This is not so much a benefit of not being hungry as it is more of a tag along experience. The reason why you don’t feel hungry on keto is because you have a better gas tank all of the sudden.
Think of it this way. Imagine I owned a dealership that had two nearly identical cars to sell you. Every detail about the cars was the same. The style, the color, the price, all identical save the fuel source. With the first car you’d get a range of around 2,000 miles. The other car has a range of 30,000 miles.
Well that’s how your body works. When you rely on glucose as your fuel source you can only store 2,000 or so calories at a time. That’s regardless of your size and shape. 2,000 calories, maybe 2,500 if you’re lucky. That’s why your body craves food so much on a glucose based diet. You go through a lot of your fuel tank each day even if you aren’t particularly active.
Now look at the person who is keto adapted. Your fuel source is ketones. Even if you’re lean and athletic you’re holding on to 30,000 some odd calories in your tank. Way more than you’ll burn in a day, even if you’re very active. So there’s no sense of urgency in your body to replace the fuel as you use it. That sense of urgency of course is hunger.
How does this play out over the course of the day. Well if you’re glucose based as your day goes on you’ll actually see the needle moving on your fuel tank. And then your body becomes nervous. It doesn’t want to wait until the tank is about empty, as we often do with our cars. The body feels there’s a scarcity of food and it acts now to protect you.
Using the car analogy, if you are flying down the highway at 80mph and you realize that you need to start conserving fuel, what do you do? You slow down of course. You decrease the amount of fuel you need to burn and try to become more efficient in how you’re burning it. As a human you experience this as tiredness and lower performance.
Now think of the ketone powered vehicle. It doesn’t worry because even if you’re super active you’re likely only going through 10-15% of your fuel supply. So there’s no need to take emergency measures to make sure you can go until the next fuel up. In fact you could go a few days without fueling up before it becomes an issue.
So how does having all day energy play out for you? You get more stuff done. There’s no mid day taper off of performance. You’re not wasting time having to refuel throughout the day so that’s more time you get to spend doing whatever you like. When you wake up in the morning you don’t need to rush to fill the tank to get started. You wake up with a sufficient fuel supply on board so you hit the ground running. And staying up later isn’t an issue either, although you still should get a good nights sleep every night. In an interesting “paradox” since I started I have more energy during the day but when it’s time for bed I sleep like a baby.
All of that is great and all, but I’d say the biggest energy boost goes to the biggest energy hog in your body, your brain. It’s such a small part of your body but it uses about 20% of your daily energy expenditure. I’m not a biology major or medical professional, that’s just the figure I’ve seen in most everything I’ve read on the subject. Brain fog, that feeling you get where it gets harder and harder to think and concentrate, is an energy issue. When you switch to ketones you not only have a much larger reservoir of energy for the brain to use, it’s an energy source it finds easier to use. You stay alert and awake all day with better mental focus and clarity. And it’s not hard to see how that will improve your productivity throughout the day. Imagine reading faster and comprehending better because you’re not having to keep going back and rereading passages due to brain fog.
All of this because you have more fuel on board which translates to more energy throughout the day. So let’s get back to the car analogy we started with. I have the same two cars to sell you. The only difference is one will get you 2,000 miles down the road, the other 30,000 miles. Which one are you going to buy from me? The answer is pretty obvious. So now the question is which body do you want? The one that has a small tank and gets cranky when the tank isn’t full? Or the one that can go for days without a fill up and still run at top performance? Which brings us to the third things I mentioned, fasting. And that is a topic we’ll cover in tomorrow post. Hope you’re having a great day and see you soon.
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