Nutrition
Introduction to the Ketogenic Diet
Ketosis allows your body to burn fat instead of sugar. Discover how elite endurance athletes harness this capability for peak performance.
Nutrition
Ketosis allows your body to burn fat instead of sugar. Discover how elite endurance athletes harness this capability for peak performance.
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Each of us can burn much more fat than we think is possible.
Our muscle makes it happen. Because muscle is the site of the highest energy expenditure in the body. When it burns fat effectively, we've already accomplished the lion's share.
This ability to burn fat must be present in each of us. Each of us has actually done it before (excluding rare, severe metabolic disorders). For example, at the beginning of our lives, when we lived on fatty breast milk and were regularly in ketosis.
Ketosis? Come again?
During high fat burning, the liver produces "sugar substitutes"—ketone bodies—which can, for example, cover a significant portion of our brain's sugar requirements. The more intensely fat burning runs, the more ketone bodies we find in our blood and the deeper the "ketosis".
In short: ketosis means you're producing ketone bodies.
Under normal conditions, we have very few ketones in our blood. Most people: none at all. The exception—and every child knows this—is when you've done heavy exercise in the evening and dinner wasn't substantial enough. Result by morning: the typical acetone breath—that's ketosis.
Ketosis with healthy eating
Healthy eating, as we define it at edubily, also means reducing the glycemic load, so cutting back on (white) flour products and instead using more unprocessed carbohydrate sources like root vegetables, vegetables, and fruit.
Moreover, we optimize our lifestyle so that we fast occasionally or sometimes consume few carbohydrates—for example, with a scrambled egg breakfast garnished only with paprika.
Moreover, we exercise. In these contexts, fat burning ramps up quickly and we regularly end up … in ketosis. We don't actually need a specially formulated ketogenic diet … but wait!
Ketogenic diet in sport
A "real" ketogenic diet means severely restricting carbohydrate intake and becoming heavily dependent on fat burning—technically called beta-oxidation.
The meal plan becomes quite one-sided, consisting very frequently of large amounts of fat such as butter, cream, nuts, animal fats and oils. Rounded out with some protein and very few carbohydrates, which nowadays are usually only allowed in the form of salads, vegetables, and a few very low-carb fruit varieties.
You can certainly give it a try. Elite endurance athletes have already done so under the renowned keto researcher Jeff Volek. This was published in 2016. The study found that keto- or fat-adapted athletes can burn 2-3 times more fat during exercise.1
The remarkable part: they could oxidize significantly more fat even under very high physical exertion than their normally fed—that is, carbohydrate-fueled—counterparts. This challenged a decades-old belief that postulated there was a "fat-burning zone" found only at lower exercise intensities. As it turns out, that was wrong.
Fat- and keto-adapted? skeptical look
Renowned metabolic researchers who have been studying ketosis and ketogenic nutrition for years tell us: __No, there is no magical timeframe until the body burns fat "perfectly". __
Most effects appear within days to a few weeks. By then, the muscle's enzyme system has already adapted. But be warned: for people who have trained their muscles heavily for years, it might take (much) longer.
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