Ketogenic Diet vs Low Carb Diet

Isn’t the ketogenic diet and low carb diet essentially the same thing? How about Atkins and paleo aren’t all of these diets just a fancy way of saying keep your carbs low. Well it’s definitely safe to say that you are limiting your carb intake in all of these diet plans but each plan calls for a slightly different approach to burning fat.

Most ketogenic diets require you to keep your carbs under 30 grams a day and the most carbs that I’ve ever seen on a keto plan was 50 grams a day. Usually, this will account for 5% of your total daily intake. Then you would have somewhere between 75 to 80 percent of your calories from fat. And finally 15 to 20 percent of your calories from protein. With ketogenic, it’s clear that the carbs are very limited at only 5 percent per day and the reason why carbs are so limited is that the ketogenic diet is trying to put you into ketosis. To sum it up simply ketosis is a state in which you’re going to burn more fat and produce Ketone bodies in your liver for use as energy when carbohydrates are really low. Low-carb diets, on the other hand, don’t require an exact number of carbohydrates the way that keto does. Obviously, since it’s low carb you wouldn’t expect to have more than 20 to 30 percent of your calories coming from carbs but even at 20 percent, it’s a huge difference from the five percent that you get with keto. So with low carb, we can consider the exact number of carbs undefined whereas with Keto that number is very defined by exact numerical values. What about Atkins? When taking a closer look at Atkins you see that Atkins is different from keto and low-carb as well. With Atkins, the Generally accepted split is 30% protein 10% carbs and 60% fat. Again this is higher in carbs than the 5 percent we see with keto which Keto dieters would not support because they would say that having a higher level of carbs would take you out of ketosis. But Atkins at certain points dies definitely put you into ketosis. The plan takes you through four phases and a lot of these phases match up with the keto structure. In Phase 1 of Atkins, you have to limit your total daily carb intake to only 20 grams per day. This is as low if not even lower than keto. Then you progress to phase 2 where you still keep carbs really low but you add certain vegetable berries nuts and seeds back into the diet. Then in Phase 3 which you only start once you’re about 10 pounds from your weight loss goal, but once you’re there you start to add 10 grams of carbs to your diet each week. And finally, in phase four, you enter maintenance which allows you to eat anywhere from 45 to 100 grams of carbs per day. Phase one and two sound just like the ketogenic diet and I’m sure when your in those two phases you will be in a state of ketosis but when you enter into phase 3 and phase 4 you’re going to be moving more towards a general low carb diet which as I’ve already mentioned is very different from keto. Now, how about paleo, where does paleo fit in all of this. Well, paleo once again elicits fat loss by keeping the list of approved carbs short but the paleo plan is different because it only allows Foods that were believed to be eaten by our caveman ancestors. The best paleo macronutrient split as defined by the perfect health diet and paleo leap.com is around 20 percent carbohydrates 65 percent fat and 15 percent protein. Again this is slightly different from what we’ve seen with low carb and Atkins but it’s very different from keto. Even though paleo and Keto are both low in carbohydrates Keto is significantly lower than paleo again keto totals only at 5% of total daily intake. The Paleo diet is also very specific with what foods you can and cannot eat. Even though you can do this diet with regular produce it’s highly recommended that all your meat products are grass-fed wild caught and pasture-raised. You’re allowed to eat any fresh vegetables except for potatoes and any nuts except for peanuts. Also, eggs, healthy oils like olive oil, and fresh fruit especially berries are allowed on the plan. Grains, bread, cereals, any processed food, legumes, beans, and Dairy are completely off the plan. Dairy is a big part of the ketogenic diet for many people. A lot of people get the massive amount of fat required on keto with options like cheese. Cheese would be forbidden on the Paleo diet but on paleo, you would actually be able to eat things like pumpkin squash and yams. With keto, it would be almost impossible to eat these things because you would easily exceed you’re 5% carb allowance. Most of these diets matchup in their efforts to limit grains

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