Given the success I’ve personally had with my nutritional ketosis (NK) run, I’m asked almost every day by folks considering an NK trial for tips, tricks, hacks, and cheats to potentially “make it easier” to succeed with nutritional ketosis. Here are several tips I share with friends and clients who are contemplating or just starting a nutritional ketosis trial…
Nutritional Ketosis Tip No. 1: They’re Aren’t Any Simple Hacks to Get the Results You Want
As an aside, count me among the many who despise the term ‘hacks’ and the pursuit thereof. There are some things in life you can obtain by using cheats or shortcuts, but the most critical benefits of nutritional ketosis (and many other things) simply can’t be earned that way.
Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about to the right; one of my email accounts is used for a popular fly fishing blog and has been in use for years, so unfortunately a fair amount of spam email oozes around the filters and into my inbox.
What’s been the most popular spam topic the past few weeks? How to cheat your way into ketosis without cutting your carbs.
There are host of great reasons to try a nutritional ketosis run, the principle being you want to turn your body into a fat-burning machine. That takes a bit of time and attention to truly accomplish, and despite the claim that celebrities know hacks to cheat their way into NK, they don’t.
Nutritional Ketosis Tip No. 2: Lay the Groundwork First Over 2-3 Weeks BEFORE Starting
Stepping into nutritional ketosis is a relative piece of cake if you’ve done some preliminary diet “housekeeping” to begin with. The most important dietary housekeeping is sorta’ve along the lines of cleaning the most obnoxious things out of your house – one, getting rid of grains and heavily processed carbs, including sugar in all its forms is one, and the second essential dumping the toxic, industrial-processed seed oils that are commonly stocked in pantry and restaurant around the world.
If you’ve been enjoying a LC/MP/HF eating plan for a while, your probably ready to start your NK run; if not, take 2-3 weeks (or more) to transition from the standard American diet to a low carb model (before going very low carb with NK).
Nutritional Ketosis Tip No. 3: Plan to Stay the Course for at Least Six Weeks
No matter how you’ve been eating before, truly starting nutritional ketosis will cause your body to make some adjustments as you preprogram your metabolic machinery. I agree wholeheartedly with those who suggest you make at minimum a 6 week commitment to the process, promising yourself you’ll wade through whatever adjustments come your way. And as your body adapts to fat-burning, there are several breakthrough windows that are exciting to watch and feel – though for most that’s territory that occurs in week three and beyond.
Nutritional Ketosis Tip No. 4: Mind Your Macros, at Least When Starting
Two of the most common challenges faced by those starting a trial of nutritional ketosis are 1) consuming too many carbs, and 2) consuming too much protein, the excess of which is converted to glucose via gluconeogenesis and either utilized or stored.
Plan to spend at least a few days early on charting your daily food intake in a detailed record and using FitDay or other tools (you can do it by hand too!) to track your macros, shooting for roughly 7% or less of daily calories from carbohydrate, 20-25% from protein, and the remaining 68-73% from good fats, at least when starting out, though pending your personal results you may want to dial back the carb and protein contributions as you progress.
Nutritional Ketosis Tip No. 4+1: Consider Monitoring Urinary Ketones When Starting
There are tools available to everyday consumers that allow monitoring for the presence of ketones/ketone related products in urine, blood, and breath; the three methods vary considerably in terms of ease of use, cost, and accuracy among other things.
When starting out, I personally recommend that NK adventurers if so inclined test for urinary ketones (the urinary chemical we’re testing for is acetoacetate); the testing strips are (relative to the others) cheap, readily available, easy to use – you just pee on the stick, and the results are typically glaringly easy to see.
Of note – as one becomes more keto-adapted / fat-adapted (can happen to some very quickly – even as early as 7-10 days), urinary ketones disappear, and some folks can be in NK and not test positively on the strips.
Testing of any sort carries a real risk of creating an obsession with the data (and changing your approach based on data manipulation primarily); I encourage my clients to pursue a less rigid, more intuitive approach (more on another day).
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