Sustainable Low Carb Living
Sustainable Low Carb Life
When I was growing up, my mother had Richard Simmons workout tapes, but I always wondered; “Was that guy ever even in good shape?” I still don’t have an answer. I’ve seen low fat diets rise, the low carb method makes a comeback, Atkins Diet, South Beach Diet, Lemonade Diet, carnivore, tree bark - you name it and someone has coined it. All this conflicting information usually leads straight to confusion on what could be best. On top of that, in the wonderful information age, everyone with a social media account has a voice. Once someone has a good experience or a bit of success with a diet, it’s in the forefront of their social feed. Honestly, you can’t blame them, their life has changed for the better. It’s easy to want to climb to the mountain tops and scream the loudest about how awesome you’re feeling. Sadly, it’s also very easy to become closed minded if you’re too over the top with yourself. I’ve easily confused a new keto-convert with an MLM salesman, and often mistaken an excited vegan for a malicious picketer. It’s a thin line to walk!
With all these different ideologies, how do we know what’s best for us? Is there one that is best for most? We have the vegans saying not to hurt the animals and meat gives you cancer. On the other side we have the carnivore tribe telling us vegetables are poisoning us and meat is the cure to all things in life. Then the ketogenic crowd thinks you sin if you eat carbs, or you’re giving yourself disease... do you even bio-hack?! Opposite the keto crew is the traditional crowd, carbs are fine, and fats just make you fat. Have a donut after your WOD, you earned it.
Where do you go from here? Can you exist without a diet-tribe? Is there a one choice for all diet?? Nope. There is no one size fits all. If you work with someone that tells you so, run. One wonderful thing about humans is that we are all so different. We all live a different lifestyle, we all have different size dresses, we all have different needs. There are, however, a few guidelines that all humans can follow, to live a lean, clean, long life, we’ll teach you a few.
Shortcut to Ketosis?
I’m sure in your reading you’ve heard the term keto, or Ketogenic Diet. As there is a lot of hype surrounding this type of nutritional regimen, the hype being both good and bad. Some people slam it, some people praise it. There will always be some sort of bias in anything that you read whether it’s pro-carb or anti-carb. Chances are, this meal plan will allude to my personal experience and success along with hundreds of my clients.
This isn’t a “keto” plan; you’re not suddenly going paleo or joining some other coined dietary philosophy. Simply put, you’re going to restrict your energy sources, and follow some guidelines of how to control your calories for life, not just a few months. We will incorporate lower carbohydrate intake than the traditional American diet, with periods of regular fasting. Let’s dive into the positives and negatives, and why a well formulated version of this might be the best fit for you, long term. Remember, this isn’t a fad, or a quick fix plan; it has to be a lifestyle choice that you sustain indefinitely, or you will never have lasting results.
Let’s start with a brief explanation of a ketogenic diet. If you don’t already know, ketosis ensues when your main energy source, glucose (carbs) has been fully depleted (all used up). In a typical ketogenic breakdown, under 10% of your total calories will come from carbs. When glucose (carbs) is absent, your body will begin to reach for fat as fuel. That process causes the production of ketones through the liver and VOILA, you are in ketosis.
On your journey to entering ketosis, you also have to keep your protein intake moderate as well, even too much meat will interrupt ketone production. As your body processes foods, especially foods with a high thermogenic (cause a heating inside the body) effect like protein, your liver will convert some of the proteins into glucose through a natural process called gluconeogenesis, and this can interrupt fat burning/oxidation temporarily.
There are 3 ways to get into a ketogenic state - doing this through diet alone can take up to a few weeks. Obviously, this is going to depend on the person doing it, how active you are, how well your body utilizes insulin, etc. The quickest way into ketosis is fasting. The other way into ketosis would be intense training or physical activity to the point that all glucose storage has been used up.
Why Fasting? We can fast for all types of reasons; religions over thousands of years have advocated fasting. We fast for health and longevity, mental clarity, or even to restore our immune health. In my opinion and a lot of recent research, fasting is probably the most under-utilized tool in the general population. If you’re in the health and fitness world, I’m sure you’ve fasted, or maybe you even follow an intermittent fasting protocol as a lifestyle.
Caloric restriction is most likely the most popular model for weight loss, but extended periods of time in a calorie restricted state just leads to a slower metabolism, not just the body weight we’re trying to lose. This is a very prevalent problem in fitness competitors and bodybuilders. However, with fasting, your metabolism doesn’t adapt to it, it only adapts to a different fuel source - ketones. If you cut your calories by 500 a day, for 3 days a week, you’ve cut out 1,500 calories for that week. Depending on your food sources in those 3 days, you stayed somewhat satiated, and kept your hormones - insulin in particular, spiking up and down. In one 24 hour fasting period, you’re cutting a minimum of 1,500 calories (assuming you get this in a day), and you only went through this process for one day. On top of the calories cut, you’ve given your body enough time to burn through your glycogen stores, start mobilizing some body fat and push your growth hormone levels up where they don’t usually get pushed. Check out the following charts to get some visuals. Keep in mind when we’re constantly eating without breaks, our hormone production is constantly interrupted.
Why would this be beneficial? There are a lot of people slamming fasting, and a lot praising it. If you’ve ever worked with a trainer or a strength coach worth their weight, he or she will have you doing some form of periodized training (programs that progress over time). Unless you’re training for a specific skill, you don’t do the same thing all the time or your body adapts, and your results start to stagnate. So, you change things up, whether it’s your rep range or choosing different exercises, adjustments keep your growth moving along.
Diets are the same way, you need consistency for sure, but you also can’t eat oatmeal and egg whites the rest of your life. We experience seasons in life, right? Then we should probably eat seasonally too. Now when I say “seasonally”, I don’t mean according to the weather, I mean we all have more active seasons of our lives, and times that we are more sedentary. Our energy intake has to adjust with those times, or we’ll be storing those extra energy sources (carbs and fats) on our bodies.
Important Benefits of a Low Carb Plan
There are plenty of benefits to trying out a low carb or ketogenic lifestyle. Now what we’re going to give you in this plan is low carb, with periods of ketosis. We’d call this a modified KD (ketogenic diet) as we know you’re all mostly active. Here is a list of some improvements that a low carb/ketogenic plan can help with:
Reducing Body Fat: in controlled studies, the KD group seems to outperform mixed diets and standard American diets in body fat reduction, in short- and long-term studies. Most of us are just worried about getting some abs or looking better in a bikini, but visceral fat reduction is much more important. This leads to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, heart disease and even certain cancers. The good news, KD helps reduce your visceral fat too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29986720
Reducing Inflammation: The association between chronic inflammation and disease and autoimmune problems has been very well established. Anything from poor immune health to Alzheimer’s disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26935858
Migraines: Because most Americans have some level of insulin resistance or dysfunctional cell metabolism, ketones can help because they can enter the cells without an insulin shuttle. Elevated blood ketone levels are shown to negate migraines. Ketogenic diets have been shown to upregulate mitochondrial biogenesis (new mitochondria growth) which leads to improving your cells ability to use glucose. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30974836
Protective against Cardiovascular Disease: Much more needs to be studied, but research shows that specifically ketones products from MCT oil like coconut oil is protective against atherosclerosis, and other cardiovascular incidents. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30917246
Insulin Sensitivity: Although this 12-week study of military personnel shows improvement body composition in the KD group, the largest improvement in just 12 weeks was a 48% improvement in insulin sensitivity. Yeah, it’s cool to drop some body fat and visceral fat but reversing insulin resistance is pretty impressive! Even if you’re just doing it for a “re-set,” maybe you’re pre-diabetic or diabetes runs in your family?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30877806
Autophagy - Let’s call this old cell clearing. Once in a while it’s great to get a good deep cleaning. During a KD or fasting period, autophagy happens, which is basically your body cleaning out old cells or protein aggregates that are just sitting there, like brain plaque. Research shows that protein aggregates are higher in patients with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia. If you could stave off the chance of getting any of the neuro diseases, wouldn’t you want to?! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26306884
Gut Health:
Some very important gut related results will be lowering gut and systemic inflammation. Everything starts in your gut. A state of chronic inflammation in your stomach, leads to all sorts of problems from autoimmune disorders, brain fog, neurodegenerative diseases, and anti-nutrient content of carbohydrate rich foods like whole grains. Full of phytic acid, or phytate - which binds to nutrients in your gut, as it is indigestible, now it’s stealing your nutrients at the same time not offering you any benefits. Lectin which is found mostly in beans, seeds, some nuts and grains also causes an immunologic response. Now of course eating grains isn’t going to give you a problem, but repetitive stimulation of your immune reaction in your gut is exactly what leads to autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Inflammation is also a pathological feature of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26682690
These are some pretty exciting improvements that anyone can benefit from. Now ketones aren’t the goal; I’ve found being too strict or chasing ketone levels doesn’t really get you too far. There is no need to get in the weeds on constantly measuring urine or blood levels. That would just give you something new to obsess about. We all need to enjoy life and avoid feeling like we’re in a food prison. Remember this, the goal is to achieve a lifestyle that’s sustainable and enjoyable. Performance can’t suffer, and neither can fun. So, here’s the plan:
1- Assuming that readers all have similar goals of living a lean, clean life: we are all made up of something in common - amino acids. So, number one thing to control, your protein intake. Regardless of what diet lifestyle you’ve chosen, we all have a protein threshold to keep up, or we will not be able to achieve the desired physique. The easy way: take your goal weight and eat that amount of protein in grams. IE 130-pound woman, can safely eat 130 grams of protein. The other equation would be 30-40% of your total calories should be protein. This will keep you more satiated throughout the day, thus making it a lot harder to over eat on the other stuff. If you have a very low protein intake right now, don’t feel as though day 1 you have to hit the numbers perfectly, but work up to it, increasing your protein intake as you can.
2- Control your energy sources. Your efficient dietary energy sources are carbohydrates and fats. An easy rule to follow is to pick one. If you love carbs and can’t cut them out, that’s your main energy source. If carbs are your main, then fats will be lower. If you love a ribeye or salmon and butter, maybe the more savory is a better choice for you. In that case, fats are your main energy source, then you lower your carb intake. You can’t eat a lot of both, if we’re going for the lean clean lifestyle. (Example meal plans below)
3- Supplement your diet. In our fast-paced world, our food sources aren’t always the highest quality. As we’d all love to have the best food all the time, busy schedules and food budgets get in the way quickly. We won’t always have nutrient rich food available, so it’s great to have some supplements to keep us at our peak performance. Here is our list of suggestions.
CLA- In animal models conjugated linoleic acid has been shown to decrease skin, liver and colon cancer, having the highest result in breast cancer by fully stopping chemically induced breast cancer. Now we can’t call this a cure, and yes, it’s animal models, but CLA and vitamin D being our strongest natural cancer fighters, it is our #1 recommendation for women.
Vitamin D - Yes, you need the D on the regular. https://builtforlife.com/articles/why-you-need-the-d-on-the-regular if you’d like to read in depth, but Vitamin D has many applications. Again, with our busy schedules and preoccupied lives, most of us don’t get enough natural sun on our skin, which converts cholesterol into vitamin D. Unless you work outdoors, or work at a pool, vitamin D is #2 on our list.
Resveratrol - Resveratrol is a hot topic and has been for the last decade. We had a fun piece a couple years ago if you’d like to circle back to it: https://builtforlife.com/articles/the-red-wine-diet
But this is one of the only items studied with actual proof behind it for anti-aging effects in humans. Whether you get this from your favorite glass of red wine or in supplement form, this is the third supplement you need to get in your diet.