The ketogenic diet has garnered significant attention as a potential weight-loss strategy and for its various health benefits. This article provides a detailed guide on calculating your nutrient intake on a keto diet to ensure success.
Introduction to the Ketogenic Diet
The ketogenic diet is a low-carbohydrate, high-fat eating plan that shifts your body's metabolism into a state called ketosis. By restricting carb intake, the body starts using fat for fuel instead of glucose. This process leads to the production of ketones, which become an alternative fuel source.
The Importance of Macro Tracking
Keeping track of your macronutrient intake is vital for ensuring success on the ketogenic diet. It helps you maintain ketosis and achieve your health goals, whether for weight loss or other health improvements.
Understanding Macros and Calories
Calories: The Basic Unit of Energy
A calorie is a basic unit of energy that helps us understand how much energy we can potentially get from the food we eat. If you eat fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight (a calorie deficit), you will lose weight.
Macronutrients: The Building Blocks
Macronutrients, or macros, are compounds your body uses for growth, maintenance, and repair. There are three macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. The total intake of macros for your diet depends on various factors, such as gender, weight, age, activity level, body fat percentage, and your personal goals.
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- Fat: On keto, the majority of your calories will come from dietary fat.
- Protein: Protein is essential for maintaining and building muscle.
- Carbohydrates: Carbs should remain low because they will prevent you from entering into ketosis and getting all of the benefits of the keto diet.
Steps to Calculate Keto Macros
Setting Goals: Setting goals for exactly how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates you’re aiming for each day is essential for calculating ideal keto macros.
Determining Calorie Needs: Determining how many calories you need each day is crucial to calculating your keto macros. If you’re looking to lose weight on the keto diet, you need to create a calorie deficit by staying below your baseline.
Calculating Macro Ratios: Once you know how many calories you should be aiming for each day, you can start calculating your keto macros.
Fat: If you’re aiming for healthy fats to comprise about 70 percent of total daily calories, then you should multiply your total calorie needs by 0.70, which will determine the amount of calories that should come from fat.
Protein: For instance, if you’re shooting for 2,000 calories per day and protein makes up about 15 percent of your daily keto ratio, you should multiply 2,000 by 0.15, which equates to 300 calories per day from protein.
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Tracking Your Intake: After you’ve calculated your keto diet macro percentages, it’s time to start keeping track of your intake to stick within your daily allotted macronutrients for keto.
Using a Keto Calculator
A keto calculator can be a valuable tool to personalize your keto diet plan. It considers individual factors like age, sex, height and weight, physical activity levels, and your specified goal of losing / maintaining / gaining weight. These calculators often use formulas like the Mifflin-St. Jeor equation to find your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Select the option that fits your body type best. If you have actual body fat % measurements from a DEXA, InBody, or BodPod, you can use the advanced calculator to input your number for a more accurate calculation. To determine your activity level think about what you spend doing most of your day. If you work sitting down most of the day with only 1 hour of exercise per day, then choose “Work in an office all day”. To accurately estimate the amount of calories you are burning while exercising please select the top two activities you perform on a weekly basis.
How Keto Calculators Work
Keto calculators use your personal information to generate personalized results. They consider factors like:
- Gender: Men and women have different caloric requirements.
- Weight: You need to enter your current and goal weight to accurately calculate your macros and calorie requirements.
- Age: Daily nutritional requirements for calories, minerals, and vitamins change as people age.
- Body Fat Percentage: Your body fat percentage is an important factor to consider as well as your goals.
- Activity Level: If you’re more physically active, you’ll need more calories.
Understanding Net Carbs
Net Carbs are the total amount of carbohydrates you can consume daily after you subtract dietary fibers and some sugar alcohols. We recommend staying under 30 g depending on your size to achieve an optimal state of ketosis. Total carbs is not a precise indicator of the carb content of a food. When you see “total carbs” on a food label, the number beside it represents the cumulative total of grams of dietary fiber, sugar, and sugar alcohol that are in that food item or beverage. By giving you your suggested carb consumption in net carbs, we are providing you with the most direct way of knowing how many carbs you need to eat to enter ketosis. For example, if we told you to eat 50 total carbs rather than 20-30 grams of net carbs, you could be eating anywhere between 0 and 50 grams of net carbs. At 0 grams of net carbs, most people will get into ketosis within the first week and experience deeper levels of ketosis as the weeks progress.
Calculating Net Carbs
To calculate net carbs, subtract the amount of dietary fiber and the amount of sugar alcohol (if sugar alcohol is present) in a food item from the total carbs.
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Net Carbs = Total Carbs - Fiber - Sugar AlcoholsFor example, using the formula, 20 grams - (10 grams + 6 grams), you get 4 grams dietary fiber.
Protein Intake on Keto
Protein intake is imperative when it comes to keto. Too much and you can lower your ketone levels, too little and you can lose excess muscle. Protein shouldn't be over-consumed on a ketogenic diet. If you want to gain muscle, we recommend having between 1.0g and 1.2g protein per pound of lean body mass.
Why Moderate Protein?
The first reason that protein is limited is simply to prioritize the intake of fat, which is the main source of the body’s energy (technically ketones are) while eating keto. The second reason is due to a fear that too much protein will kick you out of ketosis.
High-Protein Keto
Even after you convert grams to calories, you may find that your suggested protein intake is high (above 30%) and fat is a bit low for keto (less than 60%). The only problem that high protein intake can cause, however, is lower levels of ketone production. If you want to follow a high-protein keto diet, that means protein should replace fat as your primary source of calories.
Fat Consumption on Keto
To meet your macros most efficiently, try combining high protein with high-fat foods or have foods that are both high in protein and fat at every meal. For example, having a fatty fish or fatty cut of meat with high-protein cheese (and low carb vegetables) is a simple and easy way to have a keto-friendly meal that will help you meet your protein and fat needs.
Sources of Healthy Fats
There are several sources of high-quality fat that keto dieters enjoy: coconut oil, olive oil, and avocado oil, butter, peanut butter and other nut butters, cheese and other full-fat dairy, MCT oil, and high-fat meats like fatty fish and beef.
Practical Tips for Meeting Your Macros
- Plan Your Meals Ahead: One, plan your meals ahead.
- Meal Prep: Two, do meal prep (including your snacks and packed office lunches).
- Combine High-Protein and High-Fat Foods: To meet your macros most efficiently, try combining high protein with high-fat foods or have foods that are both high in protein and fat at every meal.
- Track Your Intake: To help you stay on track to meeting your macro needs, we recommend using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer.
What to Eat and Avoid on Keto
Keto-Friendly Foods
The simplest way to meet your macros is by cutting out non-keto foods and eating keto-friendly foods. Stock up on keto-friendly items like meat, poultry, seafood, non-starchy vegetables, and nuts and seeds.
Foods to Avoid
Naturally, incorporating the foods listed above into your diet is not enough. You also need to make sure to cut down your carb intake. No more bread or pasta! While you shouldn't consume any sugar, you can substitute it with stevia or artificial sweeteners. You can also drink no-sugar drinks such as Coke Zero.
Monitoring Ketosis
You don’t have to guess whether or not your body is in ketosis. You can quickly check it using keto sticks. We recommend checking the level of ketosis in the morning, just after waking up. If you want a more reliable way to check your ketone levels (without the risk of diluting ketones in urine), you should conduct a blood test. You can use a dedicated ketone meter that analyzes a drop of your blood for the presence of BHB (beta-hydroxybutyrate), the main ketone produced by your body. An optimal concentration ranges from 1.5 to 3 mmol/L (millimoles per liter).
Potential Benefits and Risks of Keto
Benefits
The keto diet may improve various aspects of health, as experienced by many people. Some benefits include weight loss and improvements in total cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure.
Risks
Possible nutrient deficiencies may arise if a variety of recommended foods on the ketogenic diet are not included. It is important to not solely focus on eating high-fat foods, but to include a daily variety of the allowed meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds to ensure adequate intakes of fiber, B vitamins, and minerals (iron, magnesium, zinc)-nutrients typically found in foods like whole grains that are restricted from the diet.
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