Keen to lose weight (body fat) and increase mental cognitive functions?
If the above caught your eye I recommend you read on.
I'm hoping to educate those who are sceptical and those who are just curious. Please do your own research and seek advice from your healthcare professional before making any sudden moves!
So, here we go!
Background
A couple months ago I reached my 1 year anniversary since I've adopted Intermittent Fasting and recently, introduced a Ketogenic Diet. I feel great both physically and mentally; I'm fitter than I've ever been and I'm able to maintain focus at work all day - the mornings and afternoons always used to be a tough for me...
Intermittent Fasting
For those of you who don't know and are interested, Intermittent Fasting (IF) involves eating within a specific window and not eating outside of that window. After about 12-14 hours of fasting, your body to start using your stored fat for energy, this is the process of gluconeogenesis - which then leads to fat loss!
An example of IF is as follows: I eat my first meal of the day at 12:00PM and eat my last meal of the day at 8:00PM - this is a 8 hour window of where I eat (in moderation) and a 16 hour window where I fast (zero caloric intake, only water and green tea).
There's many variations to Intermittent Fasting, larger vs smaller fasting windows, 2 days on 5 days off etc.
If you do decide to start Intermittent Fasting, it's recommended to start off with a smaller fasting window and larger eating window to adapt. For example, start off with a 14 hour fasting window, 10 hour eating window, then week by week, slowly increase the fasting window until you reach the desired amount of hours.
Whilst you're in your fasting state, you should be drinking plenty of water to stay hydrated, a tip is to drink green tea can reduce hunger to make it a little easier! Do not drink coffee as this contain calories and will break your fast!
When you're in your eating window, don't go and dig into a bar of chocolate and waste your hard efforts, maintain a caloric defecit and stay away from foods high in carbohydrates, this will allow your ketone bodies to kick in and you can reap all of the benefits!
Ketogenic Diet
During the 8 hour window where I do eat, it consists of a Ketogenic Diet, this is where you eat food high in good fats, high protein and low net carbohydrates.
The benefits of a Ketogenic Diet is reduced hunger, increase of energy and increase in cognitive function.
Foods with high fat, high protein and low carbohydrates that I eat regularly are: Avacado, Fish, Chicken, Bacon, Whey Protein Isolate (WPI), Chia seeds, Flax seeds, Walnuts, Pecans, Natural Peanut Butter, Natural Coconut Chips, Grass-Fed Butter, Coconut Oil, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Plain Unsweetened Full Fat Greek Yoghurt, Mushrooms, Green Capsicum, Eggs and the list goes on...
I'll update this content when I get more time, I've been very busy lately so stay tuned.
Please feel free to drop me any questions in the comment section, I'll respond to all comments!
Also upvote/downvote if you like or dislike my content, if you do downvote, please provide a comment as to why. We're all in this universe together and need to help each other!
Cheers,
Shannon
I did Keto and IF for 8 months last year and it was really great! Makes shopping and food prep so simple.
Yewwww nice! Any reason why you stopped? When it came to Christmas time I had a break, who could resist all that food?! But jumped back on board in the new year, once you get back into it, it'll take a couple weeks to get used to it again.
Best of luck :)
I broke it around christmas as well and am just staying off for a bit while I try to put on some muscle, I'm hungry all the time now and kind of hate it so I will be restarting in a month or so I think.
Fair call, the good thing about keto and IF is that it's a tool, you can use it when you need to, and don't have to when you don't need to.
I recently signed back up to the gym last month to gain muscle mass too and I can notice that at first my hunger was pretty high, but now I'm adjusting to that too.
There's a guy on YouTube who's been trying to make the move over to steemit @primaledgehealth - which is the reason why I created a steemit account - he has high muscle mass with low body fat and he utilises both Keto + IF and looks awesome!
Even though everybody is different and their bodies react differently to certain things, he's a good example that this tool works well with bodybuilding.
Here's his steemit page if you feel like checking him out :) https://steemit.com/@primaledgehealth
I just recently started the keto diet and it has done WONDERS for my blood sugar. By any chance would you be up to writing a post on how to compute the numbers? I don't fully trust my understanding, but I run a directory of Steemit posts and I want to start a Keto/Diabetic community forum. Start helping newbies learn, make some friends to keep us on track, that sort of thing. No cost to anyone and all posts are made on Steemit so everyone can earn from their posts.
Keto diet has the good short-term result but long-term pain. The most natural way to get into ketosis is doing Intermittent Fasting or Prolong Fasting. Plant-based whole food diet, on the other hand, has both good short-term and long-term benefit. Some keto diet promoters had sudden death. But never heard of any plant-based whole food promoters suddenly die. Take a look my almost perfect plan... https://steemit.com/vegan/@watermelonprince/watermelonprince-s-max-health-eating-plan
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