I am training for NYC in November and have been strictly working toward ketosis for a little over a month and am finding trouble registering ketones. I did well in the beginning with the 5:20:75 ratio but my caloric intake was pretty low. I didnt feel exceptionally bad but was urged to increase calories by close friends and experienced runners. Now my BF is increasing and I am even more confused. How might I adapt my keto diet for running 3-6 miles a day with long runs once a week? Is it increased fat? Protein? I cant figure it out. Any help is appreciated.
Can't Catch Ketosis
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#2
To get into nutritional ketosis, the primary requirement is to keep carbohydrate low enough to avoid stimulating the pancreas to secrete insulin. For most people, keeping carbs under 20 g/day will do that.
We cannot do without some protein every day, even though it stimulates insulin secretion. So a moderate amount, somewhere in the neighborhood of a gram per kilogram of lean body mass per day, is enough to meet our needs without stimulating insulin secretion excessively.
So where do we get most of our calories? From fat—both the fat in our diet, and the excess fat, if any, stored in our adipose tissue. Fat hardly stimulates any insulin secretion at all. This is why we recommend eating fat to satiety. We need to replace the calories we are not getting anymore from carbohydrate, and we need to be giving the body enough energy in order to heal and to feel comfortable parting with any excess fat it may have been holding onto.
In the beginning, eating fat to satiety can feel like an awful lot of food, but trust your body. Its satiety signaling, which was disrupted by all the carbohydrate we were eating, usually fixes itself in a few weeks, and our appetite comes down to a level of food intake that allows the body to use both the fat we eat and our extra stored fat as fuel.
The goal of nutritional ketosis on a well-formulated ketogenic diet is to adapt the body to using fat as its primary fuel source. We usually enter ketosis very quickly, but fat-adaptation usually takes a couple of months. The mitochondria in your cells have to re-tool to make use of the fat-burning metabolic pathway, because they’ve been so focused on getting glucose out of your bloodstream. During the adaptation phase, you will probably find your endurance taking a hit, but it will come back once you are fully fat-adapted.
Women who have eaten a calorie-restricted diet for any length of time often find that their body takes a while to normalize hormones and to start burning off excess fat. The key to this process, once you have lowered your carbohydrate intake, is to stop restricting calories and eat fat to satiety. Once assured of an abundance of energy, the body ramps up the metabolism and looses its death-grip on the fat stored in the adipose tissue. At that point, excess fat starts to be metabolized. A calorie-restricted diet, on the other hand, prevents all this from happening. In the beginning, eating fat to satiety can feel like an awful lot of food, but trust your body. Its satiety signaling, which was disrupted by all the carbohydrate we were eating, usually fixes itself in a few weeks, and our appetite comes down to a level of food intake that allows the body to use both the fat we eat and our extra stored fat as fuel.
Furthermore, your body may decide to add lean muscle and increase your bone density, which will confuse your scale. Women in particular are well-advised to ignore their weight and concentrate on their clothing size as an indicator of progress.