When it comes to diet culture, there are endless methods to try. One that has remained steadfastly popular over the past couple years is the keto diet. Even if you've never tried it yourself, pictures of keto before and after might have occasionally popped up on your IG feed and maybe even piqued your interest.

Keto is a high-fat, low-carb diet. While it requires somewhat drastic changes to the way you eat, it can also take as little as a week or even a few days for your body to enter ketosis, where your body starts burning fat instead of carbs for energy, says nutritionist Toby Amidor, RD. "Typically, your body uses glucose for energy. But when you're carbs are cut drastically to five to 10 percent of your total caloric intake, your body uses ketone bodies (converted from fat). And that becomes your body's source of energy," she explains.

But just because you go into ketosis quickly doesn't mean the results come in as fast. You're ditching water weight initially, but from there, how much weight you lose depends on how well you stick to the lifestyle. A safe rate of weight loss is between one to two pounds per week, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Because it's so restrictive, this diet isn't really meant to be done long-term, according to Scott Keatley, RD, of Keatley Medical Nutrition Therapy. The best way to determine if the keto diet is for you is to talk about it with your doctor.

If you're doing or planning to start the keto diet and in need of some serious inspo, look no further than the inspirational keto success stories below.

Meet the experts: Toby Amidor, RD, is a nutritionist and the author of The Family Immunity Cookbook.

Scott Keatley, RD, is a nutritionist at Keatley Medical Nutrition Therapy.

Make these 93 impressive keto transformation before-and-after photos your go-to source for motivation (because we all have those days!).

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