Doubts galore in the lives of people who are trying to lose weight. Diet or exercise? Yoga or Pilates? Strength or cardio? GM diet or Mediterranean? Vegan or Keto? Questions are aplenty.

Does tracking calories really count when you’re trying to lose weight, or is it more effective to improve the quality of what you eat? While a lot of people are now going for vegan or ketogenic diet, and some oscillating between the two, nutritionist Tapasya Mundhra gives us a wide picture of the two diet regimes.

KETO DIET:

Keto diet is a low carbohydrate diet, where you are having more fat and protein and eliminating the carbs from the diet. By consuming the diet our body starts composing the ketones in the liver. A ketosis is an approach of eliminating the carbohydrate intake with the fat intake. The less consumption of carbs is incredibly efficient for burning fat for energy. Keto diet doesn’t do starvation of calories but starvation of carbohydrates.

Since our bodies preferentially use carbs for energy. Cutting them means we have to use something else to keep organs functioning. Then our body turns to the glucose stored in our muscles as glycogen for fuel. When we break down muscles glycogen we lose water weight, because our muscles store about 3 grams of water for every gram of glycogen. That’s why when someone loses weight in just one week from keto plan is likely losing water weight, not necessarily real weight that stays off overtimes.

The reason why keto plan failed most of us is that they are not sustainable for the long term. And once we have the keto diet and come back to normal food, all the weight comes back immediately with glycogen storage and you see a weight gain.

Since restriction for life is impossible to cut back on ultra-process, high carb food like sugary beverages and tons of refined grains add more nutritious carb choices like veggies, legumes, low-fat dairy.

Keto diet can actually increase your risk for kidney and liver problems plus osteoporosis. Since carb-filled foods contain the highest amount of water and dietary fibre, deleting them from your diet may cause you constipation and increased risk of GI cancers and decreased your immune function in future.

VEGAN DIET:

A vegan diet means it focuses on plant-based foods and beverages and eliminates all animal product. That means, in the vegan diet you are eliminating dairy and eggs as well. And in the vegan diet you are allowed to have veggies, fruits, beans, nuts, and grains. Eliminating animal foods will make you lack in B12 which lead to tiredness, weakness, and constipation. So you need to have food which is high in B12 and high in protein source.

Eliminating animal food with junk food is not a vegan diet. If you are eating white bread, pasta and other packaged food are not going to help you in terms of health and weight loss. So try to have more green veggies, fruits, and Lentils.

Some people turned to a vegan diet thinking that will make them lose weight. But a vegan diet is not automatically a low-carb or low-fat diet. In a vegan diet, you also have to be careful of what you are eating and how much quantity you are eating. Not eating all the saturated fat from cheese and meat, and eating fibre-rich plants instead. They tend to be lower in calories so from a weight-loss perspective, that’s a good idea to make you feel fuller on fewer calories.

The vegan diet could reduce your risk of any kind of cancers; it can improve your heart health and lower the risk of metabolic syndromes.