Being in ketosis is great for burning fat. Unfortunately, it isn’t the whole story. Certain mistakes can get you fat even in ketosis.
Getting and staying in ketosis is great. The reason is you can burn some extra body fat and get really lean without being too miserable.
Ketosis is pretty much a state in which your body predominantly starts using fats for fuel. It runs on ketone bodies rather than glycogen.
So you start following a ketogenic diet and in the beginning your results are pretty good. But then a few weeks in things start to slow down or maybe things come to a complete halt. You’ve hit a weight loss plateau.
There are a lot of reasons this could be the case but chances are, you are at least making one of these ketosis mistakes that make you fatter. You really want to avoid them.
1. Thinking That Keto Is Simply A Low Carb Diet
At first, this might not sound like the biggest mistake you can make. However, this is an important one if you want to stay in ketosis.
A lot of people are very quick to identify carbs as the culprit responsible for their higher body fat percentage.
The second macronutrient people associate with more body fat and gaining weight is fat. However, if you’ve been trying out the ketogenic diet for a while you know how important eating enough fat is.
It helps you get into ketosis and maintain your energy levels while at the same time burning your own body fat.
The third and last macronutrient is protein. Most people never consider if protein could be the thing slowing or stopping their fat loss.
Protein gets a lot of praise but it can actually work against your weight loss efforts by ruining ketosis.
The ketogenic diet is not just a low carb diet. It is a combination of a low carb, high fat, and moderate protein diet. There is a reason why your protein intake should not exceed a low to moderate level.
How protein can mess up ketosis
If you consume too much protein, your body will turn the excess protein into blood sugar in your liver.
By raising your blood sugar, this process will most likely also raise your insulin levels. Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. Not something you want when trying to lose weight.
When your body has the option to use blood sugar, instead of body fat, for energy it will switch over.
You have two options to make sure you consume the right amount of protein when trying to stay in ketosis.
Number one is by measuring your blood glucose levels while consuming protein.
Number two is not completely waterproof but most people stay in ketosis if they keep protein intake below 20 percent of their daily calories.
If you plan on doing muscle training you can get away with a little bit more protein up to 25%.
Make sure you remember that the ketogenic diet is not only lower-carb diet. It’s also a high fat and moderate protein diet. When the keto diet is done correctly that’s when it’ll help you melt the fat from your body.
2. Accidently Eating Too Many Hidden Carbs
To get and stay into ketosis you need to make sure you don’t consume too many carbohydrates.
With the ketogenic diet plan, you only want five to a maximum of ten percent of your total daily calories coming from carbs.
For most people, this is going to wind up being under thirty or even twenty-five grams of carbs per day. This can be harder than it sounds.
A lot of people on the ketogenic diet will make sure to avoid bread or bowl of pasta. However there are quite the amount of snacks and processed foods that might lure you in because it says sugar free on the front of the box.
Sometimes the sugar in these snacks is replaced with other unhealthy things like corn syrup, rice syrup, honey, or even fructose.
It’s not a bad idea to start taking a closer look at the nutrition labels of the food you buy.
However, even if you check every nutrition label, with such a low allowance of carbs even fruit can bring your total to over the number of allowed carbs per day.
If you do a lot of exercise you can stay in ketosis even with a slightly higher amount of carbs.
3. Too Much Dairy
The third ketosis mistake that can make you gain fat at is eating too much dairy.
Dairy is one of the favorite go-to foods of the keto diet plan. It’s clear that ice cream is not allowed but dairy options like cheese and butter are high in fat and very low on carbs.
This makes cheese and butter very acceptable when it comes to staying in ketosis.
The big problem about these dairy products is that people don’t realize how calorie-dense they are.
It’s very easy to overeat calories with dairy. If you consume too many calories in your diet then your body will only be burning dietary fat for energy rather than your own body fat. It’ll be difficult to burn body fat if you’re in a calorie surplus, whether that surplus is caused by high carbs or high fat.
On top of that dairy also contains a considerable amount of protein. On a keto diet, you can eat some cheese but try not to go overboard. Unfortunately, plenty of people do just that.
4. Eating As Much Keto Food As You Want
When you first find out about the ketogenic diet it sounds like you can eat every keto-approved food there is while still losing weight.
It’s true that the ketogenic diet can be a great method to lose weight but you still need to keep the laws of physics in mind. You still want to achieve a calorie deficit in one way or another.
Even if all these calories are coming from fat sources, it’s still possible to gain weight and body fat when you consume too many of them.
This does not mean you have to start calorie counting every meal from now on. That’s one of the beauties of the ketogenic diet. You usually feel fuller with fewer calories so you don’t have to count them.
But when weight loss results stop showing up it’s time to take a closer look at everything you eat.
You can count calories for a few days. If you are consuming a crazy amount, it’s time to swap some high-calorie foods with low-calorie foods.
The point of this ketosis mistake is that you need to keep in mind that calories still matter.
5. Not Eating Enough Fat
The last big mistake that people make is the exact opposite of the previous mistake. It’s not eating enough fat.
Some people try to limit calories by an extreme amount on top of reducing carbohydrate intake to try and speed up the process even more.
However, consuming too few calories can have adverse effects. It can cause your metabolism to slow down, you can restrict essential micronutrients and it simply makes it harder to stick to your eating plan.
You need to focus on achieving a healthy weight loss rate.
That’s why it can be good to use a calorie counter when you first start the keto diet. Once you’ve measured a few times you have an estimate of how many calories you are consuming.
