A good friend of mine read my recent post about my diet and rightly contacted me with some information. I had not expressed myself well I think, and she was making sure I had the right info in case I had missed it. In face I had read the information and taken it into account, but lets touch on it here for a moment.
When you’re body runs out of glucose it obviously turns to stored fat and protein to provide for it’s energy needs, breaking these down to product ketones and supplying them to your essential organs and systems to replace their primary glucose fuel. In short, ketosis is the mechanism your body uses to reclaim the energy stored as fat. It is natural, and it happens often to us to varying degrees in relation to [[wp:lipolysis]].
The intended result of the [[wp:Atkins]] diet is [[wp:ketosis]]. As often used in dietary discussions the word ketosis is simply the state of your metabolism using [[wp:ketones]] as the primary energy transport mechanism instead of [[wp:glucose]]. Such diets are known as [[wp:ketogenic]]. The word ketosis is also the technical term for the production of ketones in any quantity. This is part of the problem, the word is often misused.
In effect I want to make use of the process of ketosis without invoking the state of ketosis. The state of ketosis is, again, a state where my metabolism must use ketones to power my primary and essential organs and systems for survival. This is a typical “famine” state.
Obviously all fat loss is the result of ketone production. Clearly anyone needing to lose weight must induce ketosis as a process to some degree or another. That is not the issue. The issue is how much ketone production is it correct to rely on, and what are the detrimental effects of existing almost exclusively in a state of deep ketosis.
Atkins folks are sometimes encouraged to use urinary test strips to look for the pretence of excess ketones and ketone fragments to ensure that they are in a fairly heavy ketosis. Heavy and deep in this entry mean production so extensive that excess fragments are excreted in the urine.
The problem is that the health effects of prolonged deep ketosis are not widely understood and have not been studied in a way I find conclusive. We must each make out own judgments on it… but the fact is that ketosis is a emergency mechanism your body evolved to handle situations where your diet was lacking in the correct intake of glucose. It is not, in my mind, a healthy state of being for constant and prolonged existence.
My primary concerns about being in a constant state of deep ketosis center around three factors:
- The preferred energy source of the brain, heart and muscles is glucose. While ketones can be used as fuel there is conflicting evidence of its efficiency.
- Ketosis also can seriously deplete amino acids that are otherwise important for other functions.
- Ketosis is fairly indiscriminate. Your body breaks down fat and other protein at a rate that may sometimes approach 50/50.
In my mind then the best compromise is to intake enough carbohydrates and sugars to supply the needs of my brain, heart and other essential functions… but not so many that my body does not need to dip into ketone production to supply discretionary and other energy needs for the large muscles in my body.
According to my information, the state of maximal healthy weight loss could be achieved by taking in enough protein and fat and the lowest amount of carb and sugars over my base requirements to keep me just below a level of ketone production that would show on the test strips.
Basically, the Atkins diet is too extreme for me, and wrongheaded in its single focus on the entry and maintenance of a deep ketosis state and it’s historical disregard for other factors. I will be and am invoking ketone production to lose fat, but I am doing it in a way that I feel protects my essential metabolic processes and is compatible with a simultaneous gain in muscle mass without losing too much amino acid and protein to a deep ketosis.
In my post I mentioned [[wp:ketoacidosis]] as beign a “close cousin” to ketosis, and it is. Extreme and prolonged ketone production results in ketoacidosis, and while it is not something the average healthy person on Atkins will experience I have no intention of going that close to the edge of something without a need. Many people do confuse the two, but I am not one of them ๐
I hoped this helped, and I’ll be talking more about it in the future.