The Bottom Line:
- If enhanced athletic performance is your goal, low-carb won’t get you there.
Low-carb and ketogenic diets are all the rage right now.
People who’ve used them to shed pounds love to tell others about how much weight they lost and how quickly they lost it simply by cutting carbs.
They aren’t lying; you can lose weight going low-carb.
However, doing so can severely hurt your athletic performance and can cause more harm than good in the long run.
What Is the Ketogenic Diet?
Most people know what low-carb diets are. Simply put, they’re diets in which you cut out as many carbs as possible.
People on low-carb diets usually try to avoid things like bread, rice, pasta and other wheat and grains.
Recently, though, a new diet known as the ketogenic – or simply keto – diet has become even more popular than standard low-carb diets.
Keto is an extreme form of low-carb dieting where people try to stay below 40 carbs a day. Some people even try to stay below 20 carbs a day!
Keeping carbs at a level this low goes far beyond cutting out bread, pasta and rice. To stay below 20 carbs a day, you must also cut most fruits and even several vegetables from your diet.
Your main options on a keto diet are proteins and fats. This means eating a lot of meat, poultry, seafood, nuts, seeds, eggs, cheese and low-carb, high-fiber vegetables.
You may already be noticing how this type of diet can negatively impact your athletic performance and overall long-term health.
Consuming so few carbohydrates triggers a process in your body known as ketosis.
Ketosis occurs because your body has used up all of its glucose/glycogen – the main source of energy/fuel in a “normal” diet – for energy and must find some other way of creating energy.
How Does Ketosis Work?
The body must have energy to survive, and the body’s main source of energy comes from carbs.
Ketosis kicks in when you deprive your body of the glucose/glycogen that come from the consumption of carbs.
When the body needs energy and can’t find any glycogen in the blood, it starts burning the body’s stored fat instead.
Depending on your normal activity level and how drastically your diet has changed once you start keto, this process can start a couple of days after beginning the diet.
Once your body starts burning stored fat, you’ll quickly see results as far as weight loss goes. There’s no way not to see results, which is why keto’s so popular.
We, as humans, are big fans of instant gratification. We like to see things happen fast!
It isn’t uncommon for people on the keto diet to lose up to 30 or more pounds in under two months.
It’s hard to argue with results like that, but if you’re concerned about your long-term fitness goals and overall athletic performance, it’s not as good as it sounds.
What Are the Downsides?
If you’re severely overweight – what clinicians refer to as ‘morbidly obese’ – and are having trouble with Type 2 Diabetes or other insulin-related conditions, keto can be a good way to drop a significant amount of weight quickly and get your blood sugar under control.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s not without its downsides, and for the ‘average person’ who isn’t significantly overweight and doesn’t have trouble with blood sugar, it can actually be downright dangerous.
Benefits
Before we get to the disadvantages, let’s be fair and talk about the benefits. Obviously, the biggest one is the weight loss and the potential to get your blood sugar under control.
However, because the negative impacts of keto can be so dangerous, I feel like I have to reiterate this point once more:
Unless you’re morbidly obese, keto is not the best, healthiest or even the most effective way of losing weight, keeping it off and improving your health.
In addition to massive weight loss and the potential for positive results in blood sugar levels, keto has a few other benefits:
- It can help improve the digestive systems of people who suffer from acid reflux, frequent heartburn and nausea.
- Some people have noticed improved mental acuity.
- It can lower the number and intensity of negative symptoms associated with women who have PCOS.
- It can improve the skin, especially if frequent breakouts are due to high-sugar, greasy-food diets.
- It may or may not reduce the risk of certain cancers.
Short-Term/Less Serious Disadvantages
First and foremost, if you’re an athlete or someone who’s serious about fitness, keto can have devastating consequences on your athletic performance both in the short-term and the long-term.
In the short-term, while your body’s transitioning to ketosis, you’ll likely become very sick, exhausted and suffer from an overall lack of energy.
In short, you’ll feel awful.
Some people refer to this period as the ‘keto flu’ because the symptoms you experience at the beginning of ketosis are very similar to the symptoms you’d experience while having the flu.
For most people, this lasts about a week, but it can last as long as a month!
During this transitional time, you’ll experience nausea, dizziness, cramping, stomach pains, depleted energy levels, poor mental ability (brain fog), irritability and digestive issues.
You’ll barely feel like getting up and going to work, much less trying to work out, run or exercise.
Other short-term/mild disadvantages include:
- Bad breath.
- Strong, foul-smelling urine.
- Fatigue.
- Intense sugar cravings.
- Headaches.
- Insomnia.
Long-Term/Serious Disadvantages
Decreased Muscle Mass and Poor Athletic Performance
Depriving the body of carbohydrates leads to a seriously unpleasant and even dangerous condition known as ‘glycogen depletion.’
Glycogen depletion, especially long-term glycogen depletion, can make it nearly impossible to build muscle.
While your body can be “trained” to burn fat rather than glycogen for energy, your muscles must have glycogen to function properly.
Additionally, the high-intensity workouts needed to achieve big gains at the gym simply can’t be achieved without glycogen.
Losing weight and building muscles are two entirely different processes.
Losing weight can be achieved when the body burns fat for energy, but burning fat has nothing to do with building muscle.
Muscles can only be broken down and built back stronger and larger through the glycogen depletion and glycogen recovery processes.
That’s why one of the long-term disadvantages of keto is decreased muscle mass.
Studies have also shown that keto can negatively impact anaerobic exercise and activities. This is due, in large part, to the body’s inability to improve muscle mass and tone without carbs and glycogen.
It’s also because burning fat doesn’t release the same intense burst of energy that burning glycogen releases, so athletes just don’t have the high-level of energy needed to perform as well in most anaerobic exercises if they aren’t eating enough carbs.
In fact, for most common types of exercise – weightlifting, running, biking, etc. – you’ll usually be advised to “carb up” before, during and after the activity because carbs will give you both the instant and sustained energy you need to succeed and not “hit the wall” halfway through the event.
That, alone, should tell you that low-carb diets aren’t going to work for improving athletic performance.
Other Long-Term Effects
Other serious long-term effects of keto are increased risk of heart disease due to the high consumption of red meat and fat and the potential for developing ketoacidosis, a condition that occurs when the body stores too many ketones and causes the blood to become acidic.
This is a serious, potentially fatal, condition that can damage the body’s major organs including the heart, liver and brain.
Finally, the most common long-term effect of the keto diet is decreased metabolism, which makes it even more difficult for people to lose weight.
Because many people who turn to keto already have low metabolism, it’s particularly hard on them.
This is largely why most people start to regain the weight they’ve lost shortly after stopping keto.
In most cases, people gain back all their lost weight and more due to the decreased metabolism.
It can make people very despondent and inclined to give up on their fitness goals altogether.
Overall, keto just isn’t worth it for most people in the end.
What Are Other Weight Loss Options that Won’t Hurt My Athletic Performance?
If you ask any serious doctor what his or her recommendation is for losing weight and getting healthy, s/he’s going to tell you what you’ve heard a thousand times before and already know to be true.
The words may be slightly different, but it’s likely to be some version of, “The only way to truly get healthy is to combine a well-balanced diet with plenty of exercise.”
No one likes to hear that because it’s not as satisfying as magic pills that’ll curb your appetite or quick-acting diets that’ll cause the pounds to start falling off in mere days, but it’s the truth.
A Balanced Diet
The only way to be healthy is to adjust your habits and put in the work, and then make those habits the new normal.
Cutting carbs and calories is a quick-fix that’ll help you lose some weight initially, but you can’t keep cutting them to lower and lower levels.
That’s not sustainable, so instead of cutting carbs and calories, simply monitor your intake of them.
Be sure you’re eating a balanced diet that isn’t too high in sugars, calories and fats. Don’t remove carbs from your diet, but choose your carbs with care.
Pass on the birthday cake, and grab a pear, some grapes and nuts instead. Turn down the 16-ounce steak in favor of the baked chicken breast.
Ask the waiter to hold the chips and salsa at the Mexican restaurant in favor of some raw veggies and guacamole dip.
You can still enjoy your favorite foods. Just enjoy them in moderation, and find healthier ways to prepare them. If you love chicken, that’s fine.
Bake it or fix it on the grill instead of deep frying it.
If you’re a chocolate junkie, that’s okay too. Add some pure cocoa to your milk each morning. (Cocoa is quite healthy in and of itself.)
You can even have real chocolate; just don’t overdo it, and try satisfying your cravings with a piece of a chocolate bar instead of assuming you have to eat the whole thing.
Exercise
More importantly, you have to exercise.
You have to put the work in each day.
Your body wasn’t designed to live a sedentary, cyclic life of eating, sitting, eating, sitting, eating, sleeping and then repeating.
Get up and move!
Whether you enjoy jogging, swimming, biking, working out at the gym, lifting or something else, that’s okay.
You can do the kind of exercise you want to do as long as you’re doing something.
In fact, if you’re worried about your athletic performance, the best thing you can do for yourself is to work out, train and improve your stamina and endurance.
Final Thoughts
Despite their popularity, low-carb and keto diets aren’t always the best options for a number of reasons.
Keto, especially, should only be utilized in the most severe circumstances of obesity and comorbidities.
In these instances, the diets should be used as weight loss tools only. They certainly won’t have any positive impacts on your athletic performance.
If you’re hoping to improve yourself in the gym, on the court, in the pool or on the track, you’re going to want to keep a generous source of carbohydrates in your diet.
Otherwise, you’ll be fatigued, start to lose muscle mass and experience multiple instances of “hitting the wall,” “bonking,” “crapping out” or whatever else you want to call it.
Put simply, high-intensity and anaerobic exercises cannot be achieved without glycogen-producing carbohydrates.
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