Any diet can be hard to stick to, especially if it’s too strict or restrictive. But what is it about keto that people find so hard to follow?
Keto is a fast and successful way to lose weight and is becoming increasingly popular in the world of health and fitness due to its success rate and other benefits besides weight loss.
Throughout this guide, we’ll cover some reasons people might fall off the wagon when following a keto diet and some handy tips on staying on track by eating the right foods and consuming the correct macronutrients.
What is Keto?
The keto diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that limits the amount of carbohydrates you can eat to a bare minimum, as low as 20g per day. Find your individual goals by using a keto calculator.
What happens here is that instead of using carbohydrates for energy, your body starts looking elsewhere for fuel, which is where fat burning comes in. This is called ketosis, a metabolic state that happens when carbs are lowered, or we’re in starvation mode.
Why is Keto So Hard to Follow?
Many people struggle to stay on track with a keto diet because it’s incredibly restrictive.
It’s the norm for humans in the modern world to eat carbohydrates with most meals, be it cereal in the morning, a sandwich for lunch, pasta, rice, or potatoes for dinner. So, it’s plausible that when people are told they can no longer eat these foods, they immediately feel restricted.
This feeling of restriction can lead to cravings and binge eating.
However, there is a way around this, and it involves eating more fat and enough protein to ensure you always feel full after a meal. You can also take supplements to ensure you’re hitting the required macros.
How Much Fat to Eat on Keto?
When following a keto diet correctly, you should be consuming macronutrients in the following quantities:
- Fat – 70% – 80%
- Protein – 15% – 25%
- Carbs 5% – 10%
So, whereas most diets encourage low-fat consumption, keto is quite the opposite, which might seem alien to some people and extremely challenging.
How to Stay on Track with Keto?
To ensure you don’t fall off the wagon and stay in ketosis, you need to ensure you’re eating enough to feel full after each meal; to do this, you must consume enough fat.
If you don’t eat enough fat, this will lead you to go into survival mode, in which your body will hold on to fat as much as it can (counterproductive), or you may start to crave the foods you’re trying to avoid, such as sugar, bread, and processed, high-carb snacks.
You can find a great list of foods on keto here, but the main idea is to stock up on high-fat natural food products such as meat, fish, olive oil, avocado, cauliflower, nuts, and seeds.
Protein is also a significant factor when it comes to feeling full.
After a couple of days of starting a keto diet, you will notice that you no longer feel as hungry as before. Your cravings between meals will stop, and you’ll no longer be dreaming about needing carbs.
Why Do People Find a Keto Diet So Hard?
It can be said that any diet, lifestyle change, or weight-loss journey is hard. Getting started is the first hurdle, but sticking to it and staying on track is the most challenging part.
If you’re finding it hard to follow a keto diet, you should read more about its benefits and side effects to understand the diet better.
Also, check on your macros. Using an app such as MyFitness Pal can help you track your eating; you can set the macros on these apps to suit a keto diet.
It’s essential to approach any diet with 100% commitment, understanding, and knowledge of what you’re doing. Without the correct information, you can end up hindering your hard work by not eating enough or overeating.
While it might sound backward, the only way you can be successful on a proper keto diet is to eat a substantial amount of healthy fats from foods such as avocado, oily fish, nuts, seeds, and fatty cuts of meat.
Overall, if you decide a keto diet is for you and you are determined to stick to the restrictions, the keto diet is an excellent way to lose weight quickly and safely.
