WITH THIS BOOK AS YOUR GUIDE, you can easily make the lifestyle change millions of other people have successfully made. You can feel and look great by eating food that’s healthy, natural, and delicious. It will benefit your mental and physical health and provide constant energy throughout your day.
To be successful, you’ll need to understand the very basics of your body and dieting.
Low-fat, low-calorie, gluten-free, Atkins, Weight Watchers, South Beach… the list of diets goes on. Most require you to starve yourself, eat bland, uninspiring food, strictly count calories, or go through various induction phases. The major problem with these diets is that they aren’t always nutritionally sound and they’re certainly not satisfying. That’s simply not safe or sustainable. They are not a lifestyle.
What the more successful diets have in common is the reduction of foods rich in carbohydrates. Studies show that people who eat low-carb diets and don’t reduce calories lose more weight than people who eat low-fat diets and also reduce calories. In addition, low-carb dieters generally show more improvement for important health indicators like triglyceride, blood sugar, and insulin levels and more.
This all comes down to how your body works. When you eat carbs, your body breaks them down into glucose, a simple sugar, which quickly and significantly raises your blood sugar levels. Then you produce insulin to reduce this spike in blood sugar. After years and years of this cycle, your body will need to produce more insulin at once to achieve the same results. You can quickly become insulin resistant, and very commonly this resistance turns into prediabetes, metabolic syndrome, and, eventually, type 2 diabetes.
According to the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA’s) 2012 data, more than 1 in 3 adults in the United States have prediabetes and nearly 1 in 10 have type 2 diabetes. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows the number of obese adults in the United States has spiked since the 1980s from 15 percent to 35 percent of all adults ages 20 to 74. This increase can only be attributed to a change in diet on a national scale.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) first released their Dietary Guidelines in 1980, and they recommended that fats and oils be heavily reduced along with sweets while carbohydrates should account for most of your daily food consumption. Soon after they released the Food Pyramid Guide, which placed carbs into the largest section of the pyramid and recommended that you eat 6 to 11 servings a day. They also recommended eating 2 to 4 servings of fruit (which is full of natural sugars) a day. These guidelines, even decades later, have been used as a framework for the US consumer education messages by the surgeon general, CDC, and many other government organizations since then.
Today, the ADA promotes eating “healthy carbohydrates” for diabetics instead of greatly reducing carbs from the diet. If carbs are ultimately sugar, and sugar ultimately causes many of these diseases, why are you told to prioritize carbs in your diet? There’s no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Your body can create the glucose it needs through a process called gluconeogenesis, where the liver converts glycerol (derived from fats) into glucose.
Alternatively, you’ve no doubt been taught that saturated and monounsaturated fats cause heart disease, cholesterol problems, and many other issues. In the last decade, dozens of studies and multiple meta-studies (studies that analyze other studies’ results) with over 900,000 subjects from almost 100 different data sets have shown similar conclusions: Eating saturated and monounsaturated fats has no effects on heart disease risks, short- or long-term.
Most fats are good and are essential to our health— that’s why there are essential fatty acids and essential amino acids (protein). Fats are the most efficient form of energy and each gram contains about 9 calories. That’s more than double the amount in carbohydrates and protein (both have 4 calories per gram).
When you eat lots of fat and protein and greatly reduce carbs, your body adapts and converts the fat and protein, as well as the fat you have stored, into ketone bodies, or ketones, for energy. This metabolic process is called ketosis.
That’s where the ketogenic in ketogenic diet originates from.
This book will provide you with what you need to succeed with the ketogenic diet— simple cooking, weight loss, and long term success.