This Diet Remains One Of The Worst, But Women Still Follow It

What is the keto diet?

We’re going to take a long, hard look at what makes keto so bad for you. Before we go any further, though, we need to answer a more fundamental question: what is the keto diet, anyway?

First, “keto” is short for “ketogenic.” A ketogenic diet, which replaces most of your carbs with fats and protein, is supposed to put your body in a special metabolic state known as ketosis. Ketosis is when your body starts burning fat for your energy needs. This is supposed to help you lose weight.

So far, so good. What, then, makes the keto diet so bad for you?

What makes the keto diet bad?

Let’s start with the good news: switching to a keto diet may be an effective key to short-term weight loss. This is something that it has in common with pretty much every low-carb diet on the market.

The bad news is a bit more extensive. First off, throwing yourself into the keto diet means you’ll mostly be avoiding things like sugary fruits, starchy vegetables, legumes, and whole grains. All of these offer your body important health benefits, and you’ll miss out on those benefits if you stick with keto. Such benefits include weight management and reducing your risks for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Type 2 diabetes.

Secondly, the longer you are on the keto diet, which is high in protein-rich foods like meat, poultry, fish, and eggs, the likelier you are to develop some pretty bad side effects. These include kidney stones, micronutrient deficiencies, extra fat in your liver, and extra protein in your blood.

Third, even doing keto in the short term can result in something commonly known as the “keto flu” as your body tries to adapt to the new diet. This can cause nausea, hunger, low energy, digestive issues, sleep problems, and more.

Why does keto remain so popular?

If keto can cause nasty side effects in both the short and long term, that brings us to another major question. Why does it remain so popular?

There are two basic reasons for this. The first reason is that most of us long to lose weight and the idea of cutting weight quickly with a simple diet sounds very attractive. And since keto remains one of the most well-known low-carb diets, many are likelier to turn to it than other diets.

The other reason keto remains popular can be summed up in one word: influencers. This fad diet remains very popular with many influencers on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. These influencers bring in new fans each day, and it doesn’t take long for those fans to seek out keto for themselves.

Try the Mediterranean diet instead

As you can tell, there are many reasons why the keto diet is so bad for you. But if you’re looking to lose weight, don’t worry: not all fad diets are created equally, and some are safer and more effective than keto.

One such diet is the Mediterranean diet. Each year, the US News and World Report ranks the best and worst diets out there. And in 2021, for the fourth year in a row, they named the Mediterranean diet the overall best choice. In case you’re curious, keto remains one of the worst possible diets year after year in this report.

What is the Mediterranean diet, though? It’s a diet based on the lifestyles of those living in (where else?) the Mediterranean, where people tend to live longer. And the diet involves eating very little red meat and sugar and focusing instead on fruits and veggies. The diet also involves consuming things like seafood, nuts, seed, and whole grains.

Part of what makes this diet popular is that you don’t have to limit your caloric intake or do the annoying (and often expensive) meal-prep that comes with the keto diet. And you’ll naturally lose weight by replacing things like processed food and refined sugar (which are chock full of calories) with foods that ultimately reduce your chances of heart disease.

Thinking beyond diets

As you can tell, we’re big fans of the Mediterranean diet. It replaces the quick and potentially dangerous weight loss of keto with a slow and steady change in how you eat. But it’s worth asking one final question: do we need to move beyond diets altogether?

Many doctors and health officials think the answer to that question is “yes.” That’s because most fad diets don’t work in the long term. The average person on keto or another fad diet will lose a bit of weight and then stop doing the diet (perhaps because of the side effects we mentioned above). After that, they gain the weight back and begin searching for another fad diet to try.

Your best bet for long-term weight loss and weight management is to make lifestyle changes in how you prepare, cook, and consume food. And you can make these changes at whatever pace you like. Maybe you spend one month without going out to eat. After that, you spend a month or two developing an exercise routine and preparing healthy meals to take for work.

Making these changes at your own pace means you won’t feel the pressure that comes with a fad diet. Best of all, you can discover what works best for you rather than trying to embrace a fad diet simply because it worked well for someone else.