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| What makes those successful on keto different? My research turned up 3 specific personality types that tend to make it all the way to goal weight. |
Keto is one of the heathiest ways to eat, but unfortunately, it takes more than a simple change of diet and increased exercise to reach your weight-loss goals. For most people, successful weight loss also requires you to make a mental adjustment.
If you're new to low-carb diets, or even returning for a second or third or fourth attempt, you might be wondering:
"Will a low-carb diet work for me?"
"Will a low-carb diet work for me?"
The answer to that question depends on your motivation, personality type, and determination to succeed.
What are the Benefits of Going Keto?
Before I introduce you to the three personality types that are most likely to achieve success on Keto, let's briefly discuss what sits at the heart of carbohydrate restriction.
Ketogenic diets comes with many benefits in addition to weight loss, such as:
- correcting insulin and blood glucose levels
- improving cholesterol markers
- lowering hunger
- gaining better control over your cravings
Today, research has shown that low carb isn't better at helping you shed the pounds than a low calorie diet is, but that doesn't mean that keto doesn't work or that it won't be better for YOU.
Dr. Atkins main concern was creating a weight-loss diet that wouldn't leave you hungry and unsatisfied.
How successful you are on keto depends on how willing you are to stick to the program, how your body responds to carbohydrate restriction, and if you can make the mental shift required.
Reality Regarding Keto
If you sit back and watch all of the participants at the various low-carb forums, you'll eventually come to realize that very few dieters every accomplish their weight-loss goals.
Despite the benefits of going keto, most people just don't achieve success.
There are hundreds of dieters that spend their free time socializing, supporting each other, and seeking help for their dieting issues on these boards, but hardly anyone announcing that they have reached goal weight.
However, a few do go all of the way to goal, so those are the ones I zeroed in on to see just what made them different from the rest of the crowd.
Why did they achieve success on keto, while so many others did not?
The 3 Personalities that a Low-Carb Diet Works For
After listening to dieters and analyzing their traits and tendencies, I came up with 3 specific personality types that are likely to succeed on keto:
1) Those who achieve their goals with a little bit of a struggle.
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| Turtles are folks who lose weight very slowly on keto. They love hanging out at low-carb forums and sharing their personal experiences and knowledge. |
These people stick around the forums in order to help others, and give advice when needed. They are particularly fond of groups, and thrive on sharing their personal experiences and knowledge.
Some of these people are known as turtles.
The weight comes off very slowly, but steadily, or they cheat now and then, which holds them back. Sometimes they go rouge for a bit and then have to climb back into the wagon.
Their overall attitude is good, however, and despite a set-back now and then, they just keep moving forward, an inch at a time.
Others believe so strongly in the low-carb theory that they don't care if they are losing weight or not.
They just keep going.
Those who find a low-carb diet has stopped working for them and decide to keep eating low carb for their health also fall into this group.
2) Those who learn from their mistakes and tweak the diet.
The second personality type are those who achieved their goals by taking a few left-turns along the way, maybe with a tweak or two of their own that failed.
Once they came to their senses, they ended up revamping the program, but they do it more realistically the second time. Part of their newly designed plan conforms exactly with some of the author's views of how they should achieve success.
And part of it doesn't.
These plans are usually created to fit the person's lifestyle, tastes, health problems, and also includes foods the dieter feels they cannot give up. Many of these individuals eat more carbs than the average keto dieters, because they found a way to make those foods work for them.
3) Goal-Achievers
Those who easily achieve their goals often disappear from the low-carb boards to live their lives -- never to be heard from again.We honestly don't know how true they were to the diet along the way, if they tweaked it to fit their own personality and health problems, like those in group 2 did, or not.
We simply never hear from them unless they gain back a part or all of their weight, or more, and want to start all over.
There are actually a large number of people who fall into the "Welcome Back" group, but they are more likely to be a part of groups 1 or 2.
For those who do make goal and decide to stick around and help others "see the light," they don't help in the same way that group 1 does. Since the weight simply fell off for them, they have trouble relating to slow losers.
It's more of a knock you over the head kind of love-thing.
Do it by the book, they scream.
Follow the author's advice exactly, or you are not doing South Beach, Atkins, Protein Power, or Keto."
While it's fantastic that this third group has the self discipline required to reach their goal, unfortunately, they don't have a lot of compassion or power to help others since weight loss came too easy for them.
Generally, this is the very first time they have ever tried to diet, so their body didn't catch on to what they were doing before reaching goal weight. This is how it was for me the first time I tried Atkins. It was a breeze.
Will A Low-Carb Diet Work for You or Not?
Determining whether low carb is right for you depends on whether you love the foods allowed on your plan of choice, how much weight you have to lose, and if you're okay with giving up bread, rice, potatoes, and sugary desserts for the rest of your life.
Success also depends on how many diets you've gone on before.
If you're coming to low carb as a yo-yo dieter, your body will have already decided that a diet is a famine situation and will fight you every step of the way. You'll need to be patient and accept the fact that the fat isn't going to come off as quickly as you would like.
It doesn't matter how accurate the low-carb science is or that ketosis sets the body up for burning fat predominantly. The body is designed to sustain your life and that is exactly what it is going to do.
You have only slight control over how fast you lose the weight.
If the body determines that your diet is an emergency situation, it will lower your insulin level, due to the drop in glycogen stores (the storage form of carbohydrates), but it will also secrete cortisol and other stress hormones.
This hormone secretion will cause the body to store all of the fatty acids in your bloodstream and coax the liver to break down its glycogen into glucose, and then toss the glucose into your bloodstream for quick energy.
All feelings of doom or anxiety over how well the diet is working, will cause this reaction, which is why anxious types don't do so well on low carb. The water fluctuations and weekly ups-and-downs on the scale literally drive them crazy.
If this is where you're at, this is where Group 2 comes into play.
You'll have to tweak your weight-loss diet to fit your expectations and personal situation. But you won't know if you'll have to tweak until after you give a traditional low-carb diet a fair chance to work for you. This is going to require patience.
There are specific steps required for the body to enter into ketosis, adapt to ketosis, and then adapt to burning fats for energy. This takes TIME.
Low-carb diets are extremely healthy because they focus on adequate amounts of:
- protein
- healthy vegetables
- nuts
- low-sugar fruits
- healthy fats
- low-carb condiments
- herbs, spices, and flavorings
Where most people get into problems on keto is either keeping their carbohydrate levels too low for an extended length of time, or when they go on-and-off of the diet, expecting it to work exactly the same way each and every time they come back.
It won't.
The body will remember where you left off when you quit. It will still have to move through the steps of ketosis, but moving through the steps of adaption that come after you enter ketosis will be faster. You might not be able to eat the same things, as much as you did before, or achieve the same results.
In some cases, the body will even start a full-body war against you. That's what it did to me.
A low-carb diet will work, but you have to respect your body and sometimes coax it into complying by making it feel secure and safe. Huge deficits do not make the body feel safe. They are interpreted as starvation, even when they're not.
Keto is a much longer ballgame than a crash diet is, but the alternative is to never reach your weight-loss goals.
So what's it going to be?
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