The keto diet is a low carb diet that is great for losing weight, as well as having multiple heath benefits. However, to maximize your gains, you’ll need to avoid these 8 biggest mistakes on keto.
Sometime people find they are dissapointed when they first start the keto diet. They find that they are not losing weight as fast as they’d hoped.
Most times, it’s that they’re making one or more of the 8 most common keto mistakes.
Here you’ll learn about these common mistakes, and how easy it is to fix your keto diet.
Make sure that you’re not making any of these biggest 8 mistakes. Fix these and you’ll be reaping all the health and weight loss benefits of the keto diet in no time.
Keto mistake no. 1
Not eating enough.
The keto diet is a low carb, medium protein, high fat diet.
It is NOT a calorie controlled diet, and there is no reason to stop eating before you feel full.
Make sure that you eat enough at each meal; you should always leave the table feeling that you’ve had enough, without feeling you’ve eaten too much.
The old calorie in/calorie out out method does not work long term for weight loss.
For a start, your body neither knows nor cares how many calories you have just eaten. There is no calorie receptor in your body.
What your body does react to is the type of food you eat: it will notice if you’ve eaten carbohydrates, protein or fats.
The keto diet is all about eating in a way that is in tune with this.
Further, if you restrict calories, you will soon lower your metabolic rate.
This will have the effect of gradually making it more and more difficult to lose weight. Your body will adjust to the new smaller portions, and do what it can to conserve energy.
If you lower your metabolic rate, you will also see a weight gain as soon as you go back to eating until you’ve had enough.
Always make sure that you don’t leave the table feeling hungry.
This leads us to:
Keto mistake no. 2
Snacking.
We as humans are simply not designed to graze our way through our day in the way of cows. We are meant to eat a few times a day, and leave many hours in between meals.
We evolved at a time when we did not have food available to us 24 hours a day. For this reason, we developed a process of Autophagy.
Autophagy is a natural process that is triggered whenever we go without food.
We have evolved to make the most of these non eating times to cleanse, repair and replace our cells. Autophagy is our built-in o healing process and is vital to good health.
When we eat way too often, we reduce the amount of times that autophagy is triggered in our bodies. We will be missing out on this spring cleaning system that is vital to our long term well being.
Autophagy can also be triggered by intermittent fasting.
This fast can be as short as an overnight fast. Simply stop eating after your evening meal at about 8pm, and then eat nothing until breakfast the next morning.
This will give you an intermittent fast of about 12 hours in a very easy to do way.
For even better results, try skipping breakfast altogether. Despite what you may have heard, breakfast is not essential to your health.
Intermittent fasting can super boost your keto diet, and maximize your weight loss. It’s a fairly easy intervention, and will boost your weight loss.
For these reasons, try to make sure that you never snack.
Keto mistake no 3
Not eating enough fat.
This is a very common problem for people when they first start on the keto diet.
We have been bombarded with messages that fat, in particular saturated fat, is bad for us.
This is simply not true: Saturated fats are necessary for our health.
Make sure that you’re enjoying plenty of butter, olive oil and lard.
Not only are these fats important, they will also help you to feel full for longer. You will find that you are much less inclined to want to snack between meals.
The keto diet recommends that 70% of your daily intake comes from healthy fats.
However, there is one fat that you should avoid at all costs. Seed oils are very bad for your health, and should never be used.
For more information about fat read: Saturated fat: Good or bad?
Keto mistake no 4
Not eating enough salt.
Again, this is a dietary myth that is all around us. We have all heard the message that eating salt is not healthy.
It’s hard to see how this came to be so widely accepted. All mammals need a certain amount of salt to stay healthy. You only have to observe cattle enjoying a salt lick to know this is true.
Managing your salt intake is as easy as judging by your taste. Your food should neither taste bland nor too salty. Adjust your salt to reach your own preferred level.
Magnesium and potassium are also very important. Sodium, magnesium and potassium are alla important electrolytes that you need to be taking care of.
If your electrolytes become unbalanced you could feel the effects of the keto flu. This is often something that effects people who are new to the keto diet.
Many times this leads to feeling of the keto diet not being right for them. Read here to learn how to avoid this, and make your keto journey a lot more comfortable.
Keto mistake no 5
Relying on food labels to tell you the truth
We’ve all been taught to ready the labels on foods carefully, so this mistake may come as a surprise.
The problem is that food manufactures can legally get very creative with their labels, and you can easily be misled into believing a food is OK for your keto diet.
Often, high carb ingredients will be listed under multiple different names. Sugar for example can be referred to in 52 different ways. This could lead to the carb count for a food being a lot higher than you’d expect.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s both healthier and safer to eat only whole foods.
These are the sort of foods that don’t need food labels at all. They are single ingredient foods. They are completely unprocessed and will offer you the best in terms of your health.
If you do want to eat a processed food from time to time, try to limit yourself to those foods that have only three ingredients or fewer.
Certainly, processed foods with multiple, often unpronounceable, ingredients should be left off your plate altogether.
Keto mistake no 6
Worrying about how much protein you’re eating.
There is a lot of bro science out there that says if you eat too much protein on the keto diet you will get yourself kicked out of ketosis.
As ketosis is the healthful state upon which the keto diet depends, you’ll obviously be wanting to avoid this.
The reason people fear too much protein is that they have heard about large amounts of protein being converted into ketosis- busting glucose.
However, the truth is that this process, known as Glucogenesis, happens all the time in your body.
It is via glucogenesis that your body is able to supply glucose to those bodily functions that can only function when they have small amounts of glucose.
This the reason that your body is able to thrive on a very low, or even zero carbohydrate diet. When it does require glucose, it is able to make it.
This is unlikely to push you out of ketosis, and you are going to continue to burn fat as your primary source of energy.
Remember, your body requires the amino acids from protein for growth and repair.
The recommended daily allowance for protein is 0.36 grams of protein per pound (0.8 grams per kg) of body weight. This amounts to: 56 grams per day for the average sedentary man. 46 grams per day for the average sedentary woman.
Also, protein, as with fat, will help you to feel full for longer too.
Keto mistake no 7
Not eating the right amount balance of the macro nutrients, carbohydrates, fats and protein.
The keto diet will only work well when you are taking in the correct amount of each macro for your body weight.
Its important that you use a keto calculator to help you to work out exactly how many grams of each macro you need each day to meet your health and weight loss goals.
Make sure you measure and track all your foods too, especially in the beginning. Relying on guesswork is more than likely to have you eating too many or too few of one of your macros.
This will make it much more likely that the keto diet won’t seem to be working for you.
Keto mistake no 8
Comparing your progress to others.
It can be disheartening to discover that your friend is losing twice as much weight as you are.
This doesn’t mean that the diet is not working for you: your weight, age, health status and exercise level are all unique to you.
This means that different people will experience weight loss at very different levels and speeds.
However, if you do feel that your weight loss is too slow, double check that you’re not just over eating, or eating too much fat.
The keto diet is not calorie controlled, but you do need to make sure that you’re not over eating.
The same goes with your fat intake. Take note of your recommended intake of fat after you have consulted the keto calculator.
If you continue to lose less weight than you were expecting to, adjust the amount of fat you eat until you’re reaching your goals.
Don’t change the amount of carbohydrate and protein you eat.
This should have you back on track within a week or so.
The keto diet is an amazing and fast way to reach all your health and weight loss goals.
If you find yourself disappointed with your progress, it will almost certainly be that you are making one of the 8 biggest mistakes on keto.
Luckily, they are all easy mistakes to fix, and take nothing more that some extra attention to details. Once you’ve done this, you will have your keto diet back on tract.
Read through the articles here, and make sure you have all the basics right too. Concentrate on healthy whole foods, and eat well at each meal, leaving many hours between each.
The keto diet is a lot more easy than it might look at first sight, and there is overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness for both weight and health benefits.
English
Español