If it’s all about calories in vs out, why is Keto so recommended
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A lot of diets are based on restricting certain foods. You get sick of the foods you are allowed to eat and thus will eat less of it.
A gummy-bear-only-diet will also work for weight-loss for example.
Obviously one of those is a lie. If you compare r/keto (success story after success story) and r/loseit (mostly failures & new starts) you will find out which one it is.
Carbohydrates are like fuel for your muscles and brain. Without carbs they don’t work efficiently. So i personally would not recomend a keto diet to anyone especially athletes. The only problem with carbs is if you eat too much refined carbs such as white sugar, white pasta, and white bread etc. So i would recommend cutting back on those and not to think only in terms of calories and fat, carbs, and proteins, but also in vitamin intake. Also i would like to point out the importance of sleep. Not just to get minimum 7-9 hour but also maintaining a consistent sleepschedule. To go to sleep at the same time every night and to wake up the same time every morning is vastly underrated and overlooked when talking about health imo.
A calorie is a measurement of thermal energy. Gasoline for example has calories, a lot of them I might add, 2000 per cup.
**From a metabolic standpoint calories are not all created equal.**
Blood glucose (sugar) is the primary source of energy for your cells, other things [proteins/fats] can be used as energy but require enzyme pathways to be used. Consuming glucose will directly increase your blood glucose levels with 0 enzyme pathways, consuming starch is just 1 enzyme *Amylase* away from becoming glucose.
Carefully monitoring your carbohydrate consumption should be pretty paramount to just about any weight lose program. Keto is popular because it works, it derives its name from *ketosis* which is the state your body goes into when it doesn’t have readily available or very low blood glucose. Personally I think the diet might be extreme but it’s hard to argue with results.
It’s not all about calories in vs out. It’s important, but disregards the process of how fat is stored and burned by the body. One reason behind low-carb diets is that when you eat carbohydrates, your body produces insulin. One of the things that insulin does is to stimulate fat storage, meaning that eating too much should in theory result in you gaining less fat. The other thing is that removing carbs from your diet will lower your blood sugar, which forces your body to start breaking down fat for fuel.
So the idea is that diets like keto work by looking at exactly how fat is stored and used to find the most efficient way to keep body fat down. Unfortunately, (as far as I’ve seen, at least) actual research on effectiveness seems to show mixed results when compared to calories in/out methods of dieting, and the body of research is honestly not as big as it probably should be, so it’s really hard to make a call on how well low-carb diets work.
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