Whether you want to know now to get into ketosis for general health benefits, weight loss, fat loss, epilepsy treatment, or any other reason, getting into ketosis seems like it’s easy, and quite frankly, it kind of is. When you start eating a keto-friendly high-fat, low-carb diet and minimize your carb intake, and moderate your protein intake on an ongoing basis, you can get into ketosis fast. But there’s some ways that you can enhance or accelerate how fast you lower your blood sugar levels heighten your blood ketone levels, and consequently get into the fat-burning state of ketosis.
One of the things that I want to point out first is when you’re trying to get into a state of ketosis and maybe you’ve never done it before, you want to try doing it at a period of time when you’re not under a lot of stress. Here’s the thing. Cortisol, stress, it’s the enemy of ketosis. Cortisol allows glycogen, which is stored carbohydrates in your muscles, to get released into the bloodstream. This, of course, triggers a blood glucose spike, which inhibits ketogenesis. It stops the production of ketones. When you are someone that is just first starting to get into ketosis, it’s already hard to convince your body to create ketone bodies. When you add glucose into the mix simply because of stress, it makes it very difficult to enter ketosis. So I usually say, set the stage properly.
How to Start a Keto Diet Stress-Free
You should be in a little bit more of a stress-free mode. I actually recommend starting a ketogenic diet right after vacation because you’re calm, you’re relaxed, and it’s before you go right back to the hustle and bustle of work. So that’s just something to keep in mind. Another thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you’re keeping, of course, your carbohydrate intake very, very low but you’re periodically switching between higher fat and lower fat. Now, what I mean by that is when you’re first starting on a ketogenic diet, you might have one day where you have, oh, let’s say 100 grams of fat and you might have another day where you have 50 grams of fat. What I have noticed in a lot of situations is that by reducing the fat intake now and then, you allow the body to adapt and use its own stored body fat for fuel. This is a very efficient process and allows the liver to utilize that fat as ketones a lot easier, thereby making the transition into ketosis a little bit easier.
The Importance of MCTs
Now, a couple of quick tips, too, ’cause not everyone likes to just take in a bunch of MCT oil (medium-chain triglycerides). C8 MCT oil is going to generate ketones the fastest. It’s a true kickstart. Okay, that’s great. But again, if you don’t like having straight oil, then what’s the solution? Well, believe it or not, goat cheese has a high amount of caprylic, C8, the acid in it. So what that means is if you consume goat cheese, you are, in turn, getting the MCTs that are going to allow you to get into ketosis a little bit faster. So enjoy the goat cheese. I always say just level it up. Have a bunch of that goat cheese. Additionally, you can also have olive oil. Olive oil isn’t an MCT, but it’s a monounsaturated fat and people forget that just because it’s not an MCT doesn’t mean that it’s not effective at generating ketones. Studies have shown that monounsaturated fats actually create ketones quite well, plus there are some other benefits of olive oil that we don’t have to talk about in this video.
Alternate vs. Intermittent Fasting
The next thing that you can do is prior to going on a ketogenic diet, practice a little bit of what is called alternate-day fasting. There have been some studies that have shown that participants that alternate-day fast, so they do one day of intermittent fasting, maybe 18, 20-hour fast, and then one day not, another day fasting, another day not, end up being a lot more fat adapted (maintaining a metabolic state of nutritional ketosis where you use fat as your primary source of energy). And therefore, it means that you can get into ketosis a lot easier. Of course during the days where you don’t fast, you may want to follow keto recipes or a keto meal plan to get the benefits of ketosis through healthy fats. Â That said, the goal with alternate-day fasting isn’t necessarily to get you into ketosis; it’s to allow you to get a little bit of a taste of what’s to come when you do get into ketosis. This way, if you know you’re going to strive for the health benefits of ketosis and burning fat stores the next week, a little bit of intermittent fasting can help you get ready. Additionally, if you want to get into ketosis the fastest, the best bet is just to do a little bit of fasting. Do a 24, 48-hour fast, more than likely you’re going to be in ketosis and burning fat stores relatively quick anyway. And it just gets faster and faster the more often that you do it.
What Kind of Exercise Should You Do To Get Into Ketosis Faster?
But the big one that I want to talk about today is going to be what kind of exercise to do. Low intensity, steady-state cardio is the best way to condition your level to generate ketones. It is not the truth that you need to get rid of all the carbohydrates in your body first. They feel that they need to go and do full-body glycogen depletion workouts and drain all their body’s carbohydrate storage before their liver will ever produce ketones and look for them as a fuel source. That’s not true. You actually just need to drain the liver glycogen. The muscle glycogen can still stay elevated. So to give you an example, if I were to go into ketosis right this second, I would probably still have a good amount of muscle glycogen stored. I don’t have to burn through that in order to get into ketosis. So, low-intensity steady-state cardio doesn’t even touch the glycogen stores. It utilizes much more of beta-oxidation, where the liver produces energy from fats. We want to condition that process to occur. So the first day or two, it’s not even worth it to do a whole lot of activity, to be honest. It’s not even worth it to do a lot of cardio because your body’s not going to be burning those fats yet, so what I recommend you do is days one and two, just keep it super low intensity. Maybe go for a little walk, okay? And then day three that you’re trying to get into ketosis, go for a long walk, maybe a 60, even a 90-minute brisk walk and that’s going to help you generate ketones a lot faster than hitting the weights. In fact, hitting the weights or doing higher intensity work is actually going to slow down ketone production because you’re going to burn through what ketones are available and your body will be forced to utilize glucose, and it’s going to pull that from other energy substrates.
The Importance of Testing Your Ketones
So this whole time, you need to be measuring your blood ketones and blood sugar. I cannot overemphasize this, because every situation’s going to be different. Some days, you might get into ketosis in 24 hours and sometimes you might take 72 hours to get into ketosis. It all depends on stress and other lifestyle factors as well. But if you constantly measure (ideally with a blood meter rather than urine test strips) and you do it a few times per day, you can see where you’re at and where you should be timing your workouts, for example. So if you start to see your ketone levels are increasing, that would be a great time to go do some steady-state, low-intensity cardio to try to get that number up a little bit more to get you into that fat-adapted state. So anyhow, when it comes to measuring, you want to leave the guess work out of the equation. Always leave the measuring to the meter. Keto-Mojo is the gold standard when it comes down to ketone testing. So as always, keep it locked in here with Keto-Mojo and we’ll see you soon.
