Keto & Testosterone: Read This Before Starting Your Ketogenic Diet

The ketogenic diet can potentially boost your testosterone levels naturally. Exercising can get you far, but a high-fat, low-carb, and adequate protein diet can optimize your body to produce keto testosterone.

This regimen can also increase the levels of sex hormone binding globulin—SHBG—and androgens—male sex hormones in your body.

The ketogenic diet—keto diet—is a type of dietary regimen. It involves reducing the carbohydrate intake of a person.

It’s used to treat epilepsy in children as well as heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in adults. It is so effective in managing epilepsy that some researches see it as an alternative to anti-epileptic drugs.

As for Alzheimer’s disease, the keto diet can treat or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. This is because glucose metabolism is a major issue in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Improper glucose metabolism can deteriorate normal neurologic functions, and this plays an important role in the development of AD.

When carbohydrates are eliminated or reduced from your diet, your body enters a metabolic state that is known as ketosis.

When you have low glucose levels in your bloodstream, muscles, and liver, your body uses fat as fuel.

Ketosis—which is triggered by undergoing a calorie-restricted diet or by fasting—provides your body and your brain with ketones. When your body enters ketosis, it produces ketones.

Ketones are acids produced by the liver when you have low insulin levels in your bloodstream.

The ketogenic diet has many forms. But two of its major purposes are to reduce your carbohydrate intake and to increase the production of ketones.

The diet forces your body to burn fats instead of carbohydrates.

Some approach only allows you to consume 50g of carbohydrates per day. Other forms involve cycling carbs.

In carb cycling, you alternate between high-carb and low-carb days. The rest of your caloric intake must come from fat sources.

The keto diet makes you increase your fat consumption, but you don’t have to worry about having excess body fats because this regimen maximizes fat loss.

Fat increases the production of sex hormones, including testosterone. Being a high-fat and a low-carbohydrate diet, the ketogenic diet is a natural way to boost your body’s levels of testosterone.

Burning thousands of calories stored in your body fat improves your body’s ability to produce testosterone.

When you eat protein and fat to reduce carbs and to avoid hyperinsulinemia—a condition wherein there are excess levels of insulin in the body, your appetite becomes normal and you burn stored body fat for energy.

DHEA—a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands—affects your body much like testosterone does. It is also converted into estrogen and testosterone.

DHEA or Dehydroepiandrosterone improves muscle mass, decreases cortisol levels, increases libido, and reduces body fat and risks of heart disease.

When you eat high carb foods, your body produces a lot of glucose. High glucose levels trigger your pancreas to produce excess levels of insulin. This lowers DHEA levels.

The imbalance can also strain your adrenal glands, preventing them from producing DHEA. This hampers the body’s production of estrogen and progesterone.

The ketogenic diet can also reverse the effects of hyperinsulinemia and can prevent the development of diabetes.

The ketogenic diet drastically decreases your carbohydrate intake, increases your fat intake, and maximizes fat loss. Once you deplete your body’s stored glucose, ketones are produced.