Some symptoms you may begin to experience are headaches, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, mental confusion, and irritability. The ketogenic (or just ketogenic) high-fat, low-carb diet is all the rage these days, but it's not new. The diet was originally developed in the 1920s as a way to treat seizure disorder epilepsy and is sometimes still used for that purpose. More recent users claim that the diet provides other benefits, such as weight loss and lower blood sugar.
That's a major change, considering that the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend eating 225 to 325 grams of carbohydrates per day if you're on a 2,000-calorie diet. To understand the ketogenic diet, you first need to know how your body works with a more normal diet. Some dieters complain of ketogenic flu, a number of unpleasant symptoms associated with the body's transition to ketosis. But Bellatti said the ketogenic diet can cause you to lose weight in water.
This could be an advantage for people with type 2 diabetes, the condition in which the blood sugar level is too high because the body can't use insulin well. There is some promising evidence that a ketogenic diet can improve blood sugar control for people with type 2 diabetes, at least in the short term, reports the Harvard Health Blog. Ketosis is a process that occurs when the body doesn't have enough carbohydrates to burn them for energy. Instead, it burns fat and produces things called ketones, which you can use as fuel.
In the absence of glucose, the liver begins to convert fat into substances called ketones, which the body can also use for energy, Bellatti said. The good news is that if you can overcome it, cloud cover usually disappears after a couple of days, and you'll experience a heightened sense of mental clarity after your brain starts burning more and more ketones for fuel (this can take about a week or two of a ketogenic diet). Once you overcome the dramatic starting water weight, you'll start burning fat, since that's ultimately the goal of keto. Fortunately, as you rehydrate your body and produce more ketones for fuel, your symptoms will dissipate and your hormones will begin to balance in a healthier way.
When you start to go on a ketogenic diet, the first day you'll probably feel good, but eventually, about 2 to 3 days later, mental and physical confusion will come. After starting a carbohydrate-restricted diet such as the ketogenic diet, your body consumes all of its glycogen and all that bound water is released through the urine, making it lighter. When this happens, the liver begins to produce large quantities of ketones to supply energy to the brain. On top of all of this, it takes your body a couple of days of ketogenic dieting before it starts producing and burning ketones for fuel on a consistent basis.
As you progress on a ketogenic diet, you will begin to burn fat and ketones as your primary fuel sources. When reading about starting the ketogenic diet, many sources say that digestive problems such as constipation and diarrhea are common. Doctors generally recommend that you wait until you finish breastfeeding if you want to start the ketogenic diet. In addition to that, ketone bodies themselves block something called the NLRP3 inflammasome, an immune system receptor linked to inflammation.
For the first few days of starting a ketogenic diet, you may struggle to sleep, Way said, as this is the result of an electrolyte imbalance.
