When should I seek help with weight loss?

Weight loss is often a goal in the back of patients’ minds that they either attempt unsuccessfully or are in the process of trying to achieve. However, doing it by yourself may not be as simple as it seems. 

If you’re overweight or obese and have tried to lose weight without adequate or lasting results, the team at Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine can give you a monitored plan that works. 

What are the benefits of weight loss?

As you’ve likely heard from medical professionals in the past, losing weight benefits your health and wellness in numerous ways. Dropping some pounds can significantly lower your risk of:

• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Heart disease
• Stroke
• Joint pain
• Back pain
• Certain types of cancer
• Diabetes
• Depression and anxiety

Additionally, if you already have diabetes, losing weight can help lower your risk of developing complications related to your condition. In fact, following the keto diet as directed by your doctor can help lower your blood sugar levels and reduce your need for insulin.

What are the dietary options for my weight loss plan?

The team at Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine specializes in two types of dieting that similarly help you reduce your intake of carbs. 

While carbs aren’t bad by themselves, your diet may contain many more of them than your body needs. Cutting down on them with one of these diet plans helps speed your metabolism, boost your energy, and even improves your sleep.

Your physician helps you choose between:

Paleo

The paleo diet allows you to continue eating carbs but limits the types of carbs you eat, to complex carbs. The idea with the paleo diet is to eat the types of foods eaten by your ancestors, in other words, real food and limiting refined carbs typical of the Standard American Diet (SAD). 

A nice way to visualize the difference between complex and refined carbs is to think about your stomach which is a bowl of hydrochloric acid that breaks down carbs into glucose. If you put your favorite cereal into a bowl of milk and come back five minutes later what has happened to your cereal? It’s become soggy. Now imagine putting that same cereal into a bowl of acid? What would happen to the cereal? Your cereal would dissolve into a big pile of glucose (sugar). 

Now imagine putting a complex carb, for example, a vegetable, into the bowl of acid. It will still break down but this will happen slowly over many hours. When your stomach processes carbs quickly like with cereal, sugar levels rise quickly which makes the pancreas overwork producing the insulin required to get the sugar out of the bloodstream. 

This leads to pancreatic exhaustion and eventually diabetes. It also causes you to gain weight as high levels of insulin cause fat to be stored rather than burned. Paleo is a great diet for all human beings (or mammals for that matter). On the diet, you’re free to eat everything that humans ate until recently such as meat, eggs, nuts, seasonal fruits, vegetables, oils, and fats. With this choice, you will lose weight gradually, with more energy and less hunger than you currently have to owe to the interaction of insulin with other hormones. 

Keto

The ketogenic diet, shortened to keto, induces a metabolic state called “nutritional ketosis” whereby your body creates energy from fat instead of carbohydrates. It is similar to Paleo but limits the sugar and insulin spikes even further. While following the diet, you minimize your carbohydrate consumption more strictly than with Paleo to just 5-10% of your total diet. 

Keto is an excellent diet and is particularly effective for patients with diabetes who need to minimize their blood sugar or for patients who need to lose a lot of weight quickly (and safely). People who utilize the keto diet usually notice that their hunger signals drop drastically. 

All those carb cravings? Gone on a keto diet. If you’re interested in changing your habits to lose weight and improve your health, call Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine or request a consultation appointment online today.

If you’re interested in changing your habits to lose weight and improve your health, call Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine or request a consultation appointment online today.

Keto Q & A

What is keto?

Keto is a popular diet plan that many men and women use to improve their metabolism and lose weight. The objective of following a keto diet is to reach a metabolic state called ketosis by significantly reducing the number of carbohydrates that you eat. 

In this state, your body can no longer derive energy from the carbs you get from your diet. Instead, it starts breaking down your stored fat into molecules called ketones that your cells can use for energy.

What foods should I avoid while following keto?

Overall, you should avoid carbohydrates to the best of your ability while following a ketogenic diet. This can be hard to follow at first, especially considering the fact that the average American diet consists of about 50% carbohydrates. However, research shows that a diet of this type contains too many carbs. This is why the keto diet is successful in helping you lose weight.

Carb-heavy foods to avoid while following the keto diet include:

• Bread
• Pasta
• Rice
• Potatoes
• Beans
• Soda
• Fruits and fruit juice
• Cake
• Pie
• Ice cream
• Candy
• Alcohol

When helping you start on the keto diet, your provider at Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine gives you a comprehensive list of the food to avoid and food that is fair game. A keto-friendly diet consists of mostly protein, like meat and nuts, and fat, like avocados and dairy. Your provider may recommend some helpful supplements, too.

What are the health benefits of the keto diet?

Continued research shows that keto provides numerous benefits for your health. Commonly reported benefits of the keto diet include:

• Weight loss
• Improved brain energy
• Clearer skin
• Reduced risk of heart disease
• Improvement of neurological conditions (e.g., epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease)

The keto diet may also improve allergies and result in better sleep.

A key reason why so many people report feeling better and even improving their chronic conditions with a keto diet is that reducing your carb intake overwhelmingly lowers your blood sugar levels. For this reason, many patients with type 2 diabetes see an immense improvement and may be able to lower their medication dosages.

Is the keto diet good for everyone?

Keto successfully helps many people reach their goal weight without restricting the amount of food they eat. However, it isn’t the best dietary option for everyone, and you should speak with the team at Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine before attempting it to make sure that it is the best option for your health.

If you have questions about the keto diet and are interested in trying it, call or click to book a consultation at Genesis Orthopaedic and Spine today.