Brainstorm

Recently, my uncle told my family that he wanted to lose weight and that he’s trying this new diet trend called the ketogenic diet, or keto diet for short. Most of us didn’t know what he was referring to, so he explained it to us. Basically, you remove all carbohydrates, one of your body’s main sources of energy, from your diet and substitute it instead with fats. A few weeks later, we saw him again and he actually lost a noticeable amount of weight. We were all shocked to say the least. We all thought that fat makes you fat, but he just proved to us otherwise. Then my dad brought up an interesting question. How safe is the diet? This question got me wondering the same thing. Wouldn’t the fat start to clog your arteries after an extended period of time? At this point, I was curious as to know if it was actually healthy. I felt scared for my uncle because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. I wanted to learn more about keto so that I wouldn’t fear it anymore. I wanted to know more about the scientific aspects behind the diet, about the ketogenic process. All this thinking leads me to the following question. Are diets healthy and effective means to lose unwanted weight? Why don’t people just workout and regulate their caloric intake, or as we sophisticated gym rats call it, enter a caloric deficit. A caloric deficit is just simply when the calories you expend are less than the calories you eat, forcing your body to use up your energy reserves, otherwise known as everyone’s favourite thing to lose, fat. Maybe that’s just my addiction to endorphins and dopamine, (love for working out not for drugs), coming through. I realize not everyone likes to work out, but personally, when it comes to improving my body, and eventually attaining my ideal body, I find the dietary side much harder than the work out. Maybe that’s why diets don’t stay around for long periods of time and end up disappearing just as fast as they came, because they are so hard to maintain. This makes me wonder, what is the failure rate of diets? I wonder how successful most diets are and what makes a diet successful? What motivates people to keep up with all the restrictions? In the case of the keto diet, I guess it’s the enticing allure of getting to feast on one of foods most rich and flavorful parts, fat. That’s why Wagyu Kobe beef in Japan is so sought after and why market price is ridiculously high. This specific type of beef has one of the highest fat contents, if not the most in the world.  The high levels of fat make the beef extremely tender, to the point where it almost seems the beef is melting in your mouth which is complimented by its amazing beefy taste. Or so I’ve been told. I haven’t been lucky enough yet to get to try it, but it is on my bucket list. Anyways, as I was saying, people yearn for fat because it tastes really good.