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How To Prevent Weight Gain After Stopping The Keto Diet
There are a number of different diets out there recommended by a sea of nutritionists, dieticians and health influencers – keto being one of the most popular in recent times. This diet can offer quick results, but many people don’t consider what happens when it comes to stopping keto.
Whether you’ve been on the keto diet for a while and are ready to come off it, or are weighing up your long-term options – and asking the right questions about this diet – here’s what you need to know to prevent weight gain after stopping keto.
An overview of the keto diet
Before we explore how you can avoid weight gain after stopping keto, let’s review what this diet entails.
What is the keto diet?
Keto is actually short for the ketogenic diet – a type of diet that prioritizes fats over carbs. In short, it’s a high fat, low carb diet that’s been a popular way to lose weight in the health and fitness space for some time now.
There are different variations of the keto diet, but in general it involves making carbohydrates around 5% of your diet – with the rest being fats and protein. The split between fats and protein is where the variation occurs.
This means that people on the keto diet avoid foods such as:
grains
rice
sugars
legumes
potatoes.
Avocados, fish and nuts are just a few of the foods you might associate with this diet thanks to their low-carb, high-fat content.
How does keto burn fat?
Drastically reducing your carbohydrate intake and replacing them with fats causes the body to enter the metabolic state of ketosis – where the body uses fat in order to generate energy rather than carbohydrates. But the main way this diet works for people to lose weight is calorie deficit. Eliminating a food group will in general reduce calories significantly and cause people to enter a significant caloric deficit.
Is keto healthy?
It’s thought that the keto diet can help with more than just weight loss. Those with health conditions ranging from diabetes to cancer may find that eating keto can help to alleviate the symptoms of their conditions.
And while it can be a healthy choice for some who are medically advised to adopt this diet, it isn’t always the case – especially in the long-term.
Like any other diet that drastically reduces the intake of a major food group, it’s difficult to recommend the keto diet on the basis of health – especially when you consider that scientific opinion is split on whether the keto diet is healthy or not.
At the Macros Clinic, we believe that each food group plays a vital role in keeping our bodies fuelled with the right nutrients and vitamins, so should be included in any healthy diet.
Side effects of keto
Following a keto diet can also cause a number of side effects – bad breath, digestive problems, and the ‘keto flu’ to name a few. But by far, the most worrying consequence of keto is the potential of developing nutrient deficiencies.
Cutting out carbohydrates from your diet can result in your body lacking in important nutrients like iron, fiber, calcium, and vitamins A, C and D. So if you do choose to still go on this diet, it’s vital that you try to get all the necessary nutrients you would be getting from carbs in other forms.
What happens when you stop keto?
When you stop the keto diet, a number of things will happen to your body. The biggest change occurs in regards to the way your body creates energy – your metabolism. Keto works by triggering ketosis in the body, where fats are used to create energy rather than carbohydrates. But stopping keto means that your metabolism shifts too, returning to burning carbohydrates as the body’s main source of fuel. Here’s what else you might experience when you first stop the keto diet.