The biggest benefit of the ketogenic diet is in helping you to lose weight, but the diet also comes with several other health benefits and one of these is fighting fatigue. If you are fatigued, it often means that your cortisol level is erratic. Lifestyle changes such as stress management therapy and exercise may have a significant impact on the way your brain would response to stress, but the keto diet has shown greater potential when it comes to regulating the level of the adrenal gland hormone, cortisol, in your body. Read on to better understand how a keto diet can kill fatigue.
What’s the Reason Behind Fatigue?
If you’re following a standard high carbohydrate diet, your blood sugar tends to fluctuate heavily. Do you ever feel angry when you’re starving? This is often due to a drop in your blood sugar level, also known as hypoglycemia. When most of the food you eat every day comes from refined carbohydrates, your blood sugar increases shortly after eating and then goes down a few hours later.
Crashing blood sugar is one of the biggest stresses to your body. In response to stress, your brain will instruct your adrenal glands to secrete more cortisol. Every time your blood sugar level drops, your body will respond by excreting cortisol. If this cycle will continue, your cortisol could become chronically elevated and you’ll eventually feel chronically stressed. Should nothing change, your brain will signal to lower the production of cortisol, which will lead to burnout. When this happens, you’ll feel extremely exhausted and chronic fatigue will start to set in. Your brain will likely become foggy, you may feel nauseated, and you may lose your appetite.
How A Keto Diet Helps Kill Fatigue
The keto diet will not only provide fuel to your body by using ketones instead of glucose, but it will also help to increase your insulin sensitivity. By increasing your insulin sensitivity, your blood sugar level will be regulated and the damage that cortisol can do to your body will be greatly minimized. Keto basically helps to prevent a yo-yo effect on your blood sugar level. When your blood sugar is stabilized, your cortisol level will be stabilized as well. With a stabilized cortisol, your likelihood of getting chronically fatigued is low and this is how the keto diet can help to kill fatigue.
It is also worth noting that when your body is in the state of ketosis, you will no longer have that feeling of low energy in the morning since your body will no longer rely on cortisol to provide you with an instant burst of energy to start your day. Most people begin to experience long lasting energy, better mental concentration, less compulsive eating and few or no sugar cravings.
In addition, chronic levels of inflammation have also been shown to have negative effects on the level of cortisol in your body. Adhering to a low-carb ketogenic diet has been shown to help minimize inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein. By minimizing inflammatory markers, your cortisol level can also be normalized.
Things to Keep In Mind
If you are suffering from general fatigue and low energy then give the keto diet a try and see what an incredible difference it can make. If on the other hand you suffer with chronic fatigue the last thing that your body needs is dietary stress. In this case you should transition your body to ketosis in a slow and steady phase. Otherwise, your fatigue could get worse initially. It would also help if you talk to a doctor familiar with the keto diet before you decide to adopt the ketogenic lifestyle. That way, your doctor can monitor the diet’s impact on your health and adjust your diet if needed, to ensure that you will reap all the benefits that your body needs.
