Is the ongoing pandemic affecting your weight and body image? Are you looking to lose weight by changing what you’re eating? Are you looking to start keto for beginners soon?
Obesity and being overweight is a big problem in the US. It increases your risk of developing serious conditions like stroke, cancer, and diabetes. According to the CDC, it can even increase your risk of severe illness from the virus.
One way to fix the problem is to attack the source. For many people, that source is their diet. Here are some keto tips and tricks to help you master and succeed in adapting to a keto diet. Keep reading below to find out these top keto beginner tips.
1. Keto Tips and Tricks: Exercise More
Indeed, keto focuses on a person’s food and drink intake. To be specific, the ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet. However, if you’re aiming to lose weight, you need to put in the hours of exercise, too.
Being active can help you get into ketosis faster.
Remember that exercising uses up the glycogen stores in your body. Since you have a limited carb intake, your liver will look for an alternate source of energy for the muscles. It will instead increase the production of ketones, which is the body’s alternate fuel source.
Note that you can’t get into a full-blown exercise routine right away. Your body needs time to adapt to using ketones and fatty acids as fuel. Instead, take between one and four weeks of gradual exercises so your body has time to adjust.
2. Start with Simple Meals
It can be challenging to begin a keto diet for beginners. If you look online, you’ll see a lot of recipes and a lot of dos and don’ts. Keep the dos and don’ts in mind, but start your beginner keto diet simple.
You can forget about the recipes and create yours instead. All you need to do is to follow a simple formula. That is to pick a protein, pick a low-carb vegetable, and add fat.
This works well for all keto foods. It also opens your meals to more possibilities. Once you’re ready for more complicated keto meals, then you can follow the online keto recipes you find.
3. Eat Keto Foods and Ingredients Only
Adapting to a ketogenic diet means limiting your daily carb limit. This also means limiting your food choices to healthy keto foods only. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to limit the delicious food choices you have.
You can still eat Thai BBQ Pork Salad for lunch and Easy Caprese Chicken for dinner. Some of the best foods to eat on a keto diet include meats like fish, beef, and lamb. You can also consume high-fat dairy products like hard cheeses, butter, and high-fat cream.
Salad lovers can enjoy meals with low-carb vegetables like spinach and kale. If you need snack foods, look for nuts and seeds. Check here for a more detailed keto snack list.
Coconut oil and saturated fats make great ingredients. Sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit are the best types to add to your meals and drinks. Avoid fruits, grains, sugar, and tubers.
4. Ease Into Keto
You want to know how to start a keto diet and maintain it. Be patient and listen to your body. Changing your entire diet cannot happen overnight. It takes months of work to get used to a keto diet and grow satisfied with it.
It’s like cutting back on smoking or alcoholism. You don’t stop and drop it out of the blue. Instead, you do it one step at a time and in a manageable way.
Try to cut out non-keto foods little by little. Don’t try all the keto diet tips you learn about at once. Instead, apply them in stages so you have time to adjust.
5. Keep an Eye on Your Ketone Levels
A great way to know if your keto diet is working is to test your ketone levels. There are three types of ketones: acetone, beta-hydroxybutyrate, and acetoacetate. You can measure these ketones in your blood, breath, or urine.
One of the most common ways to test your ketone levels is to check the acetone in your breath. Using this method is a reliable way of observing ketosis in your keto diet. The Ketonix ketone analyzer is the ketone meter for checking acetone in the breath.
There is also the blood ketone meter. For this procedure, a small drop of your blood will go on a strip. It gets inserted into the meter that checks your beta-hydroxybutyrate levels. This is another secure yet expensive way of measuring ketosis.
The final one is measuring a person’s acetoacetate in the urine. You dip ketone urine strips into your urine. If it turns a darker shade, it means your ketone levels are high. This ketone-checking solution is one of the most affordable, yet unreliable, ketone checkers.
6. Consume More Healthy Fat
In a keto diet, you may need more healthy fat than you think. Consuming healthy fat can help you reach ketosis by boosting your ketone levels. Foods with healthy fat include avocados, fatty fish, and coconut oil.
You also need to consider how your new diet will fit into your lifestyle. Do you have the time to shop for healthy, low-carb, high-fat foods? One of the reasons why diets fail is because the dieters keep their eyes on a low-carb count only.
The carb count isn’t the only thing that has to matter when you’re deciding on what food to eat. You also need to focus on the quality of your food. It won’t only make the diet effective but it’ll also make the diet easier to maintain in the long run.
7. Preparation Is the Key to a Successful Keto Lifestyle
The last of our keto tips and tricks is to be ready for it. Before you get into a ketogenic diet for beginners, you need to know what you’re delving into. Learn everything you can, what to expect, and possible complications.
For example, you can’t start keto until you learn about the keto flu. This is when you display flu-like symptoms from the sudden loss of water and minerals.
Remember, preparedness is your greatest tool for succeeding and reaching your goal.
Become a Keto Master
That ends our seven keto tips and tricks for all levels of keto dieters. We hope this guide helped you reach your health and body goal.
For more content on the keto diet and other lifestyle tips, see our other blog posts now. We offer tons of health and fitness guides so don’t hesitate to go over our content today!
