Ketogenic Diet: Is this right for me?
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Last week we talked about several different diets. And I wanted to update you guys about what I was doing to kind of you on this journey of 2018 healthy weight loss. I actually started the ketogenic diet. I’ve been on that for almost two weeks now. And as you can all remember, the ketogenic diet has a very low carbo count. So it means, less than 5-10% of your total calories coming from carbohydrates. My personal daily carbohydrate intake has been under 20grams of Net Carbs a day, which ends up being pretty difficult.
*Net Carbs = weight in grams of total carbohydrates – weight in grams of fiber
It’s been a very interesting journey. For example, I never knew that there are 3 net carbs in a single cucumber. If you count that, it adds up pretty quickly. I have actually felt some differences since doing this for two weeks. I’m feeling much more awake and alert. I feel like I’m not having those sugar crashes throughout the day. I’m no longer eating lunch and I feel a little sleepy for a while like most of us used to. I’ve noticed a little bit of weight loss. But then, I didn’t have a very high carb intake prior to this diet anyway.
I have several patients on this diet right now, and have had phenomenal weight loss in starting. I have a certain diabetic patient who has now a perfect blood sugar numbers since starting this diet. It’s working really well for everybody all around. I’m planning on continuing this and see how it goes. If any of you have comments or questions on your personal journey on the ketogenic diet or any other diet for that matter. Please leave a comment at the bottom of this video and I will respond as quickly as possible.
Now let’s talk about the exercise portion of the weight loss journey. There are different recommendations for different medical conditions and different recommendations for men and women.
One of the biggest differences seems to be that women specifically do very well with interval training. And what interval training means is that instead of getting your heart rate up a little bit and then maintaining it at that lower level, you tend to do that but then throughout the exercise you get your heart rate up much higher to maximal intensity heart rate for a certain period of time, and then back down.
Usually, what I could recommend is doing about a minute on and then two minutes off. You might want to start with 60-70% of your maximal heart rate for two minutes, and then going up about 90% for a minute, and then back down to 60-70%. What this does is that it actually shocks your body into going into a different metabolic state and it burns energy much faster.
Women do tend to respond to interval training better than men do.
Men tend to respond well just to getting their heart rates up and then maintaining their heart rates. But women do work a little differently.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that during dietary seasons, women tend to really restrict their calories. And unfortunately, a lot of women will restrict their calories to the point that their body goes into hibernation mode. You do not want to be a hibernating bear. You don’t want your body to be so deprived, that it would store the energy instead of readily burning it during the exercise.
I usually recommend not going down below nine hundred or a thousand calories for anybody, especially if they’re exercising. But there are caloric calculations you can do based on your weight loss goals online, and those will be very patient-specific.
Stay tuned until next week, and we’ll be talking about another weight loss topic.
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