Ketogenic Principle

KETOGENIC PROGRAM

How Do I Put This into Practice?

1. First off determine your basic calorie needs, our nutrition calculator will give you a good idea of your maintenance calorie level. Use this as your initial target calorie level. This will typically be around 12 times your body weight in pounds.
For example, if your body weight is 200 lb's and you lead a sedentary lifestyle, your daily calorie total would be 2000 calories per day.

2. Follow the standard athletes diet for eating frequency and number of meals, although you must not use the standard meal suggestions as they are far too high in carbohydrates. Exceptions will be highlighted below. In summary this is that you should eat 6 meals per day, every 2-3 hours. Each meal should be a mix of protein and fats with almost zero carbohydrates.

3. You should aim to get around 40% of your daily calories from protein (at least 1g per pound of bodyweight, and this can be higher if you want). You can take up to 40gm of carbohydrates per day, and the rest should come from fats.

4. During the first 7 days of this diet you need to take carbohydrates down to 20g per day. This is chronically low, it will leave you feeling very tired and struggling to train. Many people also suffer headaches during this period, and for some, this continues into the second week.
After 7 days, you can increase carbohydrate level to 40g per day, which is still very low. It will take your body around 14 days to start to fully metabolise ketones as an energy source, and during this period, your energy levels will remain low.

5. It is recommended that you eat mostly oily fish, lean meats and protein powders. Carbohydrates should come from low sugar fruits and low carbohydrate vegetables such as green leafy vegetables, like cabbage, spinach, broccoli and lettuce.
You should also aim to take a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, flax oil and a few GLA tablets. Because of the low fibre nature of this diet, you may also want to take a liquid fibre supplement available from a chemist. This will add bulk to your diet and will offset some of the unpleasant side effects that can accompany a high fat diet.

Also, when choosing a protein supplement you need to select a pure whey isolate, these contain less than 1g of fats and carbohydrates per 100g unlike whey concentrate which may contain up to 20g of carbs per 100g.

6. Cardio training will be of benefit during this program, however it may not be practical in the first 2 weeks whilst energy levels are low.
There is often a temptation to take most of the days carbs immediately prior to training in the form of a glucose drink. Resist this urge, it detracts from the purpose of the program, which is to encourage the body to use fats, via ketones, as an energy source for exercise.

7. You should re-establish your calorie needs every month on this program, although most people find that they lose weight consistently without much calorie counting as high fat/protein diets tend to naturally curb appetite.

Click here to learn a greater depth of information about this program