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If you are seeking to lose weight, especially with the help of weight-loss injections, you will have been told many times that the jabs themselves are not a magic bullet. Diet and exercise are vital components in a three-pronged attack on your weight problem.
A key reason many fitness programmes centred around weight loss jabs fail in the long run, with patients putting the weight back on, is because they don’t develop new habits based on better diets and exercise. Those who succeed, on the other hand, can stay fit for life.
This means diet and fitness have two roles to play, as they help you to shed more pounds while you are on a weight loss drug programme, but also set you up for success after the programme comes to an end.
Among the most popular ways to approach diet is not just to cut down (or eliminate) some obviously unhealthy foods, but a focused diet with known benefits. The Keto diet comes into this category.
A central feature of the diet is that it is low in carbs and high in fats, although the fats in question are predominantly ‘good fats’ of the sort you would find in avocados or fish, rather than the saturated stuff a portion of fish and chips is fried in.
Typical foods with plenty of fat that you should include in a Keto diet include:
However, it makes sense to include some non-fatty plant-based foods that are high in fibre, which is important for gut balance. Without this, the Keto diet can be bad for your digestive health, as most people get a lot of their fibre through foods with a lot of carbs in, like bread.
The reason this matters is that your body burns whatever source of energy it gets. In most diets, this consists largely of sugar converted to carbs. With a Keto diet, sugars and carbs are low and fat is high, so your metabolism shifts and focuses on burning up fat instead.
This state of affairs, known as ketosis, is clearly beneficial when trying to lose weight, as your body will be better trained and conditioned to burn fat, so it will burn off more residual fat in your body, as well as anything you have just eaten.
However, there is a need for balance with the Keto diet, which is where items like high-protein snacks are important. This is because it can help you to control the amount of protein you have in the diet to ensure the balance is correct.
The right amount of protein per day in a Keto diet should be around 25 per cent. This is because much more of it will encourage your body to produce gluten, which interrupts ketosis.
However, too little protein can have some significant negative medical effects:
These consequences come from having too little protein, although the necessary amount you need to avoid such problems is around ten per cent. That does give a little leeway in terms of getting the balance right, but you don’t want to risk going too low.
In addition, protein is often credited with helping people to lose weight by boosting their metabolic rate, although in the case of Keto diets, the focus lies elsewhere. However, this is worth noting if you discontinue the Keto diet in the future and want a healthy alternative.
The typical diet consists of 10-35 per cent protein. However, apart from the fact that the upper end of this range is too high to achieve and sustain ketosis, this figure is a percentage that, on its own, does not take into account what, or how much, food the diet includes.
By focusing much of your protein consumption on snack bars, you can control it more easily. This way, you can prepare meals that fit the high-fat, low-carb requirements of the Keto diet while also including low levels of protein, using bars to top it up.
This way, you can maintain the strict elements of the Keto diet and give yourself the best chance of making it work alongside your other measures to burn off lots of fat, while ensuring the levels of protein are just right.
