If you want to lose weight, you’ll almost certainly have heard of the popular fad diet known as keto. The diet doesn’t consist of any one food, but instead encourages you to eat naturally low-calorie foods such as meats, eggs, and dairy products while limiting your intake of carbs. You may have even heard of keto being referred to as a “fasting diet,” which is indeed what it is. When you follow keto, you’re encouraged to go without food or drink for a certain period of time so that your body can rev up its metabolism and burn more calories than you consume.
While there’s no denying that the keto diet is a quick and easy way to lose weight, it may not be the best option for everyone. Among the potential downsides are the challenges of incorporating a new food category (i.e., no carbs) into your diet and the restriction of certain foods (e.g., dairy and meat).
On the other hand, there are plenty of benefits to the keto diet. For starters, it’s a high-fat diet, which means that it’s easily absorbed by the human body and doesn’t require additional energy to digest. Moreover, unlike most other diets, keto encourages you to eat food that is most enjoyable, which in turn may help with weight loss. One study even found that people who followed a keto diet lost more weight than those on a low-fat diet, perhaps because the low-carb option allowed them to choose healthier options (e.g., less fatty foods and more vegetables).
So, should you take protein if you want to lose weight? The short answer is yes, but it depends on what you want to lose weight for. Below, we’ll discuss the various benefits and drawbacks of the keto diet and why you might want to consider it for certain situations.
The Benefits Of A Ketogenic Diet
As mentioned above, one of the major benefits of a ketogenic diet is that it’s a high-fat diet. In other words, when you eat carbs, your body will convert them to fat, storing the extra calories as body fat. When you eat high-fat foods, however, your body will not store calories as easily, and therefore, you’ll lose weight faster. For this reason, the ketogenic diet is often referred to as a “fat-burning diet” or a “calorie-burning diet.” (1) High-fat, low-carb foods are also absorbed faster by the body than other types of foods, which may contribute to greater weight loss.