Should You Count Calories on The Ketogenic Diet?
In most cases, you will gain weight if you go on a traditional diet and keep track of how many calories you eat each day. People will be surprised by this, and they might even question whether it is true at this point. Counting calories has been the most common way to come up with a weight-loss plan in recent years. Keep track of how many calories you eat: This strategy has been called into question many times because of all the evidence that shows an increase in obesity and metabolic disorders when you keep track of how many calories you eat
If you follow a traditional diet and lose weight, you're more than likely to gain it back in the next few months.
People who go on these kinds of diets end up gaining more weight than when they started them, about 40% of the time.So today, you'll learn about the differences between a traditional diet and one that works well for weight loss, like the ketogenic diet. You'll also learn about how to keep track of calories.
It's true that you should not count calories.
There is the assumption that our metabolism runs like a machine, and that the difference between how many calories we take in and how many we take out makes us gain or lose weight. This is not true. In the first place, it's important to think about the limitations that counting calories has:
Averages aren't very accurate:
There are two "approaches" to the number of calories on a label that can make a big difference in how many calories people eat.
The amount that the body actually takes in: These data are based on the assumption that 100% of what we eat is absorbed, but in real life this is known to be very different.
It's not the same for everyone: People say things like "you're a slime" when they eat a lot and don't get fat, or "I get fat with the air" when they have a high or low basal metabolism for a variety of reasons. This, of course, can't be factored into the equations for how many calories you should eat each day.
All calories are not the same: not all calories come from the same places. All foods aren't the same.
This is what you get when you eat at McDonald's: A hamburger with fries, ice cream, and other things. Even though they have the same number of calories, the effect that one meal or another will have on your body is very different.
Many people also think that adipose tissue is only there to store some of the food we eat and that the body doesn't need to use it. This is an oversimplification that is close to the absurd.
What works and what doesn't for weight loss
People who are able to keep their weight in check have one thing in common: they can still follow their hunger and satiety feelings. They are called intuitive eaters because they know what they want to eat before they do. One way to make it more likely that we'll start to put on weight is to surround ourselves with food products made by the food industry that make us think we're full when we don't feel full.
Because processed foods are made to be eaten even if you don't need them. This is the main reason why people in the western world are overweight. If you want to learn more about this subject, you can read more here.
When we think about how calories come in and out, we think about better ways to help people. These better interventions are trying to solve the problems that led us to this metabolic pandemic.
The ketogenic diet for weight loss
Our goal is to go beyond the calorie counting model for weight or fat loss, and we want to get back to the body's own mechanisms for self-regulation, which include the ketogenic diet.
The ketogenic diet or keto diet reduces appetite
In general, all diets that help people lose weight have a compensatory effect that helps them gain back the weight they lost.
This, as we have already said, means that calories aren't burned as much, which leads to less satiating hormones like leptin and cholecystokinin and more appetite-stimulating hormones. In this case, your body will take the calories that you owe it and you will be hungry.
There is a good thing about the keto diet: It makes you feel full.
That's probably because eating fat and protein makes you feel full, so there aren't any changes in the hormones that control your hunger. It could also be because ketone bodies might make you not want to eat. There is less fat production and more fat is used when you eat the keto diet. Other things that make people's bodies not work the way they should are called "cellular metabolic memory" or "glucose hysteresis."
There are a lot of times a day when it is eaten, and most of the time it has a lot of carbohydrates in it. This makes the cells get used to using glucose as a fuel and not using their energy reserves.
Over time, cells can't use fat as a source of energy, so they lose important body capacity. This is called metabolic flexibility, and it means that you can use the best energy source for each situation, like food or water.
With the ketogenic diet, by cutting out carbohydrates and eating a lot of fat, we send a clear message to the body that it needs to get back to being able to burn fat again.
Our bodies get used to the fact that the food we eat makes us want to burn fat or carbohydrates. Fat and carbs will be used if they show up.
Putting fat and carbs together in one meal is likely to make your cells use the carbohydrate first. When we cut back on carbs, we can set up the right metabolic environment so that the body understands that what it needs to do is move and use fat, not store it.
