Keto diet: 5 of the biggest food plan mistakes

Author: Stephen Johnson / Source: Big Think

The high-fat, low-carb keto diet involves putting your body into a natural metabolic state called ketosis.
When done responsibly, the keto diet can yield a wide range of benefits, most notably weight loss.
Some people have less luck than others on the keto diet because they make a few common mistakes, including failing to drink enough water, eating too many unhealthy fats, and not realizing which foods might kick them out of ketosis.
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The gist of the keto diet is simple: Eat less carbs and more fats. But actually sticking to a diet that avoids sugars, breads, potatoes, beer and most fruits isn’t easy. If you research the keto diet, you’ll find message boards littered with people who’ve tried and failed to live by the keto diet, or who’ve implemented it correctly, and you’ll also come across tons of keto diet progress blogs that mysteriously go dark after week two.

Simply put, it’s tough to keep your body in ketosis – especially in a society where most of the meals readily available at restaurants, fast food stops and grocery stores include large amounts of carbs.

“Even in the hospital under strict controls, when we send patients into ketosis for medical reasons, it can be extremely difficult to do,” Melissa Bailey, a clinical dietitian at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, told Health. “On your own, it’s virtually impossible to do it consistently.”

It can also be difficult to implement the keto diet in a healthy way, as evidenced by the common side effects people often report. Still, it’s possible to stick to the keto diet – and reap some surprising benefits – if you can manage to avoid these common mistakes.

Eating too much protein

Protein is an essential macronutrient that helps us feel full, burn fat and build muscle, and it plays a key role in any healthy diet, including keto. However, you might’ve heard that overeating protein can actually be counterproductive to a keto diet because of a process called gluconeogenesis, in which your body turns non-carbs into glucose.

But the research on this claim has failed to back it up, and most anecdotal reports suggest that eating even moderately high amounts of meat won’t kick you out of ketosis. Still, eating tons of protein can slow down your weight loss, and, if you’re eating too many processed meats, it can increase your levels of “bad cholesterol” known as low-density lipoprotein.

To ensure you’re consuming a healthy amount of protein on the keto diet, you can generally stick to these guidelines: