Going Keto? Here's The One Time Of Month Women Should Eat More Carbs

The ketogenic diet—a low-carb, high-fat, moderate-protein approach to eating—continues to gain steam with testimonials of significant weight loss, mental clarity, reduced inflammation, and more. As a functional medicine practitioner seeking to address the root causes of chronic conditions, I often use the ketogenic diet with women and men for the benefits above as well as to mellow out the mood and reduce anxiety. 

In my book The Anti-Anxiety Diet, I share how ketones have the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier serving to reduce oxidative stress in the brain, supporting optimal neurotransmitter signaling and directly influencing GABA, a powerful inhibitory neurotransmitter that reduces the fight-or-flight response, serving to provide a grounding anti-anxiety effect.

That said, in some individuals—and particularly among women who are stressed out and/or have a lower body fat percentage—a long-term keto diet can cause imbalances in the body that counteract some of these benefits. The good news: This can be avoided or resolved by incorporating something called carb cycling into your keto diet. 

While keto can be a magic bullet for metabolism and mood, it can also throw you into an imbalanced state if you're not careful. That's because it's technically a stressor on your body and contributes to your overall allostatic load—the cumulative impact of stressors, both physiological and mental, on the hormonal and regulatory function of the body. 

The ketogenic diet generally has a favorable impact on hormones. Case in point: Insulin resistance is often seen with hormone imbalance, but a reduction in carbs in your diet aids in the reduction of insulin levels in the body and thus supports insulin sensitivity—which can help prevent or reverse diabetes. Additionally, hormones are produced from fat, so a high-fat diet aids in hormone production. This is why many people see fantastic outcomes using a ketogenic diet to support PCOS, hypothalamic amenorrhea, and fertility struggles.

Beyond insulin and sexual hormone production, leptin, a hormone of satiety and metabolic regulation, is affected by the ketogenic diet. Leptin—produced by fat cells and in the small intestine in response to consumption of fat—helps suppress appetite, and this is a primary reason many people on keto see a significant reduction in hunger and cravings. Leptin also has an impact on excitatory neurotransmitters in the brain, serving as one of the mechanisms by which the ketogenic diet reduces seizure activity and anxiety. 

Leptin can be seen in excess in obese and overweight individuals, and at high levels, leptin's signals become resistant—which can trigger overeating. The ketogenic diet, which includes dietary consumption of fat and supports the mobilization of body fat in the production of ketones, will naturally reduce leptin levels, aiding in optimal leptin signaling in overweight individuals who were previously in a state of leptin resistance, which can help curb hunger.

However, individuals who are at a low body fat percentage, or who are over-stressing the body with mental demands, calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, or too much exercise, are ramping up their allostatic load and setting themselves up for declining leptin levels—which, over time, can drive anxiety, insomnia, and hunger. And because leptin has a significant influence on the thyroid and ovaries, individuals with hypothyroidism, and menstruating women leading a high-stress lifestyle who don't carry extra body fat, are especially susceptible to leptin imbalances when they enter ketosis. This can interfere with thyroid hormone production, throw off a woman's cycle, and suppress hormone production.

Carb cycling on a keto diet means you are intentionally increasing carbohydrate intake during specific times of the month to ensure that leptin levels don't get depleted and the body maintains an active metabolic balance—as opposed to increasing the body's stress response, causing potential imbalances in the body. 

For the majority of your keto diet, you'll be consuming somewhere in the range of 30 to 60 grams of total carbs per day, give or take a bit, depending on your activity levels. But when you carb cycle, you'll be consuming an additional 45 to 60 grams of carbs per day—for a total of 75 to 120 grams of carbs—for two days of your cycle. 

Typically, I recommend carb cycling on days 19 and 20 of your cycle (which is five days post-ovulation), when leptin levels are naturally the lowest. This is also when your body is supposed to be making the most progesterone, but often, women who are under a lot of stress aren't able to produce enough progesterone due to a phenomenon called pregnenolone steal, which diverts the building blocks of progesterone to produce the stress hormone cortisol. Upping your carb intake at this time helps take some of the stress off your body so you're able to produce appropriate levels of progesterone and enjoy overall hormonal balance. It's also best to carb cycle in the evening to support serotonin and melatonin demands, and to help your body enter a parasympathetic rest-and-digest state. 

I recommend trying the above approach for a few cycles and seeing how you feel. (Using a period-tracking app like Clue can be incredibly helpful in determining where you are in your cycle.) But, if it doesn't seem to be helping, you can experiment with carb cycling on days 1 and 2 of your menstrual cycle—which is the very start of your period and the other point in your cycle when leptin levels are lowest. This can be a nice way to support your body as it undergoes the process of shedding the uterine lining.

When carb cycling, you will likely experience an increase in satiety, reduction in cravings, deeper sleep, and improved hormone regulation and thyroid function. Additionally, incorporating carbs once a month into a ketogenic diet may also aid in supporting your microbiome and antioxidant status—thanks to the diversity of fibers and phytocompounds in nutrient-rich, moderate-to-high-carb foods—while supporting metabolic flexibility and providing food freedom to help remove the potential fear associated with carb consumption.