Keto Lite Diet

Everyone worries about their weight, at least a little. For some, the need is to gain weight, while for others, maintenance is the goal. However, for many, weight loss could prove a healthy change.

There is always a new fad diet in the pursuit of weight loss, and the one that seems to get the most buzz in recent memory is the keto diet. Everyone has heard of it, but the keto diet is an overly restrictive take on eating for those who don’t have a firm idea. Many people find that they cannot maintain a keto diet for long periods since the limits are too harsh.

In light of that, keto diet variants have started to emerge, and a popular diet among them is Keto Lite. The name already says a lot, but we’re going to cover it in detail. You can learn all about Keto Lite and the science powering it to determine whether it is something you should be considering.

Overview of the Keto Lite Diet

So, what is the Keto Lite diet? The name sounds familiar, and that is because you have undoubtedly heard of the keto diet. A keto diet is based on the idea of dramatically cutting carbohydrate intake and supplementing it with much higher fat consumption. This inversion of a typical diet has been shown to help with weight loss and reducing body fat.

Keto Lite, as the name suggests, is a less-extreme version of the concept. The general idea is to cut carb consumption roughly in half. Since those calories have to be replaced, increased fat consumption is used to compensate. In essence, Keto Lite is a lower-carb, high-fat diet.

Contrary to previously-believed theories, this idea of a diet has helped with weight loss in sustainable and healthy ways. Of course, every diet has its trade-offs, and Keto Lite will not prove to be for everyone.

As you keep reading, you will see how Keto Lite compares to traditional keto diets and what makes them different. You will also see the pros and cons of both of these types of diets. Lastly, you will see how to try the Keto Lite diet and gauge how it impacts your body.

How Keto Lite Differs From Traditional Keto Diets

Based on the overview, Keto Lite sounds a whole lot like keto. Cut carbs to lose weight, right? If we take a more detailed look, the differences between the two diets become clear and stark.

The source of differences between Keto Lite and keto is the ratio of foods that you consume. Keto Lite allows for significantly more carbohydrates in your daily diet. We’ll get into the numbers in a moment, but this means that the two diets work in substantially different ways on a physiological level.

Keto Lite is not a derivation of keto. Instead, it borrows from the name of the popular diet to let newcomers know right away that the emphasis of the diet is cutting carbs.
That is about where the similarities end, and to understand this deeply; we can first look at the mechanisms of the diets and how they help with weight loss. That means we have to get into detail regarding ketosis.

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What Is Ketosis?

The keto diet was initially developed for patients with specific dietary needs. Medical conditions made it hard for them to process carbohydrates, so doctors and nutritionists came up with a high-fat diet.

What the experts noticed was that keto patients lost weight and body fat at a surprising rate. They tried it with people who didn’t have the same dietary needs, and the diet proved useful for general weight loss.

The reason for the weight-loss boils down to the concept of ketosis. This is something that happens to your body under certain conditions. Typically, your body wants to maintain a specific sugar level in the blood.

This sugar is used to make energy for cells all over your body. If you cut sources of sugar, your body has to adapt to fuel the cells. That adaptation is called ketosis.

Ketosis is the result of taking simple sugars and carbohydrates out of your diet. In other words, you eat a lot of fat, moderate amounts of protein, but very little sugar or carbs. For reference, a traditional keto diet only allows two percent of your calories to come from sugars and carbs.

When that happens, your body is forced to metabolize muscle and fat to fuel the cells. This very shift is known as ketosis, and as soon as your blood sugar level crosses a threshold, your body will leave the ketosis state.

The Hard Keto Diet

Focusing on a diet that induces ketosis is difficult, and it’s common for newcomers to drop the diet very quickly. When 90 percent of your food comes from fats, your body has to make significant adjustments.

Your meals will feel heavy and may be difficult to digest at first, which can make you feel sluggish. It can change your hormone levels as well. If you cheat at all on the sugars and carbs, all of that extra fat makes you gain weight and ruins the diet.
In other words, there are many downsides.

Despite those downsides, millions of people have found success with a keto diet. Ketosis is a real thing, and when leveraged correctly, it can help with weight loss. A typical keto diet consists of 90% fat, 8% protein, and 2% carbs and sugars. To put that in perspective, a regular diet will be closer to 35% fat, 15% protein, and 49% carbs.

The most important thing about the keto diet is maintaining it. Any time your body drops out of ketosis, the diet is working against you. That said, a proper keto diet is not indefinite. Usually, results are seen within four weeks, and it is common to ditch the keto diet after a few months, although some people do maintain it indefinitely.

Keto Lite Requirements

Although Keto Lite takes elements of the keto diet, the two are fundamentally different. With a Keto Lite diet, the goal is not to enter ketosis. Instead, this name is inspired by the idea of trading a large percentage of carbohydrates in your diet for healthy fats.
The calorie breakdown for Keto Lite is 40 to 70 percent fat, 15 to 30 percent protein, and 15 to 30 percent carbs. With those ranges, you will never enter ketosis, but that’s not the point.

You’ll notice that there is a lot of room for adjustment with those percentage ranges. Keto Lite aims to be a more accessible diet.

If you aren’t entering ketosis, how does this diet help you lose weight? It focuses instead on fullness. High-fat diets tend to make you feel full a lot longer, leading to less snacking and easier control over the calories you consume.

Also, paying close attention to your caloric intake breakdown forces you to pay attention to your diet in general. Through these mechanisms, Keto Lite aims to make it easier to maintain a healthy diet that ultimately cuts calories and sustains weight loss.

The best way to ensure keto works for you is to make sure you’re getting adequate nutrition with each meal. Track your food intake using the extensive food database with Noom to see just how nutritious those midday or evening meals really are.

Pros and Cons of Keto Lite vs. Keto

Both of these diets have merits, and they both come with their drawbacks. We can compare the pros and cons of each to see if one might be reasonable for you.

At the very least, you can understand why people get mixed results with different diets. There is no perfect diet for everyone. A successful diet comes from finding what works right for the individual.

Pros of Keto

Let’s start with the pros of the traditional keto diet. At the top of the list is the effectiveness. It has been proven to help people lose weight very quickly. It also forces the body to burn fat, and that can help with slimming or leanness.

Keto has also been shown to help people have more energy and feel better in general. Entering ketosis can help with brain activity and brain efficiency.

Ketosis-based diets also tend to yield lasting results in a relatively short time. Many people can keep off the weight they lose, even if they only maintain the diet for a handful of weeks.

Cons of Keto

The first con that comes to mind is that keto is a rigid diet. It requires a massive change to the foods and drinks regularly consumed, which is not always easy to maintain on a logistic level.

The psychology of keto can also be challenging. In terms of physical symptoms, the “keto flu” is a common early side effect of a dramatic diet change. If endured, it goes away, but it still stops many dieters in their tracks.

Ketosis also comes with health risks. A high-fat diet can be healthy, but it requires care and effort. Without care and effort, it is easy to consume high volumes of saturated fats, trans fats, and cholesterol, all of which can have serious long-term health consequences.

Pros of Keto Lite

Topping the list of pros for Keto Lite is accessibility. The softer caloric ranges make it a much easier diet to follow, both logistically and psychologically.

Keto Lite is also more consistent. Traditional keto diets are often done in bursts. Keto Lite can be a permanent change — assuming it’s suitable for the individual. That consistency can help you maintain your health indefinitely.

Keto Lite is also a cheaper diet to maintain. The softer limitations are more adjustable and allow practitioners to practice more discernment in their shopping, which usually saves money.

Cons of Keto Lite

Keto Lite might be easier to maintain than keto, but the diet’s lite version is still a challenge. It still represents a major shift in eating habits, and that is always hard to do. There’s a secondary issue where it is easier to cheat with this diet.

With traditional keto, the extreme lack of carbs in the diet means that they usually disappear from the kitchen, which isn’t the case with Keto Lite. The temptation will be around, and for some, that is a serious problem.

Keto Lite is also still a high-fat diet. The overall health risks are lower than traditional keto, but they are still higher than many other diets. You still have to be diligent about what types of fats you consume, or else you’re trading one set of problems for another.

Adopting the keto lite approach won’t help you lose weight unless you’re willing to make lifestyle changes with it. Noom is a simple app that makes it easy to track your food intake.

Scientific Articles Relating to Keto and Keto Lite

To take a more serious look at keto and Keto Lite, we can turn to hard science. Plenty of studies have been performed on the impacts of ketosis and low-carb diets. Before getting into the studies, it is necessary to make a note.

Keto Lite is not a formal, scientific name for a diet. Instead, the studies refer to low-carb diets that do not induce ketosis. We can reasonably assume that Keto Lite fits this mold and applies these studies’ results to it.

Carbs and the Brain

Rather than look at all impacts of high vs. low carb diets on the human body, researchers narrowed their focus to how it impacts the human brain. Their study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found the diets have similar effects on mood, but not cognitive performance.

Seeing that impact, researchers slowly delved into how ketosis impacts other neurological conditions and the brain in general. The research on degenerative brain conditions is inconclusive but hopeful.

This study found statistically significant evidence that low-carb diets can boost certain aspects of cognitive performance when compared to low-fat diets. The preliminary finding merits more investigation, but it is certainly an interesting finding that is worth discussing.

However, the study only had 121 participants. Though it’s a large enough sample to support a body of evidence, it’s not enough to provide conclusive proof that cutting your carb intake makes you smarter.

As for Keto Lite, it was not explicitly researched in this study. It is currently unclear if simply cutting carbs is enough to help with serious brain conditions or if ketosis is required. However, research suggests cutting carbs without necessarily reaching ketosis can be helpful for cognitive functioning.

Ketogenic Diets and Appetite

A meta-analysis of studies presented in Obesity Reviews found that ketosis appears to prevent an increase in appetite despite weight loss. It concluded that additional research is needed to determine the minimum level of ketosis required to achieve appetite suppression. This means it may be possible to add higher volumes of nutritious carbs back into the diet than some might suggest.

Another study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that ketosis mitigates the hormones associated with appetite. This could potentially aid in weight loss, especially if hunger is a primary concern for the individual.

Keto Lite and Weight Loss

Although there isn’t much research concerning a “Keto Lite” diet, there is plenty of research regarding low-carbohydrate diets and weight loss.

One study published in the BMJ noted that “In this controlled feeding trial over 20 weeks, we found that total energy expenditure was significantly greater in participants assigned to a low carbohydrate diet compared with high carbohydrate diet of similar protein content. In addition, pre-weight loss insulin secretion might modify individual response to this diet effect.”

Another study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology compared the effects of low-carb and low-fat diets. According to the researchers, “These findings suggest that low-carbohydrate diets are at least as effective as low-fat diets at reducing weight and improving metabolic risk factors. Low-carbohydrate diets could be recommended to obese persons with abnormal metabolic risk factors for the purpose of weight loss.”

In general, diets low in carbohydrates were found to have beneficial effects on health. One research study published in PeerJ found that low-carb diets had similar health benefits to very low-carb diets. Additionally, participants seemed to follow the low-carb diet for longer than those following the very-low-carb diet.

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Keto and Rebound Weight Gain

According to a study in Nutrients, people who followed a six-month ketogenic diet, followed by six months with a reintroduction phase Mediterranean diet, showed an average weight loss of 10% with no weight regain at one year.

The ketogenic diet was 12% carbohydrate, 36% protein, and 52% fat. The Mediterranean diet was nearly double in calories, with 58% carbohydrate, 15% protein, and 27% fat. The keto approach here is higher in carbohydrate and protein than in the average keto diet, suggesting that a “lighter” version of the keto diet is effective.

Ketogenic Diet: Masood, Annamaraju, and Uppaluri

Keto diets have become popular enough to catch the attention of Campbell University, Loma Linda University, and Methodist University.

Research shared in Ketogenic Diet by StatPearls looked explicitly at how keto diets relate to the breakdown of fats and fat storage. They compared diets that focus on ketosis as well as diets that cut carbohydrates without inducing ketosis.

For ketosis diets, the study showed that keto conclusively reduces the body’s need to store fat. This is part of why people can lose weight on a high-fat diet.

More specifically, the reduction of carbs in the diet lowers the insulin response, and it is the insulin response that signals to the body when it needs to store fat. This study suggests that even without entering ketosis, cutting carbs can help reduce fat storage.

Their research also found that hormonal changes can lead to a breakdown of fats. This further accelerates weight loss and fat loss. Again, the study found that this effect occurred with or without ketosis as long as carbohydrates were cut. The response is amplified in a state of ketosis, but both diets were effective at lowering body fat levels in participants.

Massod, Annamaraju, and Uppaluri also looked at specific health impacts of high-fat diets. The study found that recent epidemiology results contradict traditional knowledge.

High-fat diets are not directly related to obesity or a range of heart conditions in any recent study. Even though this was prevailing knowledge for several decades, they found no increases in these problems with the keto diet participants.

They similarly found that non-ketosis increases in fat intake did not directly contribute to obesity or heart problems. Instead, they found that sugar intake correlates with both issues. This moderately suggests that low-carb diets might have long-term health benefits.

All of that said, the study only looked at two years, and the long-term impacts of these diets are mostly unknown.

Long-Term Effects of Keto

According to a study published in Experimental & Clinical Cardiology, researchers found that keto diets successfully sustained weight loss for the majority of the subjects. Additionally, their body mass index improved across the board. In that regard, keto helped lower obesity rates.

The study also closely observed cholesterol levels. Across the board, the keto diet helped participants lower their cholesterol over 24 weeks. This further confirms that a long-term keto diet can be sustained without harming cholesterol levels.

The exciting thing about this study is that it also looked specifically at reintroducing carbohydrates to the diet after twelve weeks. That means that the study was a hybrid look at keto and Keto Lite, and it found that Keto Lite sustained positive impacts from a keto diet.

Ultimately, the study concluded that keto and Keto Lite are safe diets for long-term, perhaps indefinite use. Neither form of the diet produced side-effects in patients.

There are, however, a few caveats. The study having only 83 subjects and being considered small-scale only provides enough evidence to warrant further studies with larger groups. Additionally, the study only considered obese patients.

For people with existing health risks, the diets were helpful. However, for those in relatively good health, the keto diet may not be useful. Additional research is required to see if the same conclusions apply to those at a healthy weight.

The study also found keto and Keto Lite participants required nutritional supplements. All were provided a daily supplement capsule that contained a wide range of vitamins and minerals. The researchers believed that this supplement was necessary to ensure that the diet was safe and that it is important to remember if you plan to pursue either of these diets independently.

Another study published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that long term restriction of carbohydrates could have some negative health implications. According to these researchers, “The need to further explore and communicate the untoward side-effects of low-carbohydrate diets should be an important public health message from nutrition professionals.”

How to Tell If Keto Lite Is the Right Diet for You

By now, you have a firm idea of what the Keto Lite diet entails.

Assuming you have an interest in Keto Lite, there are some things to consider before you commit. Changing your diet means changing your lifestyle and your health. When a diet works, these changes are positive, but no diet is perfect for everyone.

If you have a plan to gauge the diet while you try it, you can more clearly and easily see if it is working as intended or not. We can summarize this idea by asking four specific questions about you and how the diet is impacting you.

If you can positively answer these questions while you try the diet, then it may be right for you. If any of them have negative answers, you will have to weigh the trade-offs of maintaining the diet seriously.

How Do You Feel?

This is a staple check for any new diet. How it makes you feel is the best and most reliable indicator of how it is impacting your body and your life. It is ok to pay attention to both.

Do you have more or less energy? Typically, a successful diet makes you feel more energetic as it corrects underlying health issues that can cause sluggishness, poor sleep, and other low-energy side-effects.

Do you generally feel better or worse? This question is a little trickier, as many diets can have a mixed impact. It’s pretty standard for digestive changes to come hand in hand with dietary changes. This is because the shift in food wreaks havoc on the microbes inside of your digestive system. They will release chemicals that can impact your mood and your cravings.

Keeping this in mind, you want to keep track of if you feel better or worse for at least three weeks — as the average person will see these adverse effects fall off in week three.

This is more of a long-term question – Do you feel better or worse? Has your body stabilized after adapting to the new diet? With Keto Lite, specific issues to look out for are constipation and indigestion. They are typically temporary, but they can be significant for some people.

How Are Your Health Metrics?

You can only answer this question if your doctor is on board with the diet. If they are informed and help you make health decisions, they can track blood work and other medical metrics to see how the diet impacts you.

They’ll check blood pressure, heart rate, and several other health indicators. They can also help you keep an eye on your cholesterol, specifically for Keto Lite.

Outside of a health clinic, there are metrics you can monitor for yourself. The most obvious is weight. Is the diet helping you lose weight? That’s usually a big motivator, and if after three weeks you have seen no meaningful weight loss, the diet probably isn’t for you.

If you have any underlying medical conditions, it is important to keep an eye on them too. Blood sugar levels and hormone levels can be impacted by Keto Lite, reinforcing the importance of involving your doctor in the decision-making process.

How Are Your Finances?

Diets restrict food choice, and that’s kind of the point. Usually, the restrictions on what you can eat raise the cost of food overall.

Keto Lite is likely going to have you dramatically increase nut consumption. You will also have to ditch several cheap foods that rely on the low cost of processed foods. That might be good for your health, but is it good for your wallet?

This is a fundamental question, as a diet that is not logistically sustainable is not for you. If the food restrictions put too much financial strain into your daily life, it becomes a detrimental stress source. You can look for a meal plan that is easier on the wallet, and you will have a much higher likelihood of succeeding with that diet instead.

Of course, if Keto Lite isn’t hurting your finances, that is a very good sign that you can sustain it as long as you like. The financial check is important to pass, but you can shift your focus to answering these other questions as long as you pass it.

How Hard Is It?

In the end, this is the most critical question to answer. Everyone is different, and this is the biggest reason why so many diets exist.

Keto Lite will be easy and mostly successful for some people. For others, it will be a struggle. You have to assess where you fall on this spectrum, honestly. If the diet is rigid but only requires a little bit of discipline or will power, it might be sustainable. If every day is a struggle, it’s only a matter of time before the diet fails.

Changing diets will impact your moods and general feelings of health. Diets that are right for you tend to have positive psychological impacts, and diets that are wrong for you will feel wrong the whole time.

As discussed earlier, it’s essential to give the diet a few weeks to see if bad feelings are short-term or not, but the amount of struggle you have to put into the diet is your ultimate check.

If you find that Keto Lite isn’t right for you, that’s perfectly fine. There are plenty of additional, viable ways you can take control of your health. There is no need to force a diet that doesn’t suit you.

Guidelines to Follow Keto Lite

If you decide that you want to go with Keto Lite, some ideas and guidelines can help you succeed with the diet. Since we already covered how to tell if the diet is right for you, this will focus on how to succeed if you pass all of the previous checks. These guidelines can only help you maintain the diet, but they will not guarantee success.

Commit to a Timeframe

This is vital for any dietary change. We already discussed how nutritional changes impact the microbiome inside you and how they can create heavy resistance to the change.

You have to outlast that shift to gauge how the diet makes you feel. For that, a minimum of three weeks is necessary, but committing to 30 days with your new diet is a better idea.

This gives you enough time to see how sustainable the diet is with your lifestyle, and you can more accurately gauge how it makes you feel and how it impacts your health. All of that said, if there are ever severe side-effects to a diet, consult your doctor. The 30-day commitment is not intended to keep you on a diet that proves terrible for your health.

Take Advantage of Flexibility

Keto Lite was designed to be a less-restrictive low-carb diet. Taking advantage of that flexibility can help immensely if you have struggled on any level with food choices. The range of acceptable dietary decisions can help make the diet affordable when money is an issue.

Perhaps more importantly, Keto Lite offers a wider variety of foods than most low-carb diets. If you are consuming up to 30 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, you can still eat many of your favorites – you simply need to control the portion. That fundamental difference is why Keto Lite is ever chosen over alternative diets.

Watch Your Cholesterol

It may seem counterintuitive, but keeping a close eye on your health metrics can help you succeed with this diet. In the case of cholesterol, missing long-term spikes in this number can lead to serious health consequences — which can hardly be seen as a successful dieting strategy.

While you are watching your cholesterol, you also want to pay close attention to your consumption of trans fats and saturated fats. An imbalance in this portion of your diet will not cause immediate health fallout, but eventually, too much of these fats can turn Keto Lite against you.

You can end up feeling worse than you did before the diet, and that’s to say nothing of the potential heart issues that can come with too many bad fats.

Plan Meals

Keto Lite depends on you controlling your caloric intake reasonably. It is difficult to do this without meal planning. You will need to count the number of grams of carbohydrates you consume, and you should be counting fat and protein grams as well.

The inversion of calorie intake is going to make traditional meals entirely unacceptable for this diet. Every one of your staples will have to be reimagined to conform to the requirements of Keto Lite. You will want to meal plan weeks in advance, and if that is a struggle, it can be beneficial to outsource meal planning.

There are plenty of Keto Lite meal guides out there. You can get enough meal ideas to easily make it through 30 days and find a sustainable diet you like or determine that Keto Lite isn’t for you.

The emphatic point here is that the research is necessary. You will be unable to wing your way through this diet.

That was a thorough look at Keto Lite. Should it be your new diet? The science is out, and it is a legitimate diet to try. That doesn’t mean it is right for you, and it does not mean you will succeed with the diet.

If you are looking for a new way to approach eating and desire to cut weight and body fat, a low-carb diet might be the right way to go. Once again, we can all stop and emphasize the most important point. Your doctor should be involved in these decisions. They can help you account for individual components in your health, and they will help you keep a watchful eye to ensure your new diet does not cause harm.

Whether you choose to follow Keto, Keto Lite, or another dietary approach, using Noom can help you keep track of everything. And right now, the company is offering a free trial offer for all DietSpotlight readers!