Introducing our brand new keto information and awareness series with our very own GM and Certified Nutritionist, Lee Sandwith! Keto 101 is a series of videos in which Lee takes us through the basics of keto in manageable bite-sized chunks, so we can properly understand the basics of this powerful healing tool and healthy way of life!

And for those of us who have been doing keto for ages, it’s always good way re-learn anything we may have forgotten or clarify anything we may have been confused or misinformed about! In this first video Lee explains WHAT keto is… and it’s NOT what much of social media makes it out to be! Tune in and enjoy this series, and remember that education, particularly about your own health, is power!

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Welcome to our keto 101 series. We’ll be walking you through, step by step everything you need to know to get started on the keto diet in the right way. This is designed for newbies so if you are more advanced then you might want to look at some of our more advanced videos

Now, there’s a lot of confusion out there about keto where it's exactly quite simple, but terms like dirty keto, clean keto, classic keto make it a little bit more confusing for anyone who is starting new.

The word keto actually comes from the scientific term “ketogenesis” and ketogenesis is a "metabolic state”where the body starts to produce molecules called ‘ketone bodies’ which are used for fuel instead of glucose.

Now the body does that by using fat as its main energy source instead of carbohydrates essentially by converting fat into ketone bodies and when we talk about fat, we’re talking about two things. So the first thing is the dietary fat, which is the fat that you consume in your diet and the second type of fat is the fat that's stored in your body which is known technically as adipose tissue but essentially it just means body fat.

The keto diet, therefore, is very simple in that it's a diet that encourages the body to switch its energy source from glucose to ketones. So you can think of ketogenesis as a secondary “back up” energy system which is evolved over time to allow humans to survive and to thrive in times of food scarcity.

In evolutionary terms, we’re actually designed to be in ketosis a lot of the time and it’s only in modern times that we've started to rely more on carbohydrates and it's this switch from fat and protein to carbohydrates is now thought to be the root cause of a lot of the communicable diseases that we see in society these days, and the main reason that the diet has become so popular is there is real potential to reverse many of these conditions especially things like type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The keto diet has become mainly most popular over the last few years because of its potential to help you lose weight if you switch to a diet which is comprised of fat rather than carbohydrates then you're forcing your body to use its fat stores for energy and therefore you lose weight. Now obviously there's a lot more complexity to the diet than that, we should be covering in some later more advanced videos but that's the keto diet summed up in very simple terms.