The 3 Stages of the Ketogenic Diet (Body Mind Empowerment Podcast with Siim Land Episode 5)

Siim Land (0:00)

Is the ketogenic diet the best diet out there? Do you have to be in ketosis all the time for the rest of your life?

Are carbohydrates bad for your health? How can you not get sick when you do eat some carbohydrates? Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast Episode 5 These are exactly the topics that I'll be discussing in today's show. I'm going to replay you the live stream of my Facebook page, where I discussed about the 3 stages of the ketogenic diet, what they are and why you should want to implement them into your diet, we'll discuss soon. But if you want to support this podcast, then make sure you leave us a review on iTunes and other social media platforms. But my name is Siim and let's get on with the show.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:47)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:49)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:55)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:57)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:00)

In today's live stream, I'm going to be talking about the three stages of the ketogenic diet and what they are. We'll get down to business right away. You know, the reason I decided to talk about this topic in particular is that, you know, the more I learn about ketosis and the ketogenic diet, the more I'm amazed of how powerful it is for your overall health, your cognition and your physical performance. I think it's truly one of those optimal human diets, because it not only keeps you healthy, but it also puts you into this almost post optimal state where your body can create its own fuel without calories. Even though I could happily eat the ketogenic diet for the rest of my life, because I feel so amazing all the time and the foods are also so delicious, I still recommend you to occasionally dip in and out of ketosis. You know, there are many reasons for it.

Not because it's unhealthy that like keto is dangerous for you, but to simply increase your metabolic flexibility and improve the diversity in the microbiome. And you know, people do the ketogenic diet for many reasons, to lose fat, to battle diabetes, to improve their health or to simply eat bacon or something.

But healthy people who simply want to live the keto lifestyle, they should follow certain stages on their ketosis journey. And that's why I'm going to be sharing with you the three stages of the ketogenic diet you should go through. What are the three stages of the ketogenic diet? Well, the first one is the simplest one. The first is to get into ketosis, stage one, getting into ketosis. The first purpose of the ketogenic diet is to maintain nutritional ketosis for at least the vast majority of time, to be in this fat burning state where your body burns ketones or, you know, it has elevated levels of ketones in the bloodstream. That energy can come from either the dietary fat that you eat from food, like, let's say, butter, eggs, fish, meat, or straight from your adipose tissue when you're in a caloric deficit.

If you're doing keto because of diabetes, then you should pay particular close attention to this because, you know, these irregular ups and downs of insulin and blood sugar can make your diabetes actually much more worse. That's the reason why therapeutic ketosis is so effective.

It allows your body to heal itself more rapidly. High levels of blood sugar will elevate insulin, which makes your cells more prone to insulin resistance, and you are more prone to storing the food as fat as well. In some cases, long term keto or even prolonged fasting can actually reverse insulin resistance and very much cure diabetes completely. It's even used to treat some cancers and tumors and even neurodegenerative diseases. But if you don't have any serious medical condition, then you don't need to be so strict with it all the time because your metabolism is more robust and resilient. Of course, you can't be eating a lot of carbohydrates that would kick you out of ketosis, but you won't have any severe negative consequences for your health either if you simply eat 10 to 20 grams of more carbohydrates.

If you're not that keto adapted, then you may feel slightly sluggish or you may feel slightly tired at day times afterwards, but this is just a temporary side effect of dipping in between ketosis. Whatever the case may be, you should still want to first establish nutritional ketosis and maintain it if you were to go on a ketogenic diet. Both of them as a long term and a short term thing. The first stage is when in which you're depleting your liver glycogen from glucose and teaching your body to use ketones for fuel. When your liver glycogen gets low, then the liver starts producing ketones as a new source of energy.