Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss

Check out my client Guy’s transformation where he lost a whole bunch of fat.

While the ketogenic diet may be growing in popularity there are a lot of people jumping into it without knowing what they’re doing.

And even though keto can help you lose weight and burn fat, it’ll only help you do that if you do it right.

So I want to give you guys a step by step guide that’ll allow you to properly set up your own ketogenic diet from scratch.

I’m gonna give you everything you need including what foods to eat, how much to eat based on your individual body,

how to get into ketosis faster, what supplements to take, as well as the benefits, side effects and much much more.

First, let’s start with the basics. A  is a high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet. And the goal is to get you into a state known as ketosis. Normally your body uses glucose or carbohydrates as it’s a primary source of energy,

but ketosis is a state where your body doesn’t have enough glucose to use for energy so it switches over to primarily using fats for fuel instead.

As your body becomes fatter adapted it becomes more efficient at using the dietary fat that you get from the food you eat

and it becomes more efficient at breaking down stored body fat for energy as well. This is what helps many people lose a lot of weight on the ketogenic diet.(1)

Besides losing weight other benefits include reduced blood sugar, improved insulin sensitivity, improved blood triglyceride levels, higher levels of HDL cholesterol

or the good kind of cholesterol, lower levels of LDL or the “bad’ cholesterol, less acne, and many people report experiencing less hunger than they would on a typical calorie restricted diet plan.

Now even though a keto diet can help provide all of these benefits, many people mess it up from the beginning because they have no targets for the day.

Instead, they just avoid carbs, and eat as much protein and fatty foods as they want, assuming that as long as they keep their carbs low they’ll burn fat.

Even though low carb diets, will usually automatically restrict your calories and lower your insulin levels,

(2) if you overeat protein and fat you can gain weight the same way you would buy overeating carbs.

So to start the ketogenic diet the first thing you’ll want to do is figure out about how much protein, carbs, and fats you should be having every day based on your particular body.

A standard keto diet will have only about 5 percent of your daily calories coming from carbs,

75 percent of your daily calories coming from fat, and only 20 percent of your calories coming from protein.

The easiest way to figure out exactly what this means for you and how much you should be eating is by using my free fat loss calculator that can be found by clicking the link in the description below.

After you input your stats like your height and your weight your macro results will load. Once they load, just select the ketogenic dieting option to find your daily protein, fat, and carb targets.

Keep in mind you don’t have to track your macros forever, but it’s a good idea to do it for at least a few days so you can make sure that you’re not eating too much or too little.

Something that you’ll notice right away is that your carbs are very low, so it’s important that you’re selecting the right foods, that will be appropriate for this type of diet plan.

 Since most of you will be required to stay under 20 to 30 grams of carbs per day you’ll want to avoid the obvious things like refined carbohydrates, candy, sugar, soda, juice, and bread,

but you’ll also have to avoid grains like rice, oats, quinoa, buckwheat, pasta, and barley as well as things like potatoes, beans, and even most fruits, and some vegetables.

As far as fruits you’re mostly going to be limited to avocados, raspberries, blackberries,

and strawberry since most other fruits are going to be too high in carbohydrates to squeeze into your meal plan.

Just one banana, for example, can have over 20 grams of carbs, which will pretty much use up all your carbohydrates for the day.

In regard to vegetables, an easy way to choose the right ones is by sticking to the ones that grow above the ground rather than underground.

Spinach, celery, and asparagus are the best keto approved vegetables that you can pretty much eat as much as you want of,

but other great vegetables include cucumbers, zucchini, kale, cauliflower, tomatoes, green beans, and broccoli.

On the other hand, you’ll want to avoid things like onions, carrots, and corn since they grow below ground and they’re much higher in carbohydrates.

For protein, you’ll want to eat things like chicken, beef, turkey, pork, eggs, fish as well as other seafood. And you should be avoiding protein sources that contain added carbohydrates like fat-free or low-fat yogurt, flavored dairy products, and milk.

Last, but not least you’ll need to eat quite a bit of fat every day, and it’s important that you don’t make the mistake of being afraid of eating that fat.

Not only will it help fill you up and reduce carb cravings, but you’re also going to need it to maintain your energy levels since you’ll be eating very few carbs.

Good sources of fat to include are butter, cream, coconut oil, avocados, olives, lard, and cheese. This is all of course in addition to the fats you’ll be getting from your protein sources like steak, eggs, and salmon.

You can also eat nuts for fat too, but you want to limit how many you eat because nuts also contain carbohydrates.

The best low carb nuts for keto are pecans, macadamias, and brazil nuts. Now once you fill your diet with all the approved foods and reduce your carbs you’re going to immediately feel some changes and even some side effects.

The major one is something known as the keto flu, and even though it only usually lasts anywhere from a few days to a week, it can be quite intense for some people.

You can feel things like lower energy levels, more fatigue, decreased performance at the gym, and increased hunger.

You might also get headaches, find it harder to fall asleep, feel nauseous, and experience muscle cramps as well as soreness.

To minimize these side effects you can try to ease into a ketogenic diet by practicing a lower carb diet that isn’t quite as low as keto for a week or two before dropping your carbs under 5 percent.

You’ll also want to make sure that you’re drinking a lot of water, getting enough salt in fact when first starting keto you may want to purposefully increase your salt intake to minimize the keto flu, and you also want to be eating enough fat.

1 to 2 cups of bone broth per day can really help reduce symptoms as well. But like I said the good news is that if you can make it through that first week you’ll feel a lot better.

Now normally it can take anywhere from 2 to 7 days for your body to enter into ketosis, but there are some things that you can do to speed this up.

You can do a 24 hour fast to quickly deplete your glycogen stores. If that’s too difficult you can also combine your ketogenic diet plan with a 16/8 intermittent fasting protocol

where you would only eat your high fat, moderate protein, and low carb diet during an 8-hour portion of the day and fast during the other 16 hours of the day.

Another thing you can do is a fat fast which involves eating somewhere between 800 to 1000 calories per day with roughly 90 percent of those calories coming from good sources of fat.

The last thing you can do to get into ketosis faster is to maintain a high level of activity. Remember that ketosis will only occur after you’ve fully depleted your bodies glycogen stores.

To get the stored glycogen out of there faster we can exercise. Specifically, high-intensity exercise with weights will help get you into ketosis faster,

but keep in mind getting into ketosis faster may increase keto flu symptoms more, so you’ll want to balance all of this with how you’re feeling.

Now if you’ve been on the keto diet for a few days or a full week you’ll probably want to find out if you’re in ketosis, and luckily there are some signs that you can look out for.

Feeling yourself starting to recover from the keto flu is one sign that you’re beginning to enter ketosis.

Another sign is a bad breath smell that’s especially obvious when you first wake up in the morning before you have anything to eat.

The bad smell is described as similar to overripe apples, so it’s kind of a mix of a fruity and a metallic smell. 

Obviously testing just by the smell of your breath in the morning could be a very inaccurate method,

but there are ketonix devices that can test the ketone levels in your breath more accurately,

the only problem is that they’re usually pretty expensive.

There are also ketone test strips that you can pee on to test for ketosis,

but you can get false negatives and false positives depending on how hydrated you are at the time of the test.

The most accurate test is a ketone blood test which requires a small sample of blood that you’ll get by pricking your finger with a lancet, the same way you would to test your blood sugar.

Really you don’t have to do any of these tests, especially if your goal is to use the ketogenic diet for weight loss.

If you see the pounds coming off the scale, it been over a week, and you’re eating less than 5 percent carbohydrates on a daily basis you’re probably in ketosis.

Now on top of the standard ketogenic diet, you also have other variations that can be great to incorporate for certain kinds of people.

For example, if you work out really hard, you’re an athlete, or you simply want to ease into ketosis without feeling so much of the keto flu you can try the cyclical ketogenic diet or the targeted ketogenic diet.

You would set up a cyclical ketogenic diet by following the regular keto protocol for 5 to 6 days of the week, and then you would carb up 1 to 2 days per week.

This will temporarily knock you out of ketosis, but you’ll get right back into ketosis fast since you’ll be following the keto protocol most of the time, causing your glycogen stores to already be very low.

With the targeted ketogenic diet you would have 25-50 grams of carbs before your high-intensity workouts. Again it will be easy to get back into ketosis because your high-intensity workouts will drain most of that glycogen.

Either of these approaches will make sticking the keto diet easier for some, it’ll also help you perform better at the gym especially with your high-intensity workouts, and that could ultimately help you preserve more muscle mass while burning fat.

The last variation is known as the high protein ketogenic diet where you would keep your carbs at 5 percent,but you would drop your fats to around 60 percent, and raise your protein to around 35 percent of your diet.

Usually, protein is kept lower on the ketogenic diet to prevent a process known as gluconeogenesis, in which protein, will get converted to glucose.

However, as I already said a little bit of glucose won’t really set you back. There are organs in your body like your brain that require glucose to function,

and the small amount of extra glucose that you might get from gluconeogenesis will probably be stored in your muscles and will be used during your next workout.

I used to believe that this could really impact ketosis, but it seems very unlikely to noticeably slow fat loss.If you’re concerned about gluconeogenesis and you want to be safe then you can just keep your protein intake at 20 percent.

Next, I want to go over sticking to the ketogenic diet long term. You have to remember that when you eliminate almost all carbs, it also eliminates a lot of what might have previously been your favorite foods.

Just the thought of never having rice, pasta, a piece of bread, or even a banana may be enough to push people away from keto.

However, there are things you can do to still eat a variety of different foods and make keto more manageable long term.

For example, you can replace French fries with zucchini fries or pasta with zucchini noodles or spaghetti squash. You can make mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes, and cauliflower recipes really do taste great.

There are actually a ton of things you can do with cauliflower, including cauliflower pizza, cauliflower rice, cauliflower hash browns, and lasagna.

Instead of bread you can get creative and use eggplant disks, you can use portabella mushrooms instead of buns,

and if you have it available in your grocery store there’s even special keto bread that you can buy.

For snacks, you can eat kale chips, zucchini chips, or pork rinds instead of potato chips.

You can also eat string cheese, beef jerky, and even dark chocolate desserts sweetened with stevia.

Not only do all of these things taste good, but they will also help satisfy your carb cravings and help you stick to the plan.

Now on top of food, you might be wondering about alcohol. Does alcohol fit into a ketogenic diet?

Well, whenever you drink alcohol of any kind your body will delay burning fat and prioritize burning off the alcohol and getting it out of your system.

So alcohol will slow fat loss, as well as muscle growth regardless of what diet plan you’re on.

However, there are certain liquors that will hurt you less than others when it comes to staying in ketosis.

Any kind of flavored drink that has added sugar like bloody marys and margaritas are immediately out.

Unflavored Vodka, brandy, whiskey, tequila, and certain lower carb wines and champagnes are okay. You also can’t have a regular beer but you can replace it with light beer instead.

Next, let’s go over supplementation because there are a lot of keto supplements out there that will simply waste your money.

Having a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar mixed in water before your meals can help promote ketone production because of the acetic acid it contains.

Pure MCT oil is also good because it’s supposed to be super easy to digest and absorb and it pretty much skips your stomach and goes straight to your liver to be converted to energy faster than most other oils.

There are medium chain triglycerides in other oils like coconut oil, but just keep in mind the highest MCT content other than MCT oil goes to coconut oil with about 15 percent of it’s fat coming from medium chain triglycerides.

With MCT oil you get 100 percent so theoretically, the MCT oil should work better for Ketone production and getting you into ketosis.

You may also want to take a magnesium and potassium supplement due to the dehydrating effect of not having carbs.

Lastly, you can supplement with some L- Leucine because it’s considered a ketogenic amino acid and can be converted to ketones which may help you get into ketosis faster.(3)

Other than that I don’t recommend you supplement with anything else to get into ketosis. There are keto protein powders that are complete nonsense and stuff like exogenous ketones will increase the levels of ketones in your blood,

but won’t help you get into ketosis faster and can even inhibit your body’s own creation of ketones from fatty acids. (4) So avoid them.

The last thing that I want to talk about is who the ketogenic diet may not be suitable for. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding if you have gall bladder disease or kidney disease the ketogenic diet might not be for you.

If you have high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol levels you may want to talk to your doctor before starting the diet too. Even though keto can help improve all of these things, it’s a good idea to have some support from a doctor before beginning.

Also if you’re an athlete or simply someone that cannot go without carbs the keto diet may not be right for you either.

Athletes may do better in terms of performance on a moderate to high carb diet especially if they’re involved in high-intensity activities or sports.

That’s it guys I really hope this video has helped you out. Also, I know I gave you a lot of information here, so if you want a done for you approach that requires no research

or trial and error on your part and will get you into ketosis fast, allowing you to lose inches, and drop pounds off the scale in no time check out my 6-week challenge.

It comes with a number of customizable diet plans including intermittent fasting, carb cycling,and of course a full ketogenic diet plan as well as a 50-page keto recipe book to go hand in hand with your meal plan.

You’ll also get a 42-day workout plan, a full video exercise library, and a personal accountability coach that will check in with you every week to make sure that you’re staying on track and answer any questions you have 24/7.

The best part is that not only are a bunch of my clients losing 20 pounds or 5 percent body fat with this plan in only 42 days, but they’re also getting it for free.

The only catch is that you can’t cheat and you can’t quit, as long as you don’t cheat and you don’t quit you can have the entire program and all the materials for free.

To find out more you can click the link below in the description or you can visit my website directly at gravitytransformation.com.