The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever - Couverture rigide

Chapter 1

The Keto Reset Diet 101—­What, Why, and How

I’ve been familiar with the ketosis aspect of ancestral eating for nearly two decades, but I always considered keto to be an extreme and temporary practice, perhaps suitable only for brief periods of fasting for aggressive fat reduction or as a last-­ditch strategy for the obese to right the ship and protect against a medical catastrophe. In the past few years, though, there has been renewed interest in keto, both in the sciences and among the most adventurous in the ancestral health movement, as a strategy with broad application to promote the esteemed goal of metabolic flexibility.

Inspired by the thought leaders whom you’ll meet in this book, I started fooling around with keto several years ago, and I noticed some immediate, discernible benefits, especially increased mental clarity and reduced hunger. As my writing partner, Brad, and I maintained states of nutritional ketosis for sustained periods of time during the research and writing of this book, we both experienced significant health and athletic performance breakthroughs. Indeed, The Keto Reset Diet book is powered by ketones! As I’ll detail throughout the book, regulating appetite and developing the ability to survive—­and thrive—­on fewer calories is key to optimum health and maximum longevity. Owning this insight, though, requires a massive shift in mindset from the flawed “furnace will burn” thinking that represents one of the most destructive concepts in conventional dietary and exercise wisdom (details in Chapter 2).

What Is Keto?

“Keto” is a catch-­all nickname for anything pertaining to the metabolic state of ketosis, the burning of ketones, a.k.a. ketone bodies, or the dietary macronutrient composition (ultra-­low-­carb, moderate-­protein, high-­fat) that promotes the attainment of this delicate metabolic state. Ketones are a source of caloric energy in the body that are used by the brain, heart, and muscles in the same manner as is glucose (sugar). They are produced in the liver as a by-­product of fat metabolism when—­owing to extreme restriction of dietary carbohydrates—­insulin, blood sugar, and liver glycogen levels are very low. Most people go through life never getting anywhere near this state, and never experiencing the almost magical effects of this natural superfuel. Ketones and fat (since the burning of these two caloric energy sources always go hand in hand) help minimize the inflammation and oxidative damage that come from eating the modern grain-­based high-­carbohydrate diet. Keto awareness arises from the primal/paleo/low-­carb dietary movement that has become wildly popular over the past decade, but it is more specific with respect to required dietary macronutrient ratios; and it can be even more effective for weight loss, disease protection, and peak cognitive and athletic performance than a standard low-­carb diet.

By comparison to the Standard American Diet (SAD), the modern ketogenic diet is very high in natural nutritious fats, moderate in protein, and ultra-­low in carbohydrates.

Out on the street (which I guess today means the Internet), terms like “keto,” “ketone-­burning,” “ketogenic,” and “ketotic” are used indiscriminately to describe the burning of ketones for energy and the pursuit of (or existence in) a fat-­ and keto-­adapted state. You’ll learn about the differences along the way in this book, but it’s particularly important to understand the distinction between ketosis (a metabolic state quantified by blood or breath meter values) and ketoacidosis. The latter is a potentially life-­threatening condition that almost always occurs only in Type 1 diabetics who can’t produce insulin or in alcoholics with poorly functioning livers (insulin immediately shuts down ketone production; that’s why a high-­carb meal knocks you out of ketosis).

Unfortunately, ketoacidosis is often confused with ketosis, even among nutrition and medical professionals who should know better but have only vague exposure to the concepts related to ketone production in the liver. Owing to this common misconception, you may encounter inaccurate Internet articles from dieticians, and even doctors, who react to anything “keto” with alarm because of the severity of ketoacidosis.

The exact definition of ketosis is that of being in a metabolic state whereby your body is accumulating ketones in the bloodstream faster than they are being burned. Being in ketosis may not be indicative of your ability to burn ketones for fuel, however. People who have an acute illness or who are on calorie-­restricted crash diets while carbohydrate dependent can get into a state of ketosis in a few days, but they may not be burning ketones for energy. Instead, they excrete these valuable energy sources in their urine and breath as they remain addicted to carbohydrates.

If you have done the work to escape carbohydrate dependency and trend toward fat burning, being in ketosis may indeed be representative of your ability to manufacture and burn ketones for energy. Consequently, fat-­ and keto-­adapted is the best term to describe eating and living in a state where you are enjoying the benefits of burning fat and ketones as your preferred fuel sources. When you are fully adapted, your muscles burn mostly fat for fuel, while the ketones produced by the liver are prioritized for use by the brain. The brain is a huge energy-­demand organ (it’s around 2 percent of your total bodyweight, but the brain burns 20 to 25 percent of your daily calories!) that cannot burn fat and must burn either glucose or ketones.

Experts suggest that maintaining a state of nutritional ketosis requires a dietary macronutrient composition of approximately 65 to 75 percent fat, 15 to 25 percent protein, and 5 to 10 percent carbs. With carb intake, experts recommend a hard limit of 50 grams per day for active folks, and 20 grams per day for the inactive. To adhere to the stringent ketogenic carbohydrate intake limit and obtain maximum benefits, you must completely eliminate all forms of sugars, sweetened beverages, and grains from your diet, and even pass on starchy tubers like sweet potatoes. Eating an energy bar or enjoying a fresh-­squeezed juice (even a modest 8-­ounce glass) can bump you out of ketosis for 24 hours and possibly much longer.

Testing for Ketosis

The metabolic state of ketosis can be quantified with established parameters for blood, breath, or urine testing. Urine test strips are cheap and notoriously inaccurate—­don’t bother with them. Someone celebrating the darkening of a urine test strip into ketosis color is likely excreting lots of ketones instead of burning them. Breath test technology came to market in early 2017 and is believed to deliver accurate results with an expensive (about $300 for Ketonix brand made in Sweden) portable and reusable device. Handheld blood meters are also accurate. They work just like the glucose meters (popular with diabetics), whereby you prick your finger and apply a droplet of blood to a test strip. Precision Xtra is a good blood meter you can order online for ~$30; single-­use testing strips are $2–­$4 each—­not cheap!

A blood ketone value of 0.5 millimoles per liter (mmol/L) represents the beginning of a mild state of nutritional ketosis. Therapeutic benefits of ketone burning improve up to a level of 3.0 mmol/L, although most enthusiasts are happy to land in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 mmol/L. It’s pretty difficult to sustain levels higher than 3.0 mmol/L (e.g., you’d have to engage in long-­term severe calorie restriction/starvation or slam an excessive amount of exogenous supplemental ketones), and there do not appear to be any additional benefits at higher levels. (Note: Ketoacidosis occurs when blood levels rise to above 10 mmol⁄L— ­virtually impossible to attain if you have normal liver function.) We’ll discuss testing in later chapters, including the idea that numbers may not be an accurate indicator of your keto fitness. It’s likely that you may be better off with subjective evaluations of how well you can think and perform when you skip a meal or adhere to a moderate-­protein, ultra-­low-­carb keto-­style eating pattern; feeling great without regular high-­carb meals is a sign of being fat-­ and keto-­adapted, and the ultimate goal of the The Keto Reset Diet journey.

Practically speaking, 50 grams of daily carbs afford substantial consumption of vegetables, along with small amounts of incidental carbohydrates from nuts, seeds, and their butters, high-­cacao percentage dark chocolate, and perhaps occasional servings of fresh seasonal berries. If you are a high-­calorie–­burning athlete or very carefully space your carbohydrate intake to consume no more than 10 to 15 grams (40–­60 calories) at any one sitting, experts believe that you may be able to consume a bit more than 50 grams per day and still remain in the metabolic state of nutritional ketosis. By the way, I’m talking gross carbs, not net—­mainly for simplification. We’ll discuss the difference in Chapter 6.

If you’re familiar with extreme carb-­restriction weight-­loss diets like Atkins, The Keto Reset Diet has comparable macronutrient guidelines and a shared goal of lowering insulin to mobilize stored body fat for energy. However, The Keto Reset Diet places greater emphasis on choosing the most nutrient-­dense sources of fats, protein, and carbs, as well as avoiding unhealthy processed foods—­even if they might meet ketogenic macronutrient standards. On the carbohydrate front, The Keto Reset Diet allows for and encourages varied and abundant intake of fresh, colorful vegetables even during the most hard-­core keto phases. Consequently, The Keto Reset Diet should be viewed as a healthy lifelong eating strategy rather than a rigid weight-­loss protocol.

Keto Delivers Fasting-­Like Benefits Without Having to Starve!

Ketogenic eating allows you to benefit from the extraordinary (and long scientifically validated) metabolic efficiency, general health, and longevity benefits of fasting, but without having to actually starve yourself. When you are starving, engaging in a purposeful fast, or adhering to a nutritional ketosis eating pattern, your cells prefer to burn fat and ketones. Fat and ketones burn efficiently and quickly in the body—­they have been the preferred human fuels in our body for 2.5 million years of our hunter-­gatherer existence.

On the other hand, the high-­carb, high-­insulin–­producing Standard American Diet (SAD) causes you to burn glucose, a.k.a. sugar—­the primary human fuel since the cultivation of grains and the consequent advent of civilization around 10,000 years ago. Glucose burns quickly and easily, but it also burns dirty via the excessive production of free radicals. Free radicals are the driving force behind inflammation, cancer, and accelerated aging. They are an inevitable by-­product of living life—­burning calories, breathing air, or absorbing sunlight—­so you can’t avoid them, but concerns arise when free radical production is excessive. This happens when you introduce stressors like high-­carbohydrate eating, excessive exercise, or adverse lifestyle behaviors such as smoking, alcohol, drug use, or stressful personal relationships.

The reason glucose burning generates more free radicals is that, unlike fat and ketones, glucose doesn’t require oxygen to burn. When you burn glucose without oxygen, you bypass the protective benefits of mitochondria, the energy-­producing power plants located inside each cell. The more mitochondria you have and the better they work, the more protection you have against free radicals when you burn calories. You can consider fat and ketones the big logs in a campfire. Heat them up carefully and they keep you warm for hours—­not much smoke. Glucose is like kindling—­burning quickly with lots of smoke. Thus, if your metabolic machinery is carbohydrate dependent (because you consume too many carbs and produce too much insulin—­which keeps body fat locked away in storage), you don’t have the big logs to burn, instead having to continually stoke your fire with twigs—­that is, eating regular high-­carbohydrate meals and snacks to prop up sagging blood sugar levels.

This concept that your body operates much more efficiently when starving, fasting, or eating keto is critical to consider in today’s age of chronic overfeeding and excess insulin production (a.k.a. hyperinsulinemia). It may feel satisfying at some level to be a glutton (no offense, but anyone who eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day is a glutton from an evolutionary perspective), but overfeeding drives accelerated aging and increases disease risk. When we have chronic caloric abundance, we not only (most likely) get fat but our bodies also accelerate cell division instead of being frugal and efficient with the cells we have. Why bother being efficient (repairing and recycling existing cells) when more calories (that can help make new cells) are coming down the pipe every few hours?

Accelerated cell division is great for infants trying to triple their bodyweight in one year, adolescents trying to grow to their full height, or bodybuilders trying to develop huge guns. For the rest of us, accelerated cell division is the essence of accelerated aging. Even in people with lucky genetics who are not predisposed to accumulating excess body fat, bad stuff is likely happening inside when you exist in carbohydrate dependency. If you are flaunting your slim figure and thinking you’re immune to the ravages of accelerated aging, you may want to test your blood for signs of metabolic dysfunction and elevated disease risk, like the triglyceride-­to-­HDL ratio (1:1 is optimal; over 3.5-­to-­1 is dangerous), inflammatory markers like C-­reactive protein and Lp2A, and metabolic markers like fasting blood glucose and fasting blood insulin. In the endurance athletic world, it’s disturbingly common to see elite performers coming up with dysfunction and disease of the cardiovascular system, despite being physical marvels. These are the ravages of oxidation and inflammation from overtraining and overconsumption of carbohydrates.

In contrast to being overfed and inflamed, becoming metabolically efficient (through low-­carbohydrate eating in general, and especially through Intermittent Fasting and nutritional ketosis) optimizes autophagy, the natural cellular detoxification process whereby cellular material is recycled, repaired, or destroyed (autophagy means “self-­eating”). Dr. Colin Champ, author of Misguided Medicine, explains: “Autophagy makes us more efficient machines to get rid of faulty parts, stop cancerous growths, and stop metabolic dysfunction like obesity and diabetes.” Fasting and ketogenic eating are especially helpful to promote autophagy in the brain, and thus protective against today’s increasingly common conditions of cognitive decline and disease.

Overfeeding is the essence of accelerated aging; metabolic efficiency is the essence of longevity.

The scientists, medical professionals, and athletes on the ground floor of the keto movement can barely contain their excitement: the research continues to validate the theory that ketogenic eating offers everything from the most reliable way to reduce excess body fat; enhance neurological function and protect against diseases of cognitive decline; slow the rate of inflammation and oxidative damage that represent the essence of the (accelerated) aging process; help prevent seizures and halt the growth of cancerous tumors; and improve athletic performance for both strength/power athletes and endurance athletes.

The Keto Reset Diet Is Not a Shortcut Program

While rapid weight loss can be easily achieved with an extreme and regimented program, the goal with the more deliber...

Mark Sisson—author of the mega-bestseller The Primal Blueprint—unveils his groundbreaking ketogenic diet plan that resets your metabolism in 21 days so you can burn fat forever.

Mounting scientific research is confirming that eating a ketogenic diet could represent one of the greatest nutritional breakthroughs of our time—and that it might be the healthiest and most effective weight loss strategy ever. Going “keto” by eating high fat, low-to-moderate protein and low-carb foods enables you to break free from the disastrous effects of carbohydrate dependency by resetting your metabolism and promoting metabolic flexibility—where your body learns to burns fat instead of sugar for energy, even when you go off plan.
 
Unlike many other ketogenic programs that require challenging restrictions and deprivation or offer misinformation, Mark Sisson, bestselling author of The Primal Blueprint and publisher of the #1 paleo blog MarksDailyApple.com, presents a unique two-step, scientifically validated approach for going keto the right way.  He first reveals the real secret to rapid and sustained weight loss, which is in becoming "fat-adapted" before entering full nutritional ketosis. This process allows your body to learn to burn fat more efficiently, resulting in increased and sustained weight loss over the long-term.  It takes as little as 21-days to reprogram your metabolism to burn fat for fuel, by ditching processed grains, sugars, and refined vegetable oils in favor of nutrient-dense, high fat, primal/paleo foods--and you'll see immediate results. Next, you’ll fine-tune with Intermittent Fasting and then foray into full ketogenic eating for a further weight loss boost and improved health.  

With The Keto Reset Diet, you can eat to total satisfaction by enjoying rich, high-satiety foods, and even weather occasional slip-ups. You’ll use keto as a lifelong tool to stay trim, healthy, energetic, and free from the disastrous health conditions caused by the typical American diet. With step-by-step guidance, daily meal plans and a recipe section with over 100 delicious keto-friendly recipes, this is the definitive guide to help the keto-beginner or the experienced health enthusiast understand the what, why, and how to succeed with ketogenic eating.