10 reasons for the ketogenic diet

This text is an extract from Marina’s book “Schlank mit Keto”, published by Südwest Verlag.

The ketogenic diet has numerous benefits. By going without most carbohydrates, the metabolism is switched over. The body learns to use fat and ketone bodies as an energy source instead of carbohydrates from bread and sugar. Alongside a low amount of carbohydrates, a sufficiently high amount of fat and an amount of protein that is not too high are important for the keto diet to work.

Even though this article does not have room for all the benefits of a ketogenic diet (research is on the trail of the beneficial effects especially in the medical field), I would like to mention the most important points below, the ones that will be interesting for you too.

Anyone who has ever been caught in the spiral of cravings knows how much craving attacks limit quality of life. Quite apart from the fact that you do not feel good and fit after eating large amounts of junk food, the experience leaves behind a feeling of helplessness. The thought that discipline is lacking is often close at hand, and it offers fertile ground for negative self talk: “There I go, failing again”, “but I did not want to …”, “I am simply too weak”. You are not! Craving attacks have very little to do with a lack of discipline and a great deal to do with a panicking body.

Cravings are triggered, for example, by blood sugar that fluctuates too strongly. If you eat almost pure carbohydrates in the morning, whether that is bread with jam, a pastry from the bakery or the supposedly healthy muesli (in the worst case with skimmed milk), you experience a quickly rising blood sugar level, which attracts a lot of insulin. This insulin drives the sugar into the cells, which lowers the blood sugar level. It sinks below its starting value, and the low blood sugar tells the brain: “hunger”.

The head cries out for carbohydrates, and during the short mid morning break a chocolate bar is already going between the teeth. The more fast carbohydrates are eaten, and the more often, the stronger the blood sugar swings become. Blood sugar and insulin ride a proper rollercoaster.

Food becomes a constant companion in your thoughts. Another factor that can trigger strong cravings in the long run is malnutrition. There are the classic forms of malnutrition, for example when you eat no vegetables and therefore no micronutrients. Most of us know that a diet of rolls in the morning, pasta at midday and pizza in the evening is not healthy.

But there are also supposedly healthy ways of eating which in truth cause deficiency and fuel cravings. The best example of this is the bodybuilder diet. Here the focus is on plenty of protein, fat is strongly reduced and carbohydrates play a greater or lesser role. It becomes particularly damaging when protein turns into the main source of food and both fat and carbohydrates are severely restricted. This way of eating has long since stopped being limited to extreme athletes in the bodybuilding world.

All the usual women’s magazines and mainstream fitness magazines trumpet it from the rooftops: “15 recipes without fat”, “the best lean protein sources”. But anyone who eats protein as a way of feeling full easily needs 200 grams of it a day or more. Even with 200 grams of pure protein (which corresponds to almost one kilogram of chicken breast) you have taken in only 800 kilocalories. Even if a tablespoon of fat is allowed on top, or a handful of carbohydrates is eaten, you rarely get beyond 1200 to 1400 kilocalories a day. Far too little for an adult human being! Almost all diets in women’s magazines are based on far too few calories and too much protein. Cravings are a foregone conclusion.

Among experts, so called rabbit starvation is a well known form of malnutrition which develops when mostly lean meat is eaten (rabbit meat, for example, hence the name). Symptoms are cravings, diarrhoea, a bloated belly, low blood pressure, malaise and even amenorrhoea (the absence of the period). It is hard to believe that numerous athletes and young women put themselves through this way of eating voluntarily.

A lack of energy or nutrients causes panic in the body. It is the cause of the well known yo-yo effect after a diet (when that diet, as so often, is a form of malnutrition). The deficiency in the body makes us receptive to signals from outside. Every advert for sweets hits us twice as hard, every smell from the bakery is even more irresistible. Our body sharpens its senses for every kind of quick food intake. The ketogenic diet is different. Contrary to popular belief, it does not contain a great deal of meat. Instead, only exactly as much protein is eaten as the body needs for its daily requirement, for example to maintain the muscles.

On top of that come good amounts of vegetables: in a properly composed ketogenic diet, colourful vegetables always play the leading role on the plate. You can read more about this in our article “This is how many vegetables the keto diet really contains“. The decisive factor is a sufficient amount of fat. Exactly as much high quality fat is eaten as is needed to cover the body’s energy requirement. Fat slows down digestion, increases satiety and is also an important raw material for our sex hormones.

After a ketogenic meal the blood sugar level rises only minimally. As a result the insulin response is small and there is no blood sugar rollercoaster. The ketone bodies (small molecules that are formed after a few days on a ketogenic diet) also have a satiating effect. Almost everyone reports much better satiety after switching to a ketogenic diet. Cravings seem to be swept away. Suddenly you no longer think about food between meals, and neither adverts nor the smell of snack bars trigger cravings any more. Many people feel liberated.

The low blood sugar swings on a ketogenic diet allow active fat burning around the clock. Insulin is the opponent of fat burning. If insulin is high (caused by a high blood sugar level), the fat cells stay closed. Insulin stands in front of them like a doorman. Only when the insulin level falls can fatty acids be taken out of the fat cells and burned. On a classic diet that is only the case at certain points in the day, because after a carbohydrate rich meal the insulin level is high. Fat burning is therefore blocked. Only once the meal is digested and all carbohydrates have been used up or stored does the insulin level fall again and fat burning start up. Provided we have not already had the next snack by then.

The low carbohydrate meals of the keto diet do not interrupt fat burning. It runs almost 24 hours a day and in this way is trained better and better. “Trained” means that special enzymes which are needed for fat breakdown are formed in greater numbers. The small team in your body that takes care of fat breakdown gets more and more support. Even if you switch back to a more carbohydrate rich diet after a ketogenic phase (more on that later), this effect is retained for a while and you continue to benefit from better trained fat burning.

Observations also show that on a ketogenic diet it is above all the unhealthy belly fat carried by so many overweight people that is broken down. In almost all places on the body, the subcutaneous fatty tissue serves as a storage place for surplus energy. We have subcutaneous fat on the belly too, but a thick belly indicates that a lot of fat has also been deposited between the organs in the abdominal cavity. This so called visceral fat is particularly hormonally active and releases a large number of signalling substances, among them a great many inflammatory factors. Excessive amounts of belly fat therefore put the body into a permanent state of inflammatory alert and can promote atherosclerosis and, as a consequence, heart attack and stroke.

The ketone bodies were mentioned earlier on. These special molecules are formed in the liver on a ketogenic diet. Now comes the special part, the point that sets the ketogenic diet apart from every other way of eating more than anything else: these ketone bodies are an energy source for the brain. Until now you thought the brain absolutely needs sugar? Then you belong to the majority, because even many nutritional scientists hold this belief. The reason is that ketosis and the formation (and use) of ketone bodies are mentioned in the standard literature only in passing at best.

If it really were the case that the brain could live on sugar (glucose) alone, the human species would probably not have made it this far, because our ancestors were exposed to times of food scarcity again and again. You might want to object now: “Yes, but there is gluconeogenesis for that, the new formation of glucose from protein”, and you are right. But only in part. If a human being were to obtain the energy for the brain from protein, that is from the muscles, for several weeks during a drought, for example, then within a very short time he would have lost so much muscle mass that he could hardly chase after an animal if he met one.

So for times like these the brain has developed a wonderful mechanism. When few carbohydrates are available over longer stretches, the body switches to ketogenesis. Ketone bodies are then formed, which supply the brain with energy. In this way the mechanism of gluconeogenesis is not overstretched and valuable muscle mass is preserved. So do ketone bodies only appear in times of scarcity? Not at all. Our ancestors, who did not eat carbohydrates three to six times a day, probably had a few ketone bodies in their blood regularly, even daily. Even people who eat a very carbohydrate rich diet most certainly form the odd ketone body at night.

But ketone bodies are much more than just a rescue in an emergency: they give your brain real superpower. They are formed from fat, and everyone always has that ready on their hips. So the dips in concentration in the morning, the ones that can only be fought off with a small snack, a sweet or a second breakfast, are over. Say goodbye to the food coma and the afternoon slump. On a ketogenic diet your brain is ready for action all day long, without fluctuations, because from now on it always carries its energy supply with it.

Besides being constantly available, ketone bodies are even a more effective fuel than glucose. For the same amount of energy, less oxygen is needed when ketone bodies are used. That is one reason why the ketogenic diet is also being researched as an aid for deep sea divers, who run the risk of suffering a stroke as a result of a lack of oxygen.

No more cravings and active fat burning. These are the two most important mechanisms that make losing weight easy on a ketogenic diet. You can now eat your meal and feel pleasantly full afterwards. Fat burning can carry on seamlessly until the next meal. No snack is needed in between, and so, quite unconsciously, you no longer eat more than you need. If you take a look at the recipe section of “Schlank mit Keto” or at the recipes in our blog, you will also see that with all those treats no wish is left unfulfilled. Once you have switched your metabolism over, even ketogenic treats, whether ice cream, cake or chocolate, are not a problem.

As a fan of science, I find it particularly exciting that the ketogenic diet promotes a special kind of fatty tissue, the so called brown fatty tissue. It is the only fatty tissue where more of it is better. In humans it is above all infants who have this special kind of fatty tissue. In adults it occurs only in small amounts. This fatty tissue does not store fat (as you know it from the fatty tissue on your hips or your belly, for example). Instead it burns fat and produces heat, it carries out what is known as thermogenesis.

In studies on mice it was found that the ketogenic diet increases the content of mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, in brown fatty tissue. This mechanism is one of the reasons why energy expenditure is slightly raised on a ketogenic diet. You will notice it in winter, for example, when you feel far less cold and complain much less about cold feet.

The lovely thing about the ketogenic diet is that it is not only effective if you intend to keep it up for the rest of your life from now on. That is not even the most sensible strategy (unless you follow a ketogenic diet because of an illness). If you do keto for lifestyle reasons, because you simply want to feel better, be slimmer and fitter, then you are best off using the ketogenic diet as a tool with which you train your metabolism again and again.

I myself, for example, now follow a cyclical ketogenic diet, in which I eat strictly ketogenic in some phases (for instance when I want to be particularly productive, such as while writing this book) and eat somewhat more carbohydrates in other phases (for example when I eat with business partners a lot for work, or when I am travelling).

To achieve this metabolic flexibility you need a longer ketogenic phase at the beginning (three months is best of all, but 21 days are already enough for the first switch over), after which you can raise your carbohydrate intake a little for single days or for whole weeks. Ideally the ketogenic diet then stays with you in the long term. With ketogenic weeks or days you keep the flexibility of your metabolism intact.

With this training your body becomes the ultimate hybrid engine and learns to cope well both with fat as an energy source and with moderate amounts of carbohydrates, without experiencing cravings or a loss of performance. That is what is called metabolic flexibility.

Many people report a much better mood when they switch to a ketogenic diet. They describe themselves as more balanced and more positive. What might be behind this? Without doubt the mental relaxation that goes hand in hand with this way of eating has an effect all by itself. Anyone who suddenly finds themselves free of cravings, afternoon slumps and dips in concentration can approach the day in a more relaxed and more confident way. Energy levels rise and lift the mood, but that is not all.

Medical research has shown that the ketogenic diet also has an influence on signalling substances in the brain. For instance, it shifts the ratio of the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA (glutamate has an excitatory effect, gamma aminobutyric acid an inhibitory one). A favourable shift in this ratio is seen as one cause of the positive effect of the ketogenic diet in epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases. An influence on mood is also conceivable by this route. The signalling substance GABA is credited with a relaxing, sleep promoting, anxiety relieving and antidepressant effect. Medicines against depression, sleep disorders and anxiety disorders also have an influence on the GABA balance, although on a different scale than the ketogenic diet.

My clients often start a ketogenic diet because they want to lose weight. Perhaps you are reading this article for that reason too. When I then ask for feedback after the switch, I often hear a whole series of positive results. Better sleep, more calm in everyday life, fewer headaches and, right at the end, a great weight loss “on the side”. A ketogenic diet improves wellbeing all round, so that the actual goal (losing weight) is no more than a pleasant side effect. Another positive aspect of the keto diet is its anti inflammatory effect, which can be observed among other things in better looking skin. People affected by autoimmune diseases also report relief of their symptoms. More on the anti inflammatory effect of the ketogenic diet can be found in the digression further above.

Does a steak on your plate have to be nicely browned and give off roasted aromas? What is responsible for the colour and the typical aroma is the so called Maillard reaction. Under the influence of heat an amino acid (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins) combines with a sugar molecule (glycation). Why do I mention this? Because the Maillard reaction can also take place in our body. Not as quickly as in a pan heated to a hundred degrees, but amino acids and sugar molecules can nevertheless combine in our body as well, and so called AGEs are formed in the process. If these accumulate in the bloodstream over time, damage to cells and tissues can occur.

A well known representative of these AGEs is HbA1c, known to everyone with diabetes as the “long term sugar”. This is haemoglobin that has combined with sugar molecules. On the one hand it is a measure of how high the blood sugar values have been over the past 12 weeks, but it also shows, by proxy, how strongly this reaction between sugar and amino acids may have taken place elsewhere in the body.

While these processes take place in the body and (sadly) often receive little attention from us (“it will not affect me anyway”), the skin ageing associated with AGEs is visible from the outside and is often the first fuel gauge for the ageing processes that are also taking place unnoticed inside the body. Through its positive effect on the blood sugar level, and through the fact that the ketogenic diet can also reduce the blood sugar level in the long term in people with diabetes, it works strongly against the formation of AGEs and slows down the ageing processes connected with them. We may like glycation reactions when coffee is roasted or a steak is fried. In our body, by contrast, they should not play any great role.

When I switched to a ketogenic diet back then, I was mainly doing strength training, and very happily so. I did usually go jogging in the mornings as well, but only for 30 minutes. I was never a fan of longer distances. So I was all the more astonished when one day I simply set off running and was still not exhausted after 90 minutes. My endurance seemed to have increased as if by magic. It was only with my later research into the ketogenic diet that I understood the mechanism behind it. Because of the training of fat metabolism, the body can fall back on its fat reserves as an energy source from minute one during (aerobic) endurance exercise.

If, by contrast, you eat a carbohydrate rich diet, the body first tries to use the sugar stored in the muscles and in the liver as its energy source. When this store runs low, you go weak. Endurance athletes call this phenomenon “bonking” or “hitting the wall /the bonk”. They feel as if they are running into a wall. To avoid this, isotonic drinks and carbohydrate rich gels are consumed.

A keto adapted body does not need these sugar suppliers from outside. It can fall back on its own fat reserves with the greatest of ease. Endurance athletes who train on a ketogenic diet and in this way achieve a very well trained fat metabolism can run for longer without taking in carbohydrates and so achieve better results. Many keto athletes train in a fasted state and need nothing more than still water while they are out, sometimes with a little salt in it.

In (anaerobic) strength sports, getting used to the ketogenic diet takes somewhat longer than in endurance sports. Strength athletes usually find it distinctly harder at the beginning, but after the long term switch (three to six months) they too feel an increase in performance on a ketogenic diet.

Since this book [“Schlank mit Keto”] is aimed above all at everyone who would like to lose weight, the health effects of the ketogenic diet can only be mentioned briefly. Even so, I hope that the benefits of the ketogenic diet, such as improved sleep, better looking skin and above all better wellbeing, will convince you and keep you with this way of eating. Far too often, unbalanced and badly designed diets damage the health of people who want to lose weight. On a ketogenic diet, by contrast, weight reduction and improved health go hand in hand. A healthy body lets go of surplus fat reserves voluntarily. The health effects of the ketogenic diet are also astonishing.

In medicine the ketogenic diet has been used successfully for more than 100 years to treat epilepsy in childhood. In more recent years research has been eagerly looking into the beneficial effects of the ketogenic diet on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis.

But even away from these “big” diseases, the ketogenic diet has a positive effect on health. Probably every one of us knows someone who suffers from high blood sugar, blood pressure that is too high or a cholesterol level that is too high. All of this is part of what is known as metabolic syndrome, also called the deadly quartet. In industrialised nations up to 30 per cent of the total population are affected by metabolic syndrome. Alongside smoking it is seen as a decisive risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Impaired glucose tolerance, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, raised blood pressure, a disorder of fat metabolism (raised triglycerides, lowered HDL) and obesity in the abdominal region are all part of metabolic syndrome. Excitingly, all of these factors can be influenced by changing your lifestyle. The ketogenic diet takes hold at all of these points and can improve them considerably.

The keto diet lowers blood pressure soon after the switch. One reason for this is the higher excretion of sodium. In healthy people, however, the lowered blood pressure can lead to tiredness, headaches and even dizziness during the initial switch to a ketogenic diet. To counteract these symptoms I recommend an increased salt intake. For people who previously suffered from high blood pressure, the lowering of blood pressure is a welcome development.

The ketogenic diet also has a positive effect on many forms of a disturbed carbohydrate metabolism. The raised blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes improves after only a short time on the new way of eating, so that blood sugar lowering medication can often be reduced relatively early on, in consultation with the doctor. Insulin resistance, which is still reversible in its early stages, can be improved and in part fully reversed by a long term low carbohydrate diet. The steady and very low intake of carbohydrates takes the strain off the pancreas and its insulin production.

The ketogenic diet makes fat burning easy, and among followers of the keto diet this works particularly effectively against unhealthy belly fat. This visceral fat is a driving force in the inflammatory processes of metabolic syndrome. An excess of fat in the abdominal cavity encourages diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke. The extent of unhealthy belly fat can be estimated from the waist circumference. A waist circumference of more than 102 centimetres in men and more than 88 centimetres in women is regarded as a risk factor. Through its anti inflammatory effect, its positive effect on the hormone balance and the rapid fat burning, the ketogenic diet is particularly good at breaking down belly fat. Incidentally, by reducing belly fat the ketogenic diet also lowers blood pressure in the long term.

Another exciting fact is that a properly composed keto diet with the right high quality fats is able to lower triglycerides and raise the good HDL cholesterol. What matters here is a good balance between saturated fats as an energy source, medium-chain saturated fats such as those found in coconut oil and in MCT oil in particular, and high quality monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, for example from olive oil and oily sea fish.

As a rule the ketogenic diet raises the good HDL cholesterol. At the same time it improves the ratio of LDL to HDL cholesterol. This ratio is an important value for judging whether fat metabolism is healthy, and it should be below 3.5 (LDL : HDL).

Unlike the low carbohydrate ketogenic diet, an extremely carbohydrate rich diet can raise our plasma triglycerides and lower HDL. This is seen most often with extremely low fat diets. Paradoxical: you mean well with “little fat”, but achieve the opposite and make the blood lipid values worse. The intake of fructose in high amounts in particular (for example by eating a lot of ready made products, drinking fruit juices, or during juice or smoothie fasting) has an extremely negative effect on the blood lipid values.

It has also been shown that ketogenic diets bring about a shift in favour of the larger, fluffier LDL particles. LDL comes in various sizes, and the fluffier variants are more favourable than the smaller, denser LDL particles.

By the way: trans fatty acids from ready meals, margarine and junk food always have a negative effect on the cholesterol level. Likewise, the anti inflammatory effect of the keto diet has a protective effect on the cardiovascular system, because only when the vessel walls are injured and inflamed can plaques be deposited and cause atherosclerosis. The ketogenic diet throttles back the inflammatory processes and reduces the risk.

Do you like this article? We have plenty more concentrated knowledge for you. This text comes from the book “Schlank mit Keto” by Foodpunk founder Marina Lommel. The book is published by Südwest Verlag and available in bookshops, in German.

Image: Shutterstock.com / Elena Veselova