Carbs and Insulin

Your blood glucose levels (or blood sugar) is affected by everything you eat. As your blood glucose rises, your pancreas releases insulin. This causes your fat cells to store glucose in the form of triglycerides.

Sugar and carbohydrates keep your insulin levels high. While this gives you a feeling of quick energy, it also causes a problem.

Since insulin causes your body to store fat and prevents it from being released into your body as energy, eating this way actually reduces the amount of energy you have overall. It also causes you to gain weight.

The goal of any diet -as well as exercise- is to burn fat. For this, you must reduce your insulin levels and reduce foods that promote rises in your glucose level. Protein and fats are good for this, as they do not raise your insulin levels nearly as much as carbs.

One difference between a typical low carb diet and the Ketogenic Diet is that the latter advises you to limit your intake of even “good” carbs.

Even vegetables generally considered to be healthy, such as broccoli, asparagus, kale, avocados and others should be eaten in moderation on the Ketogenic Diet.

This is why, despite some similarities, you can’t use an index like the GI or and Acid-Alkaline chart when following the Ketogenic Diet. In many ways, it’s stricter than these (as well as most low carb) diets.

That’s because with this diet, your aim is to create a specific chemical reaction in your body -ketosis. This means you have to be very selective about what you consume.

These types of vegetables are still preferable to things like sweets, white bread and pasta, of course. You don’t have to avoid them completely. You do, however, have to remember that they are carbs, and therefore must be limited with this type of diet.

The problem with most low carb diets is that they focus solely on the carb vs. protein quotient and ignore the role of fat. If anything, they usually tell you to avoid fats along with carbs.

The Ketogenic Diet, on the other hand, advises you to increase the amount of fat in your diet. This may seem like a completely counterintuitive practice, as most of us have been brainwashed into the idea that we must eat low fat foods in order to avoid being fat!

Fortunately, a lot of recent research has led even some mainstream nutritionists and health experts to re-examine the role of fat in our diet. Even people who aren’t familiar with the Ketogenic Diet may know that there are good or healthy fats, such as those high in Omega-3 (such as fish).

So, while there are some similarities between the Ketogenic Diet and low carb diets, there are also significant differences. The Ketogenic Diet is low carb, but it’s not really high protein. It’s actually a healthy high fat diet.

To understand why this is so beneficial, we will have to look more deeply into the whole issue of healthy fats, which we will do later on in this report. We will also have to look at how damaging sugar is to any healthy diet.

Insulin causes both fat absorption and prevents fat from being used as energy. Eating fat and protein does very little to raise your insulin level
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