Keto Answers summary

If you’ve ever dieted, the following might sound familiar. After a week or two, the pounds start to drop. You should be feeling great, but you just . . . don’t. You’re listless, irritable and always hungry. You only feel better after you finally drop the diet.

With keto, on the other hand, things are different. The longer you do it, the better you feel, because weight loss is only one of keto’s beneficial effects. The reason? Keto was never intended to be solely a weight-loss program. In fact, when the modern keto diet was invented in the 1920s by Dr. Russell Morse Wilder at the Mayo Clinic, it was intended to be a therapeutic dietary regime for combating insulin resistance.

Before getting into the nuts-and-bolts of carb-counting, here’s a snapshot of what foods you can enjoy and which foods you should avoid when you’re eating ketogenically.

The keto diet is high in proteins. But that doesn't mean eating steak for dinner every night! It's important to get these proteins from a variety of sources, because different proteins offer different key nutrients. For example, while steak is high in iron, salmon has a much higher level of Omega-3 amino acids. Make sure you eat a variety of pork, beef, poultry, eggs, seafood, and offal.

Adopting a keto diet brings with it a wealth of positive change, but in the short term, there's no sugar-coating it: the first few weeks can be a challenge. 

To begin with, going grocery shopping after you’ve made the decision to “go keto” can feel overwhelming. You know which foods you need to eat in theory, but how do you put them all together in a keto-friendly way? Instead of buying ingredients at random, do some prior planning and map out the meals you want to cook before you hit the shops.

Remakes, reboots, and retro fashion are everywhere, and sometimes it seems like everything old is new again. That's certainly true when it comes to the ketogenic diet, but unlike those other things, keto is no passing trend. Humans have been entering ketosis since our prehistoric days, in fact, when our diets were naturally lower in glucose.

What’s more, there’s another ancient dietary strategy that can be combined with keto for even greater health benefits: fasting.

It’s just as true for your diet as it is for your shoes – one size does not fit all!

Whatever your body type or health concerns, following the standard keto diet properly should produce significant improvements to your health. But depending on your unique physical needs and health objectives, you might find that you can optimize your keto plan even further with a few tweaks. 

Thanks to their different physical makeup, men and women can react differently when eating the same diet, including keto.

Don’t fret, though; a man and a woman on the same ketogenic diet will both experience health benefits. It’s just that they may experience some of them on different timelines. 

As we’ve seen, eating ketogenically can help you burn fat, increase your energy and mental clarity, regulate your hormones, and optimize your metabolism. 

But you shouldn’t go on a keto diet.