The key to switching your body to fat burning requires that you lower your carb intake to 20-50 grams per day. For people who have a very slow metabolism, you might have to lower this even more and keep your carb intake around 20 grams. Really, you’ll have to test the waters and see where your ideal carb intake for weight loss is. Yes, everyone will lose weight at 20 grams only of carbohydrate, but you want to keep this number higher if you can, so you can eat more energy and nutrition yielding vegetables.
By the way, there is no essential carbohydrate. Our body can do quite fine without them. There are different types of carbohydrates: vegetables, fruits, berries, starches (potato and rice), grains and legumes. Then you have the really bad guys — refined carbohydrates like table sugar, wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
With ketosis, we want to stick with vegetables and very small amounts of berries only. Vegetables give us our vitamins and minerals and turn into sugar very slowly. Berries turn into sugar much more slowly. Consuming fruit and fruit juices like orange juice is the worst. Did you know that an apple contains a whopping 19 grams of sugar?
Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is not a diet. It’s about the science of tapping into fat burning by limiting the frequency of meals, allowing you to tap into fat burning for all that time between the time you eat your meals and when you’re sleeping at night.
The reason this is so essential is because one of the primary triggers of insulin is EATING– eating anything. So, eating 5-6 times a day — and let’s not forget snacking is eating — will spike insulin. Frequent eating through the day, causes chronic sustained higher levels of insulin, and this leads to insulin resistance.
Eating less often with no snacks to spike insulin in between meals is the most powerful way to heal and correct insulin resistance.
To do this, first start with three meals per day—NO snacks—absolutely nothing between meals but water, black coffee, and other non-caloric, non–insulin spiking drinks. (Too much coffee, however, will also spike insulin.)
Keeping insulin at normal between meals and during sleep allows the pancreas to rest and recover. But some people have a hard to time going from one meal to the next because they get blood sugar crashes and severe hunger.
The solution to this is to consume more fat at the meal. Fat not only satisfies you the most but triggers insulin the least. Consuming lean protein and low-fat meals keeps you hungry, so the answer is more fat.
The goal over time is to GRADUALLY transition from three meals per day to a shortened daily eating window by eating only two meals a day.
This is not about lowering your calorie intake; it’s about eating less often. Your new goal should be to reduce the frequency of meals you eat and avoid spiking insulin.
Again, low-calorie diets do not work because they keep you hungry and craving—even worse, they deprive you of nutrients, eventually slowing your metabolism. If you’re transitioning from three to two meals, make sure your two meals contain the same calories as the three meals.
Credit: keto.drberg.com
