Thinking about keto? You’ve probably heard about some of the amazing results people have gotten from the keto diet, or seen it for yourself in a family member, friend, or coworker.
Keto is a low-carb diet that’s particularly helpful for people who are trying to lose weight or improve their metabolic health. It can help you burn stored fat, improve your blood sugar levels, and get your appetite under control. Keto may even offer some brain health benefits, too.
In this guide, we’ll share what you need to know about the keto diet for beginners — including what to eat and what to avoid, how to get started, and a three-day sample keto diet plan.
What Is the Ketogenic Diet?
Keto is a low-carb, high-fat, and moderate-protein eating pattern. Carbs, fat, and protein are micronutrients, or the components of food that provide calories. Generally, most people on keto aim for this macro breakdown:
- Carbs: 5% of calories or less
- Protein: 20-25% of calories
- Fat: 70-75% of calories
For many people, this works out to about 25-50 grams of carbs per day.
Carbs — things like bread, pasta, potatoes, sugary sodas, and even fruit — break down in the body into sugars and have a large impact on your blood sugar levels.
Although protein and fat can also affect your blood sugar levels, they have much less impact than carbs.
By drastically reducing your carb intake on keto, you’re able to enter a metabolic state known as ketosis. You can read more about ketosis and its benefits just below.
How Does the Ketogenic Diet Work?
The keto diet works by allowing your body to shift into a state called ketosis.
Although the body normally burns carbs for energy, in ketosis it burns fat as its primary energy source instead.
In ketosis, your body is able to use dietary fat or stored body fat for fuel.
Additionally, the keto diet may help reduce appetite and preserve lean muscle mass. This makes keto particularly helpful if weight loss is your goal.
Different Types of Ketogenic Diet
There are several different types of ketogenic diets, and they all may offer different benefits or be a better fit for certain people. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Standard: This is a regular keto diet, where you’re sticking to the same macro pattern each day and likely tracking your food intake.
- Clean: On this ketogenic diet, you’re sticking to low-carb, high-fat macro patterns, but choosing high-quality, organic foods and avoiding highly processed foods. Most people on clean keto avoid fast food, packaged snacks, artificial sweeteners, and seed oils like corn oil and soybean oil.
- Dirty: Dirty keto refers to a keto diet that is solely based on hitting your macro goals, regardless of food quality. A dirty keto diet may include things like fast food, diet soda, artificial sweeteners, and seed oils.
- Lazy: “Lazy keto” means that you’re following a keto diet without tracking your intake. This may be a good fit for you if you dislike measuring portions or tracking, but it’s easy to eat too many carbs or calories on lazy keto — which could be a problem if weight loss is your goal.
- High-Protein Keto: High protein keto is a higher-protein version of the keto diet, with 30-35% or more calories from protein (and less from fat). Protein can be very helpful for weight loss, so high-protein keto may be a good option if you’re trying to lose weight.
- Cyclical Keto: On cyclical keto, you follow a higher-carb diet on certain days and stick to a strict keto diet on other days. This may be particularly useful for people who have training days (during which they can eat higher carb), as well as women who want to adjust their macro intake throughout their monthly cycle for hormonal balance.
- Targeted: Targeted keto is similar to cyclical keto, but instead of adding carbs only on certain days you will add pre-workout carbs before all of your workouts. These carbs are burned up during your workout, so it’s easier to stay in ketosis (but the carbs provide an added energy and performance boost). Targeted keto is a good fit for active people.
There can be some overlap between these types, too. For instance, you may choose to follow a clean, lazy, cyclical keto diet — which just means that you choose minimally processed foods, don’t track your macros, and eat more carbs on certain days.
Potential Health Benefits of the Ketogenic Diet
The major keto diet benefits are weight loss, brain health, and blood sugar control. Keto can be profoundly anti-inflammatory, and this anti-inflammatory effect is thought to be a major cause of the many benefits of the diet.
For this reason, ketogenic diets are a hot topic in the research world, and many emerging studies have found evidence to support these benefits. You can find thousands of positive stories about drastically improved health from keto online, too.
Weight Loss
Many people try keto because they want to lose weight. A quick online search will bring up thousands — if not tens of thousands — of success stories from people who have met their weight loss goals using the keto diet.
There are a few research-backed reasons that keto is great for people trying to lose weight, too:
- Fat loss: In ketosis, your body is primed to burn fat rather than carbs — so it may be easier to burn your stored body fat.
- Muscle sparing: Keto diets may also prevent muscle loss while you’re losing weight. This helps preserve your metabolic rate, so you’re still burning the same amount of calories while your weight decreases.
- Reduced appetite: Fat and protein are very filling, and many people report that their appetite is much better controlled on keto than when they are eating high-carb foods.
- Better blood sugar control: Finally, keto diets may help to stabilize your blood sugar — which could help regulate your appetite and reduce carb cravings.
Brain Function
Ketogenic diets have long been used effectively to help treat drug-resistant epilepsy in children.
Although research is still ongoing, ketosis appears to be very helpful for other aspects of brain function, too — especially for certain conditions.
Researchers have found that, in addition to epilepsy and other seizure disorders, following a keto diet may also be helpful for mood disorders like depression, mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and cognitive decline.
Blood Sugar Control
Many people also try keto to help with blood sugar control. Online, you can find many stories of people who have reversed their type 2 diabetes or reached a point where they no longer need insulin or blood sugar-lowering medications thanks to keto.
Additionally, research shows that ketogenic diets can help improve blood sugar levels and insulin resistance.
Keto may be useful for type 2 diabetes, along with other conditions related to insulin resistance and blood sugar control — like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and metabolic syndrome.
