The Healthy Keto Diet
Your Quick Start Guide
There are lots of guides about the keto diet for beginners, but here’s what makes this one different:
You’ll discover Healthy Ketosis
Unlike traditional forms of the keto diet, Healthy Ketosis uses high-quality ingredients full of nutrients to support your health.
I’ve helped many of people to lose weight and get their health back under their control.
And in this guide, I’ll show you how you can get started with your own keto diet plan even if you’re a total beginner.
Or if you’re a seasoned keto adherent who’s limited your carb intake, become keto-adapted, and enjoyed the anti-inflammatory benefits of a low carb keto way of eating, you’ll find tips and tricks drawn from years of research that you probably won’t find anywhere else on the web.
Let's jump in
What is a ketogenic Diet?
A ketogenic diet is simply a diet, which causes your body to run on what are called ketones instead of sugar from carbohydrates like pasta, grains or sugary foods. Ketones are a type of acid formed when your body begins burning stored or dietary fat for fuel instead of carbs. They’re actually a very efficient fuel for your body. The most abundant, and beneficial, ketone is called beta-hydroxybutyrate or BHB.
On a typical diet, your body is constantly converting sugar from carbs into energy. However, when you change to a high-fat diet and limit your net carbs, your body starts producing ketones for energy. As a result, on a low carb diet, your body automatically begins burning fat.
In a keto diet, the goal is to switch your body from burning sugar fuel to fat fuel.
Do You Really Need Carbs?
The dictionary defines carbohydrates as “substances such as sugar or starch that provide the body with energy.”
Simple carbohydrate made of refined flour and added sugar rapidly converts to blood sugar (glucose) when you eat them. Complex carbohydrates, such as grains and beans, convert more slowly. Regardless, all carbohydrates convert to sugar in the body – and when your net carb intake is high you’ll gain weight.
All your life you’ve been told that you need carbohydrates for energy or that your brain can only run on glucose made from carbs, a type of sugar. Those are myths, as evidenced by the countless healthy, happy individuals on low-sugar or low-carbohydrate diets. Instead, you can run your body on other fuel sources such as fatty acids and ketones produced by fat burning. While your body does need a very tiny amount of glucose (sugar) to function, it has the capability to produce all the glucose it needs internally from fat or protein, not carbs.
The carbs you do need are vegetables—but only for the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber they supply. Otherwise, your body does not require carbohydrates for good health. In fact, the opposite is true. Carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates, deplete your nutrients and negatively affect your health. Carbs also turn to fat in your body, and they impede fat burning. (That’s why you haven’t been able to lose weight on a high-carb diet.)
Ketosis Simplified
“Ketosis” is the state your body is in when it is converting fat into energy. When a diet is referred to as “ketogenic,” it only uses a particular combination of foods that puts your body into ketosis using a process called ketogenesis.
The goal of the ketogenic diet is to get your body into ketosis and keep it there. When you’re in ketosis, your body creates better fuel for itself and for your brain.
As you can guess, the foods that throw you out of ketosis are excessive carbs and sugar and high protein. So too will frequent eating.
Getting your body into ketosis is like flipping a switch from using energy from carbs to using energy from fat. The result is that you start burning fat automatically as you go through your day.
Traditional Keto Diet Plan Vs. Healthy Ketosis
Although the common denominator of all keto diets is low net carbs to induce ketosis, not all keto diets are created equal. In fact, traditional ketogenic diets do not differentiate the type of food. Many times they include processed, genetically modified foods, gluten products, unhealthy trans fats, and synthetic vitamins. This gives keto a bad rap. Traditional low-carb, high-fat keto’s primary goal is usually rapid weight loss or a reduction of epilepsy symptoms, and not necessarily good nutrition. As a result, you could lose weight or reduce certain symptoms but become less healthy overall.
Any type of ketogenic diet, by limiting net carbs, also reduces your insulin – but why limit yourself when there are an impressive variety of long-term health benefits, which await you?
It’s not “Lose weight to get healthy,” its “Get healthy to lose weight!”
Healthy Keto is groundbreaking because it emphasizes obtaining your required nutrients from high-quality foods such as organic vegetables, full-fat organic dairy, and wild-caught, grass fed, pasture-raised meat, fish, fowl, and eggs —all with the goal of getting you healthy to lose weight rather than losing weight to get healthy.
The Truth About Fat
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, widespread media stories about the alleged virtues of low-fat diets resulted in hundreds of unhealthy low-fat foods on our grocery shelves. These low-fat processed foods were (and still are) loaded with sweeteners and chemicals to make them more palatable because they lacked delicious fats like butter or coconut oil.
Rest assured that healthy dietary fat is a vital component of any diet. Your body needs it! Fat assists in cell growth, the production of hormones, the absorption of nutrients, and more(7).
Although 70 percent of your diet as fat seems like an excessive amount, remember we are talking about 70 percent of the total calories. Because fat is more than double the calories per gram than protein or carbs, the amount of fat in weight size is a lot smaller. Instead of focusing on the 70 percent, let’s look at it in the volume of food on your plate.
I recommend you gradually work your way up to your daily amount of fat. If you add too much fat too quickly, you’ll overwhelm your gallbladder, which can cause shoulder pain and bloating. Keto involves eating more fats, and your body will adapt to this by producing more bile. This is a gradual process and may take time, so if you react to an increase in dietary fat cut back a little and introduce it more slowly.
On my Healthy Keto Plan, you’ll be eating foods like beef, large salads, butter, and eggs. If you want to know the gram amounts of fat you’ll be consuming, it would range between 20 to 50 grams in each meal.
I recommend everyone start off on a higher amount of fat in the beginning to help satisfy you between meals. As your body adapts to ketosis over time, you can reduce your fat if you need to lose more weight. Since either your ketones are generated from your own body fat or the dietary fat you eat, eating too much fat may keep you from losing your own fat, particularly if your metabolism is slow despite still being in ketosis.
Healthy Keto Combined With Intermittent Fasting
When you hear the word “fasting,” you might think you have to starve yourself through hours of food deprivation. That’s not what I’m talking about! Intermittent fasting is not a starvation plan but another powerful strategy to boost the health and weight-loss benefits of Healthy Keto
Intermittent Fasting Explained
Intermittent fasting isn’t a diet; it’s a pattern of eating and not eating. It’s not about cutting calories; it’s about changing when you eat and when you don’t eat.
Intermittent fasting triggers one of the most powerful hormones in your body. It’s called growth hormone (GH). GH has anti-aging properties and is the most powerful fat-burning hormone you have. As well, it protects your muscles and builds lean body mass.
There’s another substantial benefit from fasting: your insulin will be reduced.
Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas and is the body’s defense against glucose (sugar). When there is glucose in your bloodstream, your pancreas produces insulin to quickly remove the sugar and feed it to cells plus store it as fat. This explains why you get a quick burst of energy after eating sugary treats. Of course, it lasts only for a second before insulin comes along to remove the sugar, leaving you with low blood sugar fatigue (otherwise known as a sugar crash).
Why should you care about your insulin levels? Because in the presence of insulin, you cannot lose weight; insulin prevents the burning of fat. In fact, insulin is so dominant; it will actually block the beneficial growth hormone I mentioned.
Eating triggers insulin – even when you’re on the keto diet, you’ll trigger some insulin. Thus, the less often you eat, the less insulin you’ll produce.
What’s interesting about this is if you consumed 2000 calories in a given day but ate them spread out over six meals as compared to two meals, you would gain more weight because of this insulin factor.
Thus, intermittent fasting enables you to influence the action of insulin and growth hormone for your benefit.
How Intermittent Fasting Increases Fat Burning
Your body needs very little sugar to function. In fact, it requires just 1 teaspoon of sugar per day, which could easily be converted from the protein or fat you eat. You don’t need any dietary sugar. However, the average consumes 31 teaspoons of sugar every single day—over 30 times the amount of sugar required by your body!
Sugar is highly toxic to the body. It causes damage to the nerves, affects vision, increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, and contributes to Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
When sugar is detected in your body, insulin will use it as the primary fuel source. Not because it is a high-quality fuel, but because it is so damaging your body tries to get rid of it as quickly as possible. People mistakenly take this body response to mean that sugar is the primary preferred fuel of the body. But as you can see, it’s not.
However, carbs aren’t the only thing, which causes the body to produce insulin. Insulin production is triggered when you eat any type of food. As a result, every time you eat—even healthy snacks—insulin levels in your body spike and block fat burning. Bodies weren’t designed to eat and graze all day long. Which means snacking is a very bad habit!
A Healthy Keto diet combined with intermittent fasting maximizes fat burning by:
1. Greatly reducing the volume of carbohydrates (sugar), and thus insulin, in the body.
2. Providing a lengthy time period in which growth hormone can burn fat without interruption from insulin.
You may be thinking, how on earth do people stay with keto without feeling deprived, hungry, and cranky? The reason people – like you – can sustain this eating plan and easily stick to it is because cravings and hunger disappear, you’ll maintain stable energy levels, and feel more positive.
The Life-Changing Benefits of Low Carb
The life-changing benefits of Healthy Keto and intermittent fasting include:
1. More efficient fuel for the body
On the Healthy Keto diet, you’re burning your own body fat for energy rather than relying on carbohydrates. This is a much cleaner, more efficient way to fuel the body.
2. Dramatic weight loss
Healthy Keto and IF produce some of the fastest weight loss of any diet. They also eliminate stubborn belly fat.
3. Brainpower booster
A ketogenic diet improves memory and relieves cognitive disorders such as childhood epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological issues.
4. A happier outlook
When your body runs on sugar, you can get irritable and cranky once your sugar supply drops. Running your body on ketones instead stabilizes your blood sugar and mental outlook.
5. Reduced hunger and cravings
A keto diet stabilizes your blood sugar level. This relieves the cravings and hunger that can overwhelm dieters.
6. Bust through the weight loss barrier
Do you have a set weight point that you can’t seem to get past? This repairs your metabolism so you can bust through that point where your weight loss stalls.
7. Bring insulin levels (and your health) under control
High insulin levels pose severe risks to your health. Left untreated, high insulin levels can result in serious physical conditions including diabetes, strokes, cardiovascular issues, and Alzheimer’s, to name just a few. A ketogenic diet enables you to take control of your insulin level. It will not only vastly improve your health; it could save your life.
We have hundreds, if not thousands, of success stories from ketogenic diet followers whose lives were changed by recovering their health, losing weight, rejuvenating their bodies, and regaining their zest for life. By following the simple principles described here, these benefits are available to anyone who wants to make a change for the better.
Keto Myths
Myth #1
Our brains need more carbohydrates than are provided on this diet
This myth is based on the idea that your brain can only run on glucose. Actually, when your body depletes its glucose stores it will begin to run on ketones, which is much healthier for the brain than burning carbs. In fact, there are some brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease that are improved by a ketogenic diet.
Myth #2
The ketogenic high-fat diet is dangerous.
There are many studies proving that a ketogenic diet improves health conditions like heart disease, epilepsy or diabetes. Here are a few:
Myth #3
The ketogenic diet reduces your lifespan
I found one study that claimed that a low-carb diet shortens a lifespan. When I took a closer look, I found that the researchers had a conflict of interest because they had received fees from large pharmaceutical companies. Additionally, this “study” was based only on questionnaires using people’s memories of what their diets had been like.
Myth #4
The ketogenic diet will give you a fatty liver
What gives a person a fatty liver is high levels of sugar in the body. Any blood sugar not needed immediately for energy is converted to fat and sent to the liver. The Healthy KetoTM diet allows the body to flush out stored fats, including from the liver, that it no longer needs.
Myth #5
The ketogenic diet will cause nutritional deficiencies
Traditional ketogenic diets could cause some nutritional deficiencies because their focus is on weight loss, not nutrition. That’s why I developed the Healthy Ketosis diet. It’s a keto diet with this twist: it’s based on you deriving all the nutrients you need from the foods you eat.
Myth #6
The ketogenic diet is not good for people with hypoglycemia
With hypoglycemia, the amount of sugar in the blood drops too much. This makes a person irritable and craves carbohydrates. But keto doesn’t cause your blood sugar to drop; instead, eating sweets or starches does. If you have a tendency toward hypoglycemia, be sure to 1) consume more fat at each meal, 2) don’t eat too frequently, 3) avoid sugars and carbohydrates, and, 4) include plenty of leafy greens to provide the minerals (especially potassium and magnesium) to help insulin resistance.
Myth #7
The ketogenic diet causes bad breath
Bad breath is easily handled by eating 7 to 10 cups of low-carb vegetables each day. If there’s an ammonia smell to your breath, cut back on your protein. If you overload your body will protein, it can’t digest it and the protein turns up as waste. Vegetables help offset this.
Myth #8
The ketogenic diet causes kidney damage
Kidneys are actually damaged by high levels of insulin or sugar. The Healthy Ketosis diet lowers insulin and sugar levels. It also requires eating lots of greens, which supports kidney health with minerals like potassium.
Myth #9
The ketogenic diet causes ketoacidosis
Ketoacidosis is a serious medical condition related to diabetes. Ketosis is a completely different state resulting from the body burning fat for energy rather than carbohydrates. The two are not related.
Myth #10
The ketogenic diet is not sustainable
Our bodies weren’t designed to take in the high volume of sugar a typical person consumes in a day. Excess sugar consumption results in high blood sugar and insulin levels, which ultimately load up the liver with fat. Burning ketones for fuel, which is what one does on a keto diet, is much healthier than burning carbohydrates. Your brain can use ketones for fuel indefinitely.
Myth #11
The ketogenic diet is too restrictive.
The restrictions on the keto diet are to prevent the consumption of unhealthy food. Just as a doctor would advise a patient to quit smoking to prolong the patient’s life, I advise keto followers to restrict the intake of foods, which cause diabetes, organ damage, heart disease, fatigue, and many other unwanted physical conditions. And like the patient who quits smoking, keto followers live happier, healthier lives.