What is Ketogenic Diet (Keto Diet)?

The Keto diet is a type of low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, which provides multiple health benefits. Many studies demonstrate that keto diet can help in not only losing weight but also improving health. This diet may even provide benefit to patients suffering from various types of diseases including diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and cancer.

What happens in Keto Diet?

Keto diets involve reducing your carbohydrate intake drastically and eat fat in its place. This reduction in carbohydrates forces your body to a metabolic state referred to as ketosis. During ketosis, your body burns fat for its energy requirements efficiently, thereby, helping you lose weight. It also converts fat to ketones in liver that are used as energy by the brain.

Keto diet can result in massive reduction in insulin and blood sugar levels. This in association with raised ketones has multiple health benefits.

Keto diet may help you shed weight

Keto diet helps in losing weight effectively. In fact, according to research, keto diet is superior to low-fat diet in losing weight. Moreover, the diet in itself keeps you so full that you can shed weight without tracking food or counting calories.
According to a study published in the Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism, people who were on keto diet shed 2.2 times excess weight in comparison to those people who were on low-fat diet that restrict calories. Moreover, the HDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels of people on keto diet also improved.

The different kinds of ketogenic diets are as follows:

Standard keto diet (SKD): This type is a low-carbohydrate, high-fat and moderate-protein diet. It consists of only 5% carbohydrates, 75% fats and 20% proteins.

Cyclical keto diet (CKD): In this diet periods of high carbohydrate re-feeds are there in between ketogenic days, for example-5 keto days are followed by 2 high-carbohydrate days.
Targeted keto diet (TKD): In this type you can add carbohydrates around your workouts.

High-protein keto diet: This diet is similar to standard keto diet, but the ratio of protein is more. It consists of 5% carbohydrates, 35% proteins and 60% fats.

Extensive studies have been done only on the high-protein and standard keto diets. Targeted and cyclical diets are mostly used by athletes or bodybuilders.