Number Three: Consistency Is Key

I am now on to the third takeaway from my “7 Takeaways From 7 Years Keto” series: Consistency Is Key. Consistency in weight loss isn't just about sticking to a diet for a few weeks; it's about creating sustainable habits that become a part of your daily routine. When you consistently make healthier food choices that support your goals, these behaviors eventually become second nature. This shift from short-term effort to long-term habit formation is crucial for lasting weight loss (who wants to lose the same weight over and over again because you yo-yo??). Consistency gives you TIME for your efforts to add up as well!

Honestly, it is one of the more frustrating parts of weight loss. In a world where just waiting 2 days for shipping is now the norm, we want things QUICKLY. On top of that, we also want to see an equal amount of payoff for our effort-at the very least. But a weight loss journey is often not a straight downhill one, you won’t see a loss every day or every week. It is more of a roller-coaster that has ups and downs, as well as some flat parts too. There will be natural fluctuations that will cause the scale to stay the same and sometimes go up. But this is where consistency comes in. When you zero in and look at the change from day to day or even week to week, it can seem like things aren’t always going well. When those natural fluctuations have the scale up, you can feel pissed off that the effort you put in didn’t result in the progress that you feel you earned. But if you stay consistent, if you continue to put the effort in and zoom out looking at weeks or months on a whole you will see that the effort is paying off. Take a look at a little snapshot of my progress from the beginning of my weight loss journey. If you look at just week over week 8/12-8/19 I gained. That was after some solid progress. It was hormonal and due to water retention. I found over the course of the last years that each month that lines up and to expect it. It is temporary and the next week I am back to a loss or maintaining (maintaining was my goal once I hit my goal weight as I was not looking to lose more weight). If I gave up at the first sign of my effort “not paying off on the scale” I would never have reached my goal. Progress was adding up, I could see that it was working for me. Giving up and going back to what I had been doing in the past hadn’t worked, so I decided to keep going with something that had been working for me. It paid off. All of the “little losses” added up. No one loses 100lbs in a month, it takes time and during that time it takes consistency of making choices that support your goals. Just like you didn’t gain all the weight in a month, you won’t lose it all in a month. It took consistency to put that weight on too- for me it was about 8 years to gain it all. That is roughly 96 months. I couldn’t expect to lose it all in just 1 month.

Consistency impacts us on a larger level as well. While we see the weight loss, we often don’t see the less physical impacts. Yet these “invisible” changes not only help support the weight loss “physical change” but lead overall health improvements. So I wanted to take a moment to touch on those.

1. Hormones: The ketogenic diet significantly impacts various hormones in the body, particularly those related to fat storage and hunger. When you consistently follow a keto diet, your body adapts to using fat as its primary fuel source instead of carbohydrates. This shift influences many hormones, but lets focus on three key ones: insulin, ghrelin, and leptin. Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels and fat storage. Consistently consuming a high-carbohydrate diet leads to frequent insulin spikes, which can promote fat storage and lead to insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction over time. On a keto diet, the reduction in carbohydrate intake results in lower insulin levels, promoting fat burning and reducing the risk of insulin resistance. The next two hormones I wanted to talk about often go hand and hand- leptin and ghrelin. Ghrelin is the hormone that signals hunger, while leptin signals satiety. You can probably guess why those are so important behind the scenes when it comes to weight loss. Studies have shown that a keto diet can help regulate these hormones. Consistently maintaining ketosis can reduce ghrelin levels, decreasing hunger, and increase leptin sensitivity, enhancing feelings of fullness and reducing the likelihood of overeating. This is an incredibly BASIC explanation that doesn’t cover nearly all the impacts on hormones or even the role these hormones play in weight loss. But it gives you a little peak at least, since this post is not focusing on this- but a future more in depth post will.

2. Improved Metabolic Health: Consistently following a whole foods based well formulated ketogenic diet has been shown in the peer-reviewed research to improve various markers of metabolic health, including reduced triglycerides, increased HDL (good) cholesterol, and improved LDL (bad) cholesterol as well as LDL particle size. While weight loss is the goal for many, overall health should be right there with it.

3. Reduced Inflammation: Inflammation is a natural response by the body to injury or infection, but chronic inflammation is linked to various diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. The ketogenic diet has been shown to reduce inflammation markers when implemented consistently. CRP is a marker of inflammation in the body. Studies have found that the ketogenic diet can lower CRP levels, indicating reduced inflammation. Lower inflammation can lead to a decreased risk of chronic diseases and improved overall health. In addition to CRP, keto has also been shown to reduce the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are signaling molecules that promote inflammation. This helps in lowering chronic inflammation and its effects. Inflammation plays a huge role not only in disease but also in how we feel too. If you are suffering from chronic inflammation and your joints are always hurting you, do you think you are going to want to be active? Heck, do you think you will want to be standing and walking around in the kitchen making meals and doing prep to lose weight? Reducing this inflammation in the body can really help to support your health and weight loss goals by making it less uncomfortable to be active. This is a HUGE benefit of keto that is often overlooked.

I could go on and on about all the ways consistency with keto pays off, but at the end of the day it is something that is better to experience. Allow yourself the grace needed to be consistent. Remove the expectations around being perfect with tracking. Remove the expectations around how much progress you think you should make each day/week. Instead, focus on consistently implementing a ketogenic diet the best you can each day- day after day. Whether you are perfect with your macros or had an off day, you keep going with the goal of doing your best consistently with keto. That will lead to progress, and that progress gets you to your goal.