Thankfully, there is an alternative to using blood sugar for cellular energy. You can use fat. Now this flies in the face of all the health guidance you probably have heard throughout the years. I remember, since I was a kid hearing again and again, that fat is evil and saturated fat is bad for you. That's all I heard.
Health authorities and advisory boards were saying that I should load up on mashed potatoes, rice, vegetables, fruits, so on and so forth. It turns out that it's the other way around.
The real health emergency in America and elsewhere is the high amount of sugar (read:carbohydrates) in our diets. It's the sugar that's making us sick. It's the sugar that is inflaming us. It's the sugar that is positioning us to developing certain types of cancer later on. Who knew?
The ketosis alternative
If your body doesn't use sugar for energy, its only other alternative is to use fat. Your liver metabolizes fat in the form of ketones. These biochemical compounds are absorbed by your cells and transformed into energy.
Ketosis explained
Ketosis refers to the biochemical process your body goes through when it starts burning fat for energy. Normally, your body burns sugar in your bloodstream as well as the sugar stored in your liver and muscles. Worst comes to worst, your body would turn protein into sugar courtesy of your liver.
When you burn fat for energy, your pancreas does not release insulin since there is no sugar involved. This means that you feel fuller longer. You're no longer eating throughout the day like you would if you were on a standard carbohydrate rich diet.
The reason why a lot of people gain weight is because they can't stop eating throughout the day. This is due to the fact that their insulin peaks and crashes several times during the day. These peaks and crashes trigger your brain to feel hungry. Your body starts sending out hunger signals and you can't help but eat.
Obviously, the more calories you eat and the less calories you burn or if you burn calories at the same rate as you normally do, you end up storing those excess calories into fat. You let go of all of that when you switch over to fact. Your body burns fat instead of sugar, so you feel fuller for a longer period of time.
No, you’re not going to die with ketosis!
One of the most common misconceptions about going on a keto diet is that you end up polluting your blood with ketone bodies to the point that you die. This is a myth. Usually, the people who develop this condition called ketoacidosis are people who cannot naturally produce insulin.
In other words, people most prone to keotacidosis are type 1 diabetics. There's a good chance you're not a type 1 diabetic. Most people aren't. This is why you shouldn't worry about developing ketoacidosis because at some level, your body is still producing insulin. It really can't go completely off insulin.