentially that fuel will be used. Why you might ask? Preservation of optimal body function. The body doesn’t want high levels of substances that cause damage. When something causes inflammation, it’s causing damage. Alcohol, sugar and fat are three primary body fuel sources. Both alcohol and sugar are inflammatory and need to be cleared to normal/low levels to reduce any negative impact they may have on the body. That is priority #1
Everyone is different. The level of carbohydrate restriction needed to allow the body to clear enough glucose (sugar) to burn stored body fat will vary from person to person. Your sweet spot for carb restriction will greatly depends on your level of health and how tolerant or intolerant your body is to carbohydrates (sugars). Your personal level of carbohydrate tolerance has a lot to do with your weight over the years. Do you easily put on weight, are you weight loss resistant? Have you yo-yo dieted, have you been over weight or obese for years? Are you pre-diabetic or have you been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes? Do you have other health issues? All of these things will have an impact on your personal level of carbohydrate tolerance and how strict you need to be with dietary carbs in order to move toward your health and weight goals.
Carbohydrate Tolerance
How well your body handles dietary carbohydrates is related to how sensitive your body is to the hormone insulin as well as other metabolic hormone regulators but for now, I’m going to keep the focus on insulin.
What you eat and how often you eat affects your blood sugar levels. Your blood sugar levels impact how much insulin is released by your pancreas. Your bodies sensitivity, how well it recognizes and hears insulin’s hormonal message affects your health and weight.
Insulin and Body Weight
When insulin is circulating it puts your body into storage mode. Yes, fat storage mode. You can NOT burn fat when insulin is high. Insulin is loud and bossy. The message it sends is to store excess energy (fuel). Insulin is clearing excess sugars out of the blood stream. Why? Because, high levels of sugar (glucose) in the blood is inflammatory and damaging. The sugars must be cleared and blood levels of sugar (glucose) must be brought back within a normal, healthy range. The body loves balance.
As a fuel, we can burn a lot of the dietary sugars during our normal daily exercise and movement. Unfortunately, the modern American diet gives us WAY TOO MUCH daily sugars. Way more than we need to function. This is where insulin comes in. It takes those extra sugars and packs them off as glycogen, which is form of stored sugar in the liver and muscles. Nifty right, sugar storage, perfect. Not so fast, the bodies ability to store sugar as glycogen is tiny. Nowhere near enough to pack away all the extra sugars from our normal diet. What’s insulin and a body to do? Find a different storage space. That different and very extensive storage space is FAT. The excess sugar gets re-package as triglycerides and stored as fat. Problem solved, the sugar has been dealt with. At first glance, great, but wait, more fat?? Who wants more fat. Right, a new problem.
Here’s what happens when you have a lot of sugar in your diet and insulin is hanging around to make sure it gets tucked away –
Are you wondering how to help your body out and get rid of a bunch of the sugar? I hope so. Here’s a graphic of macronutrient (carbohydrates, proteins & fat) and how the different macros affect blood sugar and insulin.
If you want to calm insulin down and get it out of the way, you have to start by reduce your blood sugar levels. How to manage your blood sugar:
- Cut the Processed Foods
- Eliminate High Sugar Carbohydrates
- Enjoy low sugar carbohydrates (the amount will vary from person to person)
- Eat Protein
- Enjoy Healthy Fats
- Eat Less Often
- Get Good Quality Sleep
Insulin and Health
High levels of insulin will make you fat. High levels of insulin will also make you sick. Insulin is an important hormone. We need insulin. What we don’t need is chronically high levels of insulin. When there’s a lot of insulin and it never clears out, the body becomes inflamed.
Did you know that inflammation is the root cause of pretty much every modern disease? It’s true, even heart disease. It’s not the fat folks, it’s the sugar. The thing that’s tricky, high insulin, also known as hyperinsulinemia, doesn’t just happen over night. Subtle changes happen during life that end up resulting in high fasting insulin levels.
- Consistently over eating
- Eating all the time
- Slowly reducing or even eliminating time for exercise
- Bad sleep patterns, causing a disrupted circadian rhythm
Sounds like normal life, right? It kind of is. Life kind of got in the way and most of us missed it. Very few of us were thinking about body function, our bodies just kept keeping on. You don’t think about something until it’s not working properly. Don’t fix what ain’t broke, isn’t that how the saying goes?
Your body is always working really hard to make sure everything runs smoothly and stays in balance. 40 years of dietary and lifestyle insult catches up with the best of us. The body gets tired; it just can’t keep up. You may not even realize there’s an issue until your doctor tells you your blood sugar is creeping up. That’s your body becoming less and less sensitive to insulin and losing it’s ability to maintain balance. At this point, you’ve probably had high levels of insulin for 10-15 years. More and more insulin was being pumped out just to keep your blood sugar levels within a normal range, and make it look like everything was working just fine. Unfortunately, everything was not working fine, your pancreas has been running overtime and it’s finally too tired to keep up. Your cells also got tired of being screamed at by insulin so they have stopped listen. Meaning, they’ve become insulin resistant. Your body won’t give up though so it will keep pumping out higher and higher levels of insulin in an attempt to maintain balance even as that balance and proper function slips away.
As this freight train of insulin continues to build, your body becomes more and more resistant and inflamed. Here’s an abbreviated list of conditions/diseases of inflammation (high insulin):
- Obesity
- High Blood Pressure
- Heart Disease
- Type 2 Diabetes
- Cancer
- Neurodegenerative Disease: Alzheimer’s, Dementia
- Neurological Issues: migraines, depression, anxiety
- Autoimmune Conditions
By the way, I mentioned that one of the first signs that there is dysfunction within your body is when your doctor tells you your blood sugar is looking wonky. There are many more signs well before blood sugar gets wonky. Things like, weight gain, especially around your middle, high blood pressure, gut issues, lousy sleep, lack of energy, brain fog. The signs are there; we just don’t take notice because we’ve all been told this is a normal part of aging which, I guess it is if you’re inflamed. Who wants that!?
Where to Start
If you are currently eating a low-fat diet or a standard American diet, which may have your daily carbs somewhere between 200 – 300 grams/day (or more) my suggestion would be to start at the higher end of ‘low-carb’ and see how your body reacts. If you’re interested in understanding how carbs could add up to over 200 grams/day please go back and read my post, How Many Carbs is Low Carb.
As you get used to the idea of what carbohydrates are and what your typical level is, you can slowly continue to reduce your daily amount of carbs until you get to a level that appears to make a difference and start moving you toward your goals. This could be weight change on the scale but for many there is a change in body composition before there is any huge change in scale weight.
Losing fat mass, positively changes body composition often before there is a reduction is scale weight.
What that means is, use a measuring tape. Measure your waist, your hips, your thighs, your arm. These are all areas that will decrease as you burn and lose fat. If you’d rather not fuss with a tape measure, use clothes. Pick an outfit that doesn’t quite fit, something tight that you’d like to fit into. Try that outfit on 1x/week to see what kind of progress you are making. Trust me, the scale will lie to you! Your body composition will improve even while the scale tells you nothing is happening. You will develop a better ratio of lean muscle to fat mass. This is what makes people look lean and healthy, good amounts of lean muscle with low levels of fatty tissue.
If you’re ready to get started but aren’t sure how to cut your carbs to bring your blood sugar down, please download my free guide: 3 Key Tips on How to Low Carb for Life.
Why Ketosis?
At this point you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. Why go super low-carb to the point of nutritional ketosis if low-carb is all it takes?
People with certain conditions will benefit more from nutritional ketosis than just low-carb. Who might those people be? Here’s a list of conditions that nutritional ketosis is known to have a positive impact on:
- Uncontrolled Epilepsy
- Type 2 Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
- Certain Types of Cancer
- Neurodegenerative Diseases
Beyond a ketogenic diet as a therapeutic tool for certain conditions, there is excitement building about the positive impact ketone bodies have on physiological body function.
First, as mentioned above, ketones are a byproduct of the body burning fat as a fuel source. What that means is, the liver takes some of the free fatty acids that have been released from fat storage and converts them to ketone bodies. This happens because, while much of the body can use free fatty acids as fuel some parts of the body can’t, namely, the brain. The liver converts those free fatty acids into ketones and the brain uses the ketones. Here are some of the exciting and positive implications of the body having access to ketones:
- Ketone Bodies and the Brain
- Nutritional ketosis enhances neurological function; ketones are neurologically protective. This is why nutritional ketosis is being studied for neurodegenerative diseases
- Dom D’Agostino’s has explained that studies are showing that nutritional ketosis is effective fore seizures independent of the cause of those seizures: genetics, temporal lobe epilepsy or even traumatic brain injury.
- Ketone Bodies are an Energy Source
- Generate ATP in cells
- Ketones are a cleaner burning fuel than sugar. Ketones are burned with in the mitochondria of cells. Less free radicals are produced which results in less oxidative damage.
- Ketone Bodies are Anti-inflammatory
- They reduce overall inflammation in the body
- Ketone Bodies and Epigenetics
- New science is showing that ketones have a positive impact on gene expression. They help healthy, good genes express and may keep faulty, mutated genes quiet.
- Ketone Bodies are Health Protective
- The ketone metabolite, beta-hydroxybutyrate (found in the blood) appears to have a similar positive impact on the body as the metabolic byproduct, butyric acid from healthy gut bacteria.
How might the average, healthy person feel while generating ketone bodies on a very low carbohydrate diet?
- Improved cognition, brain function
- Less depression and/or anxiety
- Better Appetite Control – ketones are an appetite suppressant
- Improved Energy Levels
- Better overall Body Composition due to fat loss
Lifestyle Change
As you can see, both a low-carb lifestyle and the stricter, very low-carb ketogenic lifestyle have positive advantages when it comes to overall health and wellness.
I am a huge fan of a low-carb lifestyle, if you couldn’t tell ; ) I do tend to flux in and out of a ketogenic state. When I really want to get into shape, and drop some fat I will lean more toward the low, ketogenic levels of carbs. My body is quick to jump into ketosis and generate ketones. I also love n=1 experiments and data so I do like to occasionally track my food and see what happens with my blood sugar and ketone levels. This is all something I can elaborate on in the future if there is any interest.
Evidently, I have a LOT to say on this topic. This post was twice as long as what you’re reading here. I broke it in half and will post the second part as my next blog entry.
The remaining information for the next blog post will cover:
- Ketosis as a Natural Human State – don’t fear ketones
- Weight Loss: Calories, Protein, Fat & Carbs
- Advantages of Low-Carb/Keto over Traditional Calorie Restriction
- Adding Exogenous Ketones to your Diet
Sorry I’ve been so long winded. I hope I’m being clear and the information makes sense. Please ask questions. I look forward to talking with you on Facebook or in the comments below.
Be well,
References & Where you can find More Information
- Broken Brain Podcast with Mike Mutzel
- Peak Human Podcast with Prof. Tim Noakes
- Peak Human Podcast with Dom D’Agostino
- Book, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living
I’m Amy a board certified holistic nutritionist, certified functional nutritionist and lifestyle practitioner and certified Life Coach. I help women in midlife understand the changing needs of their body so that they can stop dieting and lose weight permanently. At 56 I live what I teach. Don’t believe the story that your best years are behind you. They are not. Your best years are just starting!