Aren’t we all looking for an easy way when it comes to reducing weight? Why wait for months for the best results if you can have them sooner? Well, now you can!
You’ve probably heard about the keto diet. And you might have wondered how you can also get the impossible weight loss results you’ve seen plastered all over social media.
As with any weight-loss approach, the keto diet is not without its challenges.
That said, these five keto hacks can help increase your initial results and support sustainable fat burning and weight loss. So, whether you are new at keto or already a keto lifer, these hacks might be the variation you are looking for.
Skip to section.
Set Realistic Weight Loss Goals
One thing that causes dieting to be more difficult than it has to be is setting unrealistic expectations. When exploring the keto diet, you’ll see incredible changes that fill you with hope and inspiration.
You don’t see the efforts, procedures, and subtle changes behind the seemingly miraculous results. Almost everything you read about the diet shows that keto causes rapid fat loss, so this must indicate you are doing something wrong.
- Is it hidden net carbs?
- Should I eat more fat?
- Do I need to buy ketone supplements?
- Should I be in higher levels of ketosis?
If your main goal is to lose weight and keep it off, the answer to these questions is nearly always going to be “no.” Pursuing these smaller keto diet pieces before setting a sustainable dietary approach will only lead to confusion and disappointment.
This is why the initial weight-loss hack is to get more realistic, not strict.
Here are some recommendations that will help you implement this helpful hack:
- Compare your current self to your past self, not others. Although it can be motivating to see incredible keto results, this can also serve unrealistic expectations. Instead of relying on inspiration and willpower to get you through the diet, concentrate on setting up your lifestyle, environment, and habits in a way that creates weight loss naturally.
- Slow and steady accomplish the weight loss maintenance marathon. When we push our bodies into faster fat loss, our results become much harder to sustain in the long run. A healthier, sustainable, and more realistic goal to direct for is 1 to 2 pounds of weight loss per week.
- Track your progress regularly, but not too often. Your weight will naturally alter from day to day. To get a more realistic picture of your weight loss rate, track your weight and waist circumference every 1 to 2 weeks. If your results aren’t going in the right direction after a month (as shown by a decrease in weight and waist circumference), focus on adjusting your food consumption. Losing weight too fast? Have slightly bigger portions or include a keto snack to your day. Are you losing weight too slowly? Try reducing your calorie intake.
Does this indicate you have to track calories? No, not necessarily. Many tools can help you drop weight and keep it off, and tracking calories is just one of them. If calculating your food and quantifying everything that passes your mouth is still not sustainable, focus on achieving the other four keto diet hacks.
Keep Keto Simple
There are hundreds of methods to approach weight loss. And they all work by following one fundamental principle: maintaining a calorie deficit causes fat loss.
The keto diet is one way of achieving this. But if you find it restrictive and doesn’t bring you results for some reason, then it might not be the answer.
The best weight loss plan is healthy and sustainable for you, and adding more limitations to your diet is usually not the answer.
We suggest keeping it as straightforward as possible for those of you who want to give keto a try. For example, bypassing high-carb food, eating low-carb food, and eliminating processed food can lead to accelerated fat loss.
Following more complex keto-related elements like ketone levels and net carbs can be helpful. However, it is not essential for most people.
Making your diet more complex will only reduce the likelihood that you will stay on it for the long-term.
Begin with simple food rules that you can quickly complete and sustain. To get started with your low-carb keto lifestyle, use this food list to keep you guided:
Avoid These Foods
- Grains – Wheat, corn, rice, cereal, etc.
- Sugar – honey, agave, maple syrup, etc.
- Fruit – apples, bananas, oranges, etc.
- Tubers – potato, yams, etc.
Eat These Foods
- Meats – fish, beef, lamb, poultry, eggs, etc.
- Low-carb vegetables – broccoli, kale, spinach, and other low carb veggies
- High-fat dairy – high fat cream, butter, hard cheeses, etc.
- Nuts and seeds – sunflower seeds, walnuts, macadamias, etc.
- Avocado and berries – blackberries, raspberries, and other low glycemic impact berries
- Sweeteners – monk fruit, erythritol, stevia, erythritol, and other low-carb sweeteners
- Other fats – saturated fats, high-fat salad dressing, coconut oil, etc.
This simple food list may be all you need to begin losing weight simply and efficiently.
Even with the help of simple diet rules, however, we all finally fall back to what is accessible, painless, and pleasure-filled. This is where the next two keto hacks take over to help get your keto weight loss journey as easy and painless as possible.
Make it Easier for Your Body to Adapt to Keto
The first speed crash on the way to weight loss for many keto dieters is the keto flu.
Simply put, consuming carbs less than 50 grams per day can lead to hormonal shifts and rapid water weight loss. But this could also mean that you’re losing essential electrolytes.
These changes can create flu-like symptoms that shift your weight loss dreams into a keto nightmare.
Fortunately, you can remedy many of these symptoms by drinking more water and consuming sodium, potassium, and magnesium. If the symptoms persist, you might want to look for other ways to implement the keto diet.
Here are some keto hacks that will make transitioning to ketosis much more comfortable:
- Add MCTs to your diet. Researches have shown that fatty acids called medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs) help boost ketone levels. It also lessens the time it takes to get into ketosis and decrease keto flu symptoms. Add 1-2 tablespoons of MCT oil or MCT powder to your morning coffee or tea for added energy and ketone advance. Begin at lower doses and slowly work your way up if MCTs produce some stomach discomfort.
- Harness the power of caffeine. Whether you booze caffeinated coffee or tea, caffeine will help stimulate ketone composition and make keto dieting a lot easier. Try adding MCTs to your caffeinated drink for an added energy boost that will also help suppress your appetite.
- Try intermittent fasting. Not only can intermittent fasting support weight loss and keep it off, but it can also help raise ketone production as well. Whenever we work for long periods without food, our bodies naturally raise ketone levels to meet some of our energy needs. This implies that we can help drive our bodies into ketosis more quickly by skipping a meal or two.
- Increase your physical activity levels. All types of exercise can help improve ketone production in different approaches while on the keto diet. Low-intensity exercises like walking and yoga can help boost fat burning and give your liver more ketone building blocks. In contrast, moderate-to-high-intensity exercises help drain glycogen more quickly. It also enhances your body’s need to produce ketones. In other words, no matter what style of physical activity you add to your life, it will help you adjust to the keto diet more quickly.
To make your transition to keto as smooth as possible, try combining intermittent fasting, caffeine, MCTs, and exercise. Each one will help you in your struggles to lose weight and keep it off as well.
Use Sustainable Strategies that Help You Achieve and Maintain Weight Loss Results
Willpower, motivation, and a limiting diet may help you modify your body, but they will not help you keep your results. Your lifestyle and food environment will conquer out in the long run.
To make weight loss easier to reach and maintain, we must focus on changing our lifestyle and environment to feed our results. This will help reduce some of the internal struggles that most of us encounter when following a new diet.
Meanwhile, it increases the likelihood that we will make healthier decisions when tired, stressed, or lack discipline.
Before we take a glance at our food environment, let’s examine some simple strategies you can use to make weight loss come naturally:
- Follow simple diet rules. The best diet for you will be one with rules to follow with your current practices and lifestyle. The keto diet, for example, demands you to limit carbs to a level that helps you sustain nutritional ketosis. This is a simple diet practice that is easier to follow for some and almost impossible for others. If the keto diet’s “rules” are not applicable in any way for you, then you may need to follow a distinct set of rules that help you lose weight. Perhaps, eating fewer carbs or excluding most processed foods from your diet may be a more efficient rule for you to follow if keto is not feasible.
- Skip a meal or two (intermittent fasting). By consuming all your calories in a smaller time window (i.e., 8 hours instead of 12 hours), you will naturally eat less food and lose weight without feeling like you are limited. You can implement this approach by skipping breakfast each day or sticking to particular fasting and eating time windows.
- Track protein, fat, carb, and calorie consumption. Tracking what you eat can help you determine how much you are eating and how it alters weight loss or weight gain. After a few months of using this process, you will acquire a sixth sense for calorie intake. Doing so will help you make healthier choices without having to measure everything you eat.
- Use caffeine and MCTs to suppress appetite and keep energy levels up. Both caffeine and MCTs have been found to boost ketone levels and subdue appetite. Many people will blend coffee, MCTs, and intermittent fasting to help them lose weight without worrying about how much they are eating.
- Change your food environment. Your surroundings are continually nudging to make individual decisions. Just seeing a tasty, unhealthy food for a second can trigger cravings that are almost difficult to resist when stressed, tired, or hungry. This is partly why taking command of your food environment is one of the best ways to prevent yourself from overeating and gaining weight. We will take a more in-depth look at how you can do this in the next section.
- Plan for the worst. In your future, there will be several potential roadblocks. Birthday parties, holiday parties, vacations, business trips, etc. will all present you with difficulties that can derail your progress. If you do not have a strategy for these potential deviations, your emotional brain will likely take over and convince you to take advantage of the free food and goodies.
- Exercise regularly. An interesting conclusion from the long-term weight loss study is that the people who regain the least weight usually exercise regularly. This doesn’t indicate that exercising causes long-term weight loss, but it can help indirectly in many different forms. Ideally, try lifting weights 2-3 times a week. Then, raise your activity level throughout the week by going for walks, cycling, hiking, or playing sports. This is the simplest technique to get the most out of your exercise regimen.
Each one of these procedures can help make weight loss much more comfortable to achieve and maintain.
You do not have to perform all of these to be successful. Focus instead on finding two or three approaches that you can easily add to your life for the foreseeable future.
This may take some trial and error, so give one or two of these procedures a try. If an option is not efficient for you in any way, then try another suggestion from this list.
Create an Environment that Feeds Your Results, Not Your Fat Cells
Eating is one of the most emotionally charged conditions we do. If we didn’t capitalize on the possibility of having more calories in our paleolithic past, we would no longer exist.
This tremendous emotional response to good calories is ready to be triggered at any moment by what we see, smell, think and feel. These triggers will then create an internal struggle that makes dieting so difficult.
A part of your brain would want to satisfy a specific craving, while your rational mind knows that it is not permitted on your diet. When we first commence any diet, we have plenty of motivation and willpower to say “no” to that craving, so our rational brain typically wins the battle.
However, we will not always be in a motivated, strong-willed, or disciplined state of mind. In these notes, cravings will be impossible, and we will eventually give in.
This is one of the primary mechanisms behind weight regain. What happens is that we get to follow our new regimen, only to give in eventually because of some triggers. Our conscious mind may win some battles initially, but our emotional mind will typically win the war.
One of the best ways to approach this common issue is to change your food environment. That way, it influences you to make better choices instead of unhealthy ones.
This weight-loss hack will eliminate the triggers that can lead to inner struggles between your emotional and rational minds. You might be surprised that both parts of your brain are working together, putting your weight loss results on autopilot.
Final Thoughts
You aim to get your body to ketosis, in which it turns over from glucose to fat as your fuel source. The change can be rough, though, leaving you tired, uncomfortable, and downright miserable.
Since you’ll feel like a mess physically, you might get worried or demotivated to stick to your keto diet. You don’t want that.
Prepare yourself for the physical and mental symptoms you could feel, and it’ll help drive through the lows so you can reach the highs.
First, use test strips to determine if you are even in ketosis.
Second, have electrolytes on hand to replace the ones being flushed out of your body.
Third, your body may respond to these changes with some technical issues in the backend (i.e., constipation or diarrhea). You may need some fiber supplements.
Despite whatever symptoms you hit, make sure you drink PLENTY of water.
As much as you want those keto diet weight loss results, don’t obsess and get so caught up in the diet that you forget about what really matters. This includes your health and happiness.
Getting some exercise, fresh air, peace of mind, and spending time with people you love will help make you happier and more likely to hold to your diet.
The ketogenic diet, like any diet, can be difficult for beginners. But with these keto hacks, you’re sure to set yourself up to obtain better results than if you go about it without the right purpose. Good luck!