I Don’t Need To Follow Keto – Bariatric Edition

I don’t need to follow a ketogenic lifestyle.  I am not overweight.
How much truth is there to this statement?

I often hear that a ketogenic lifestyle is for the overweight person.  
I do not agree with this.  Keto is for everyone.

Keto, if done correctly, is not really a diet.  It is just a healthy way of eating.  We remove the refined and processed foods from our diet and this keeps insulin levels low.  We also focus on removing sugar from our lives.  This is hard in the beginning but with time it becomes easier and more manageable.

Let’s be pro-active by keeping our insulin levels low.

Let’s talk about “skinny fat”.  Lots of people are thin on the outside and fat on the inside.  Many thin people have visceral fat around the liver, and the internal organs and these thin people have no idea about what is happening on their insides.

This is the cascade of events…
If a person’s genetics are such that they can eat pretty much whatever they want and they never gain weight, they may not ever exercise and they don’t get  big and they tend to eat whatever they want.

In fact, I was this person earlier in my life.  In high school and in college I had no physical symptoms.  I had no weight problems.  I ate whatever I wanted and I ate really low quality food.  It caught up to me with time.  Eventually I started feeling fatigued with low energy and my weight slowly started creeping up. 

These symptoms didn’t happen over night.  It took years.  I tried to exercise my way out of a bad diet and that worked for a while but eventually I was the losing the battle.  I found myself constantly hungry and reaching for the next snack.  When I couldn’t eat every two hours, I found myself hungry, angry, and upset.  I thought I had low blood sugars – even though my yearly physicals and labs showed that my numbers were fine.  

I didn’t understand what was happening to me until I started studying nutrition and had a deep dive into nutritional science and cellular biology. I had my ah-ha moment sitting in a classroom.

Now I believe that it’s important to increase our awareness.  Just because you don’t have a weight problem, you may still want to follow a ketogenic lifestyle.

Don’t wait for a motivation to change your diet to start eating healthy.  Even if you have good genetics, there are other things that go on deeper inside of us.  If you were to get an ultrasound of your liver, you may find there are fatty deposits on your liver even if everything else looks fine health-wise.   

The point of following a ketogenic lifestyle is to lower insulin.  

High levels of insulin are behind so many health problems including chronic inflammation, eye diseases and fatty liver disease.  

The arteries are also affected by high levels of insulin.  Sure, it takes time for this cascade to happen.  One of the first symptoms of a heart attack, over 50% of the time, is death – there are NO symptoms.

What we want to be is pro-active when it comes to our health.  

High levels of insulin start to destroy the inside of the artery. You get inflammation.  You start to get plaque and calcium buildup.  This is a very dangerous situation and one that we cannot see from just looking in a mirror.

We should clean up our diets now, instead of waiting to gain an excessive amount of weight.  Do something pro-active for yourself by starting to follow a healthy ketogenic lifestyle to keep your insulin levels in check.  The external AND internal you will thank you for making the switch to good, natural, high quality, REAL food.

Join me this week in the IF challenge / week 3 in Fasting February is to Intermittent Fast for 18 hours and our eating window is for 6 hours.

Let’s discuss “skinny fat” on my FB LIVE 3pm EST on Friday, February 8th.  Why is a low carb, ketogenic lifestyle for everyone!