You may have heard about the many health benefits of nutritional ketosis — including the potential for weight loss, reduced cardiovascular disease risk, and improved Type 2 diabetes markers. But did you know there’s evidence that nutritional ketosis can also have performance benefits?
The ketogenic lifestyle can lead to improved energy levels, better sleep habits, and reduced body mass, which can all help you get the most out of your body when it comes to athletic performance.
Throughout the course of our clinical trial with the BIOSENSE™ ketone monitoring device, many participants on the ketogenic diet reported higher and more stable energy levels, improved sleep quality, and better stress tolerance. They contrasted this with the energy and mood swings they experienced when eating a high-carbohydrate diet. Here are just a few of the positive reports from our trial:
- “I felt more awake during the day and more energetic.”
- “I had fewer issues falling asleep and waking up. My energy levels were up during the day.”
- “I had a lot of stress at work while I was doing the trial, and I felt I was able to cope well with it.”
- “I lost 5 pounds in the first week and felt a lot better overall.”
- “I sleep well, and I wake up really rested. I love that! When I eat carbs and sugar, it’s unbelievable how much more sleep I need.”
In addition to this anecdotal evidence, a 12-week study of military personnel found that performance potential was improved among participants who adhered to a ketogenic diet. The study showed that measures of physical performance, such as strength, power, and endurance, were preserved in the ketogenic diet group compared to the control group, even though the ketogenic diet group was in a state of reduced body mass.
This suggests that a state of nutritional ketosis enables improved relative power and strength through the maintenance of existing muscle mass as body fat levels drop.
Why Tracking and Performance Benefits Go Hand in Hand
To achieve these performance benefits, however, you need to approach the ketogenic lifestyle with a strategy for measuring and tracking your ketone levels. Tracking will ensure that your body is reaching the necessary depth and time in nutritional ketosis to see the full benefits. This is true for both physiological and psychological reasons.
For instance, some people find it difficult to reduce their carb intake when they first begin the diet. Measuring ketone levels provides external validation that their efforts are paying off.
Further, just as commitment levels differ across the population, so does individual physiology. All bodies react differently to foods and exercise, so measuring ketone levels is the only way to see definitively which foods and exercises put you deepest into nutritional ketosis.
In our trial, we found that even people who were ostensibly “doing keto” for several months beforehand found they weren’t actually in nutritional ketosis when they began to track their ketones. Despite the perception that they were following a strict diet, their bodies did not adjust as they had expected. By measuring their ketones, they were better able to pinpoint the specific foods that were keeping them from entering and maintaining nutritional ketosis.
To see the greatest benefits from a ketogenic lifestyle, it’s important to consider more than whether you’re in or out of ketosis. In fact, your time and depth in nutritional ketosis are the ultimate indicators of the performance benefits you’ll achieve. And the only way to truly know how to achieve the appropriate level of nutritional ketosis is through precise ketone data measured with the right device.
Better Tracking and Performance Benefits With BIOSENSE™
When it comes to tracking your ketone levels, choosing the right monitoring strategy and device is critical to your success. Ideally, your ketone monitoring device will provide you with easily accessible high-resolution data. Breath monitoring provides the least invasive and most cost-effective route to understanding your metabolism.
However, the majority of breath devices on the market do not provide the granular, high-resolution data that BIOSENSE™ can. Most only report a wide continuum of breath ketone concentrations — a color-coded scheme to indicate general ranges, for example.
Understanding that these wide ranges fail to provide the precise, actionable data necessary to achieve the performance benefits of nutritional ketosis, we intentionally designed BIOSENSE™ to display a precise reading between 0 and 40 ACEs, our unique unit of measurement for breath acetone concentrations. This unit is designed to be easily interpreted by individuals who have previously used blood ketone meters: ACE levels are approximately 10 times the equivalent of BHB levels. So, for example, if your blood meter reads 0.5 mmol/L, your ACE reading would be approximately 5.
In addition to providing this high-resolution ketone information, the BIOSENSE™ device is highly portable, and because it displays your reading directly on the device, you can take it with you anywhere you go (e.g., to the gym or on a run) in order to see how your ketone levels are affecting your performance — and vice versa. This ease of use enables both new and experienced individuals to conveniently and accurately track their depth and time in ketosis over the course of days, weeks, and months to see whether their lifestyle choices are improving their performance levels.
