If you’ve recently begun a keto diet or are planning on doing so, you may be wondering how you can enter ketosis quickly or speed up the process to kick-start your weight loss journey. Well, you’re not alone. Even though several keto followers can begin the diet successfully, it often takes their bodies fairly long to begin ketosis.
There are many ways to speed up ketosis: cutting down on carbohydrate intake, increasing protein intake, taking supplements, and more.
Having your body enters into a state of ketosis presents a host of benefits, the foremost of which is a speedy yet healthy weight loss method. Speeding up ketosis can help you achieve your weight loss goals quicker than you ordinarily would by following a regular balanced diet and exercise regimen.
The following tips and tricks should help you speed up ketosis safely and effectively. You can choose to focus on a few or all of these tips, depending on what you believe will work best for your body type, lifestyle, and weight loss goals.
Cut Down On Carbohydrate Intake
Reducing your carbohydrate intake is by far the most effective method of speeding up ketosis. This is mainly because cutting down on carbs is the very basis of ketosis and raising your ketone levels.
Once you reduce or eliminate carbs from your diet, you’ll find your body burning stored fats instead of carbs consumed. Ordinarily, your body would burn sugar or glucose to release energy. But with a reduced carb intake and reduced dependency on the aforementioned sources, your body starts burning ketones and unhealthy fats instead.
What’s more – ketones can help boost the working of your brain as well. In other words, following a keto diet helps improve your physical health and does the same for your mental health.
While reducing carb intake may seem intimidating at first, it takes only a few days and a little willpower to grow accustomed to it. If you don’t cut down on carbs, don’t expect your body to get into ketosis. You can keep track of your carbohydrate intake and even use testing strips to check your ketone levels.
You may believe that you can only follow a low-carb diet when you’re at home and are preparing your meals. However, this is far from true. Those following the keto diet know that maintaining their ketone levels is fairly easy, even when they have no choice but to dine out.
Now, the carb requirement is not the same for everyone following the keto diet. It depends on your level of activity throughout the day and how many carbs you’ll require to fuel your activities.
Practice Fasting
Those familiar with the keto diet are quite unsurprised with the suggestion of intermittent fasting. Fasting is often an integral part of the keto diet, and those who practice it will be able to tell you that it’s given the weight loss results like never before.
Now, fasting on keto is not as extreme (and indeed, unhealthy) as it is with most other diets. Such diets will have you lose weight by starving yourself – only to have you put it back on later. This is not the case at all with the keto diet. Fasting is one of the quickest and most effective methods of speeding up ketosis and raising your ketone levels.
Not only does it speed up ketosis, but it also helps reduce and regulate your blood sugar levels and reduce your exposure to several common illnesses. While it will surely be a bit of a challenge at first, once you get into the habit of fasting regularly, its various benefits will greatly justify the initial discomfort you experience when trying it out.
However, with regards to following a keto diet, it’s not just about fasting but about fasting the right way. Fasting on keto does not simply entail starving yourself till your body is forced to burn fat to fuel energy. It entails consuming 1,000 calories or less per day using sources of healthy fat.
In other words, you consume fats instead of carbs to fuel your daily activities. Those who fast regularly on keto have reported that their body stays in ketosis even between meals when they do so.
Consume Adequate Protein
There is a common misconception among those looking to follow the keto diet that they will have to drastically reduce their protein intake along with their carb intake to lose weight. This is not true in the least. You need to make sure you’re consuming adequate protein while you’re on keto, or your body won’t stay in ketosis for long.
Besides, not including enough protein in your keto diet plan is sure to cause some negative short-term and long-term side effects on your overall health. While many people assume that simply substituting carbs for healthy fats will get them through ketosis and give them impressive weight loss results, this is not true.
If you want to speed up ketosis and ensure your receive adequate nutrition, you would need to include a good amount of protein in your keto diet. Only those who consume enough meat, eggs and other sources of protein on the regular have been able to speed up ketosis and maintain their ketone levels.
However, you have to be careful not to overdo it either and ensure that only about 1/5th of your total calorie intake comes from protein sources.
Increase Physical Activity
This is one of the more obvious methods of helping your body speed up ketosis, but it’s by no means any less effective than the others mentioned in this article. Increasing your physical activity will help you burn through the glycogen stored in your body. Glycogen is essentially glucose obtained from carbs consumed that is not required by your body as yet.
Therefore, if you reduce your carb intake, it logically follows that your glycogen levels go down and you begin relying more on other sources of calories. However, simply reducing carb intake is not enough for ketosis to occur quickly. This process can be sped up by days, weeks even when coupled with a good exercise regimen.
Once your body runs through its stores of glycogen, your liver will amp up ketone production which will help power your workouts. Working out during the phase of your body’s transition into ketosis can greatly help you increase your ketone levels faster and burn through fat.
It’s important to note here that during the initial weeks of trying to get your body into ketosis and increasing your physical activity, you may find it difficult to cope with your routine tasks. However, don’t be alarmed if you feel lethargic or fatigued during this period, it’s perfectly normal.
It takes a week or two on average for your body to adjust to its depleted glycogen build-up, especially when coupled with a strenuous workout routine. You should try and keep up your exercise routine as best as you can to enter (and stay) into ketosis quickly.
Take Keto Supplements
If you’re following a keto diet and haven’t been able to achieve significant results even weeks after you’ve begun, you should consider trying out a supplement. A good keto supplement can help speed up ketosis while causing minimal to no side effects. These supplements are also known as exogenous ketones.
Most keto supplements contain BHB, a type of ketone that’s already present in your body. In providing your body with a healthy dose of ketones, you effectively replace glucose with ketones as the fuel for your daily activities. What’s more, ketones work better as a fuel than glucose does, thereby helping you release more energy than you could with a regular diet.
Such supplements are generally available in the form of pills, powders, or even drops. The pills and drops are the easiest to use as they can be consumed anytime, anywhere. The exogenous keto bases or powders, on the other hand, need to be mixed with a beverage to be consumed, which makes them relatively inconvenient to use.
One of the many great keto supplements available in the market today is HB&S Solutions’ Keto Green Drops. These gluten-free drops help speed up and maintain ketosis in your body. If you chose to test it, you’ll find an increase in your body’s ketone levels once you start using these drops.
Conclusion
While getting your body into a state of ketosis isn’t all that difficult, it can often be a slow, even tedious process. Simply following a generic keto diet may not get you the results you desire, at least not in the time frame you desire. Therefore, you may need a few tips and tricks to help you along the way.
All of the methods we’ve mentioned above to speed up ketosis are known to be reasonably effective. These tips and tricks have worked for scores of keto followers around the world, regardless of their weight loss goals and former lifestyles. Therefore, if followed diligently enough, there’s no reason these won’t work for you as well.