The Role of Exercise in Your Healthy Keto Journey

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A healthy keto diet can be a powerful tool for weight loss and overall health improvement. By inducing ketosis, it causes your body to burn fat for fuel. This makes it an especially useful diet for overweight and obese people who need to lose weight for health reasons. Adding exercise with healthy keto diet helps you to tone up your muscles and improve your cardiovascular health further.

Diet has a bigger impact on our weight than exercise. It's easier to cut down on the number of calories you consume in a day than to burn those calories through physical activity. For instance, skipping a 500-calorie dessert is simpler and quicker than spending an hour on the treadmill to burn the same number of calories.

However, this doesn’t mean that exercise does not matter. Exercise complements a healthy diet by offering benefits that diet alone cannot provide.

The benefits of exercise

Here are some of the reasons you should integrate exercise into your healthy keto lifestyle.

Burns calories and increases metabolism: Exercise helps you burn calories, contributing directly to weight loss. While the healthy keto diet limits carbs to promote ketosis, exercise helps create a calorie deficit needed to lose weight. Regular physical activity also boosts your metabolism, allowing you to burn more calories even at rest.

Builds and maintains muscle mass: Building and maintaining muscle mass is essential for a healthy metabolism. Muscle tissue burns more calories at rest compared to fat tissue. Strength training exercises such as lifting weights can help preserve and build muscle mass.

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Lowers the risk of heart disease and other health issues: An active lifestyle is vital for good heart health. Regular physical activity helps lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. It also reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes and other lifestyle-related diseases. Exercise can enhance your overall health.

Boosts your mood and reduces stress: Exercise releases endorphins, which are natural mood lifters. These “feel-good” hormones can help reduce stress, anxiety and depression. By reducing stress, exercise also helps curb stress eating, which can sabotage your weight-loss efforts.

Improves quality of sleep: A good workout helps you sleep better at night. In turn, a good night’s sleep keeps your metabolic function and energy balance in check, which can help your body regulate weight better.

A balanced approach

Exercise is a necessary part of a healthy keto lifestyle. Just as leading an active lifestyle but eating lots of fast food won’t lead to the best of health, eating all of the right foods but never moving your body can stop you from reaching your health goals.

The exercise you do doesn’t even need to be intense. According to Dr Lim Su Lin, the dietitian behind the Healthy Keto Diet, exercises as simple as brisk walking and lifting some light weights can enhance your keto journey by toning your muscles.

By combining a well-planned healthy keto diet with regular physical activity, you can achieve sustainable weight loss and improve your overall well-being.