Do You Have To Do Intermittent Fasting On Keto
Definitely not.
But many people have found combining IF and Keto can boost weight loss.
As you probably know, one of the effects of following a Ketogenic diet is that your body will enter a state of ketosis.
In ketosis, your body will be depleted of its glycogen stores. When your body needs energy, and there is no glycogen available, it turns to ketones and fat stores to supply itself with the fuel it needs.
Intermittent Fasting helps to deplete glycogen stores so you can get into ketosis faster and stay there longer. As a result, you can more quickly experience the weight loss and other health-boosting benefits of a ketogenic diet.
Well look at 7 ways IF can boost your health in a moment, but first, let me answer the question thats probably in your head right now
Are They Safe Together
In short, yes, it is safe to do intermittent fasting and keto at the same time. The trick is to make sure you are getting enough nutrition and calories to maintain function while still entering ketosis.
In ketosis, the body is ramped up into fat-burning mode and is feasting on all of those extra stores that accumulate around the body.Keto eliminates unnecessary carbs from the diet, so its easier to get all of your required vitamins, nutrients, proteins, and healthy fats.
The trick is to focus your keto diet to only include the good stuff. So eat lots of lean proteins, red meat, and dark, leafy vegetables.
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Fasting To Induce Ketosis
I already listed the three ways your body may end up in ketosis . The point of the article is to explain how intermittent fasting and ketosis work together to help you achieve your health goals, so I am going to explain how to use fasting to induce ketosis. Before we get to that, I need to explain the stages of intermittent fasting because how fast you move through all the stages will impact how you will be able to use intermittent fasting and ketosis.
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Intermittent Fasting Vs Keto Which Is Better
Now that you understand the basics of both intermittent fasting and keto, its time to determine which is better.
As we discussed in the intro and the last section, both intermittent fasting and keto can help you achieve your weight loss goals. That said, we think that keto is the easier diet to start and maintain for these reasons.
Improved Blood Sugar Control And Insulin Sensitivity
By giving your body an occasional break from calorie consumption, you can also help improve blood sugar levels and enhance the insulin sensitivity of your cells. One clinical trial found that intermittent fasting may even be a better strategy than maintaining the same calorie deficit with six meals per day.
When combined with the keto diet which also has been found to help with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes the two dietary strategies may work synergistically for improving blood sugar control. However, more research is needed on the effects of using them in tandem.
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Who Should Not Fast
Fasting isnt for everyone, especially people who are any of the following:
- Underweight with a BMI of 18.5 or less
- Malnourished
- Hypoglycemic
- Experiencing eating disorders
Note: While intermittent fasting can be quite beneficial for the diabetic, its best to work closely with your healthcare provider to ensure that its implemented in a safe and healthy way.
Intermittent Fasting For Disease States
Recent studies support the use of intermittent fasting as a means of lowering blood glucose in people with diabetes and leading to overall improved health outcomes.
In particular, one study published in the World Journal of Diabetes found that subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus implementing short-term daily IF significantly reduced body weight, fasting glucose and improved post meal glucose variability.
IF has been shown to:
- Improve markers of stress resistance
- Lower inflammation and blood pressure
- Improve glucose circulation and lipid levels, leading to a lower risk for cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders and cancer.
Beyond its application for diabetes management and reducing the risk of other diseases, IF is also proven to be as effective as some approved drugs for reducing some types of seizures and seizure-related brain damage and for addressing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.
Additionally, research is beginning to emerge showing positive effects of alternate day fasting on reducing the toxic effects of chemotherapy and decreasing morbidity rates associated with cancer.
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So What Makes Intermittent Fasting So Appealing
In order to lose weight, you must burn more energy than you bring in. Intermittent fasting is useful in this regard in that there are substantial periods of time where no energy is consumed at all, and the total amount of time spent bringing in energy is cut short. Additionally, since the focus of intermittent fasting is time-based, there are no restrictions on what types of food you can eat as long as you maintain a negative energy balance.
Eat Well Balanced Meals
Along the same lines of well balanced meals, this is ideal for maintaining weight and achieving the best results. Meals packed with high fat and lean protein foods will help you sustain a healthy diet as well as reap maximum benefits. Remember that limiting carb intake is key for the keto diet part. It also helps you achieve ketosis quicker, which encourages excelled fat burning and weight loss.
Well balanced meals full of essential nutrients will also inhibit nutrient deficiencies.
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Youre Not Necessarily Limiting Carb Consumption On An Intermittent Fast
Its not just calories that are hard to restrict when you have a limited eating window such as when intermittent fasting. Its carbs as well.
No type of intermittent fasting diet is concerned with how few carbs you consume, only how few calories. Its the periods of not eating that allow you to burn fat, not the reduced carb load.
You might still lose weight on the intermittent fasting diet, but its not the healthiest choice. A high-carb diet could put you at a higher risk of sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, liver disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gallbladder disease, and cancer.
How Long Should You Intermittent Fast
How long is intermittent fasting sustainable? When it comes to intermittent fasting for beginners, 24 hours or fewer is a safe limit.
Those more experienced with fasting may go 48-72 hours, or even longer however, youll have to experiment and work up to a long fasting window, and stop if it doesnt feel right or keeps you from doing daily tasks.
You can incorporate some form of fasting into your schedule every day, as long as you stay healthy and nourished with the right foods during your eating windows.
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Challenge #: Muscle Maintenance
To build muscle requires resistance training, a caloric surplus, and adequate protein. On keto and fasting regimens, people often fall short on the final two criteria.
Lets zoom in on the protein goal. Along with insufficient electrolytes, insufficient protein is one of the main mistakes folks make on keto. Why? Because people take high-fat to mean a plate full of fat, with some protein on the side. But since fat contains 9 calories a gram, and protein only 4, your plate should actually be centered around protein.
What You Can Do: Bump Up Protein. To gain or maintain muscle, shoot for about 1 gram protein per pound of lean mass.
What You Can Do: Shorter Fasts. Lean towards shorter fasts to ensure adequate calories. These calories provide the raw materials required to build muscle.
Who Should Try An Intermittent Fasting Keto Approach
Anyone who has been on keto for more than two weeks and with the okay from their healthcare team would like to add IF may do so. But the keto diet has become popular for those who have prediabetes or diabetes, though asking these patients not to eat for a significant amount of time can be dangerous, says Kwasnicka. If you have chronic kidney disease, a history of eating disorders, are undergoing active cancer treatment, or are pregnant or breastfeeding, its unlikely youre a good candidate for this combined diet plan. Even the individual diets may not be recommended for these populations. Check with your healthcare team.
Also, if youre currently following the keto diet and are happy and feel good with the way youre eating, you do not have to add in IF, she says.
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/5how Are Keto And Intermittent Fasting Different
While the Ketogenic diet focuses on the intake of low-carb foods and high-fat foods, which is then used as fuel, Intermittent Fasting works by following a time-restrictive eating schedule. Simply put, while the Ketogenic diet emphasizes lowering carbs and using fats as a primary energy source to lose weight, Intermittent Fasting works by moderating your eating patterns, without really restricting anything.
Autophagy: A Nobel Prize Winning Lifestyle Hack
In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering some of the mechanisms of autophagy the process by which the cell devours itself. Superficially, this sounds like a terrible thing for our cells to do until you consider what is really taking place.
When our cells undergo the process of autophagy, non-essential parts like damaged proteins are recycled and invading microorganisms and toxic compounds are removed. This means that autophagy plays an important role in stopping the aging process, reversing disease, and preventing cancer, but it doesnt happen all the time.
Fasting, protein restriction, and carbohydrate restriction are the three main ways that can initiate different autophagic processes all of which are not the same. This is part of the reason why a ketogenic diet has so many positive effects, and it also shows you why intermittent fasting is a way to improve your diet even more.
Though this is reason enough to fast more, autophagy isnt the only upside of intermittent fasting. In fact, the combination of keto and fasting can provide us with a wider array of benefits.
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Keto Vs Intermittent Fasting
The keto diet and intermittent fasting are both effective in weight loss, and other health benefits but they affect the body in a different way.
The keto diet is a high-protein, low-carbohydrate, and fat-rich diet that can be too restrictive for some people. Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that involves alternating periods of not eating with periods of regular food consumption.
Intermittent fasting can be done anywhere from 12 hours to 48 hours and more, which lets you have food every other day or every two days.
The keto diet is more popular for its quick weight loss effects and its ability to maintain energy levels while intermittent fasting provides different long-term health benefits such as lowering cholesterol levels.
In this article we will discuss the difference and similarities between the keto diet and intermittent fasting. And try to find out which is the best option for you.
The Possible Health Benefits Of A Keto Intermittent Fasting Diet
There isnt research on the health effects of doing keto and IF together, but its clear that ketone levels increase when the plans are combined. This may help accelerate weight loss, says Dr. DAgostino. Still, everyone responds differently, so this may not be true across the board, he says.
Shemek has all of her clients use keto or the IF and keto combo. My clients are typically all prediabetic and overweight. Once they see and feel what eating in this way does for them including regulating their blood sugar levels they are able to stay on an IF and keto plan easily. The success of the combined approach reinforces their committment, she says.
One interesting way that low-carb IF diets are being studied outside of weight loss is for cognitive health. Richard Isaacson, MD, director of the Alzheimers Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYorkPresbyterian in New York City, says that doing a low-carb, time-restricted IF may be beneficial for calming down insulin pathways and letting the brain benefit from cleaner burning fuel, which may offer benefits for people with Alzheimers disease.
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Intermittent Fasting And Ketosis Schedule
After looking at the intermittent fasting stages breakdown, you have a general idea of how long it will take you to achieve ketosis without the keto diet. However, I want to give you a few more pointers that will help you come up with hour own intermittent fasting schedule suited for ketosis.
First of all, if you have never been in ketosis before, it may take longer. You may choose to go on the keto diet for 7 days to speed things up. If so, I have a 7-Day Intermittent Fasting Keto Meal Plan that will help you do just that. If you use the meal plan, you will notice that I dont recommend you skip lunch when you are on the keto diet. Thats because the keto diet mimics fasting so you dont need to fast as long. Another thing I want to mention is that if you choose to try the keto diet to become fat-adapted, plan to feel unwell for a few days. I did it myself and even though I was already in ketosis most days through intermittent fasting , I still had the keto flu.
Fasting in definitely a more gentle way to achieve ketosis, but it will take longer.
What To Know Before Combining The Diets For Weight Loss
Before combining these two popular diet trends, you should know a couple of things:
Always start the keto diet first and then combine intermittent fasting with it, otherwise, your body will face difficulty in managing both at the same time.
When you follow these kinds of diet plans, having sickness at the beginning is very common. So, when you start a keto diet, having symptoms like headache, nausea, cramps are all a part of the adapting process, as your body is shifting its fuel source from carbs to fats. And same with fasting, when you decide to merge these two, you should prepare yourself and your body, to go through some changes.
When you start low-carbohydrate diets, you may experience lower blood sugar levels before the body gets orientated with the change, so it is normal to feel more tired and lazy for few days.
This plan is a very healthy way of eating, you just have to reschedule your meals and eating patterns. But people with these issues must consider their respective doctors first
- Pregnant and breastfeeding women
The results of the keto diet can also vary from person to person. Some people may lose weight faster than others, as everyone adapts to it according to their body functioning.
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The Right Way To Start An Intermittent Fasting Keto Diet
At the Cleveland Clinic, practitioners do not advise people to start both keto and IF at the same time. Its a huge shock to your system to switch from glucose as fuel to ketones, and implementing IF is a significant change, says Kwasnicka. For that reason, people would start with keto. After being on the diet for a couple weeks to months, they might consider IF.
Its also important to choose the correct timing. For their patients, Kwasnicka suggests a 12- to 16-hour fast. For many people, not eating 12 hours a day is a natural habit anyway and doesnt require skipping meals.
To start, consider delaying breakfast to get your body accustomed to going longer stretches without eating, suggests Shemek. When youve adjusted to your new eating pattern, reintroduce breakfast earlier in the day and extend your overnight fasting time, as eating breakfast not only leads to better cognition, but also improved metabolism and insulin sensitivity, according to a study published in August 2018 in the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology Metabolism. As for the length of time to stay on keto-IF, she recommends doing keto-IF for no more than six months and then transitioning to a more standard low-carb diet.
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Intermittent Fasting For Better Physical Fitness
Research into the effects of fasting on fitness is early but promising.
In one study, scientists tested the VO2 max levels of a fasted group and a fed group .
Both groups had starting VO2 levels of around 3.5 liters per minute , which is close to standards for regular, untrained individuals. The study participants underwent endurance cycle ergometer training and had the following change in VO2 max:
In short, the fasted group increased their VO2max significantly more than those who were fed breakfast, which equates to a promising result for athletes and people who need aerobic fitness.
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Intermittent Fasting Vs Keto: Which Should You Choose
- Pin
Intermittent fasting and the keto diet are both popular weight loss options that boast plenty of success stories. Some people have seen fantastic results with keto, while others advocate intermittent fasting. Some dieters even do both.
But, when it comes to intermittent fasting vs keto, which approach wins?
Intermittent Fasting And Cancer
Although there is little to no literature on the effects of 2 or 3 day fasts on muscle loss in humans, many clinical trials are currently being conducted on the effects of 2 or 3 day fasts on cancer patients.
In initial case studies, people who were undergoing chemotherapy voluntarily fasted for anywhere between 48 to 140 hours. Each person reported fewer side effects and improved quality of life regardless of how long they fasted.
This may suggest that fasting for 2 days to a week can have a protective effect on the cells in the body while they are undergoing intense bouts of toxicity.
Other studies in animals have found that fasting was possibly as effective as chemotherapeutic agents in delaying the progression of different tumors and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. Although this research may not apply to your life, it does suggest that intermittent fasting can help support your body in times of toxic stress.
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