Keto diet

Why Does Ketosis Work?

Ketosis is the reversal of the biologic pathways that are involved in obesity. You’ll remember that insulin was there to convert all your excess carbohydrate into your body stores of fat. As you gained more weight, your pancreas released more insulin to carry out this process.

Most obese people become so adept at releasing insulin that their blood is never really free of it, and, even at night, when weight loss most naturally occurs, they’re still not

The Secret of a Ketogenic Diet

able to use up their fat stores. In a normally functioning body, fatty acids and ketones are readily liberated from adipose tissue and converted into fuel during those hours. But the overweight subject is overweight because the high insulin levels prevent this from happening to him or her or to you.
Now, with very little carbohydrate in your diet, your insulin levels will become normal perhaps for the first time in years or decades.

Back in 1971, Drs. Neil Grey and David Kipnis convincingly demonstrated that insulin levels drop as carbohydrate intake is lowered. When carbohydrate drops to ketogenic levels, an abnormality in insulin can no longer be detected. Numerous studies over the past two decades have reconfirmed the insulin levels drop on ketogenic diets.2

In ketosis, you bum the fat placed in storage by insulin when the obesity cycle began, and this fat powers your brain and your other vital  organs.

The reason that BDK can take place so smoothly, if you know the “secret” to unlock its latent power, is that your body elaborates specific substances to sustain and facilitate the process. Back in 1960, three English researchers, Dr. T. M. Chalmers, Professor Alan Kekwick, and Dr. G. L. S. Pawan, whom I’ll be telling you about in the next chapter, isolated the most significant of these, a Fat Mobilizing Substance (FMS), from the urine of animals and humans who went on ketogenic diets containing virtually no carbohydrates.3 When they injected that urinary fraction into nondieting animals and humans, the recipients lost weight without dieting. Subsequently, other researchers discovered other substances that have similar effects, and a class of compounds called lipid mobilizers was identified.

Presumably what happens is that in the absence of carbo hydrates to fuel the body, a signal is sent out to release a symphony of lipid mobilizers. The burning of stored fat in the absence of dietary carbohydrate is a natural mechanism of our bodies it’s what sustains hibernating animals and our bodies provide natural messenger substances to ensure that the process of fat mobilization, heralded by ketosis, takes place smoothly and is self sustaining. For you, this is a sort of biologic utopia. Once you reach a state where fat mobilization is supported by blood borne enabling substances, the process of losing weight becomes as painless and hun ger free as “eating naturally” was in the days when you were gaining weight.