Aaaaaand i caved (cheated)

(Dan Kirwin Jr ) #1

Morning everyone!
Ive only been following a strict keto diet for about 2 weeks now. Up til last night ive kept my total carb intake at or below 20g with about 10-12 being dietary, the remainder net. Ive been using the urine test strips to test for the presence of ketones(as i know its not the most accurate). For the past week and a half ive been expelling average between 40 and 80 mg/dL. Granted its not a read for whats in my blood.
All that being said, last night at a friends house i started consuming some low 0 carb vodka tonics (started the night with good intentions)and after a few drinks i stumbled upon my friends snack cabinet… needless to say “just one gummy worm” turned into an onslaught of sugar intake :flushed:. Dove chocolate, mike and ikes, smart food… i mean i was like an underfed ravenous beast. Obviously it was a poor choice, but like most things its in the past and im moving forward with my keto diet and not looking back.
My curiosity is this- i did a urine analysis this a.m. (after my late night binge) and still had light trace amounts of keytones(roughly 15mg/dL). I figured this was just what was left over and that it would soon be depleted. I continued my morning routine as alway with my morning coffee with grass fed butter and MCT oil, but this time assuming that id have to push like it was day one to get my body into ketosis and was planning to fast throughout the day. After an hour i rechecked and im back up to the darker shades between 40 and 80mg/dL. Has anyone else had an experience similar to this? And i guess the broader question would be, if the body has high carbs does it still create keytones?

Thanks!

(Christy) #2

Hi, Dan! Glad you didn’t decide to give up after your slip up! Welcome!

I have had 2 similar incidents where I carbed pretty hard (well over 100g) & was never knocked out of ketosis. Everyone has their own unique threshold. On the flip side, I definitely didn’t feel well, I had zero energy, my weight loss halted for several days & I even gained about a pound.

It happens … keep that “move forward” attitude & it’ll be all good :grinning:

(Little Miss Scare-All) #3

Gummy worms, even! Hey man, it’s all good. I messed up horribly with cake a couple weeks ago. There’s.going to be times we all eat stuff that kicks us out of ketosis. I was out of ketosis with the cake,.but it didnt show up immediately. I was in ketosis for the next half day, but then boom, I was at .2 and .1.

It happens. Try not to get down by it. Just keep yourself 20g or less and keep going. Ketosis always comes back and youll be as you were.

sings We’re only huuuuumannnn, bornnn to make mistaaaaaaakes - Human League

(Scott) #4

It can happen, get over it and KCKO

Next time put down the gummies and slowly back away so nobody gets hurt.

#5

You should make an alcohol consumption rule: only bacon with booze. Cheeseburger on salad if desperate. But seriously, bacon goes best with alcohol, as does butter, cheese, nuts, lard, and anything fat. Bring your own bacon if not at home.

(Dan Kirwin Jr ) #6

Love the responses, thanks everyone. I had some theories as to how i may escape a little more unscathed than had i not been consuming alcohol. Ive been living with celiac for almost 10 years so my gut knowledge is decent. Alcohol is an inflammatory for individuals who dont drink often. I know when the digestive tract is inflamed your body absorbs less nutrients and is focused on burning off the alcohol. Inflammation is like a “fight or flight” natural respone. Im curious if the combination may have eased my, what would have been catastrophic, carb intake to less than what it would have been had i not been consuming alcohol. Regardless im not feeling the best today lol. Im just gonna continue to monitor for science sake. Thanks for the input everyone! Keep calm, and Keto on!

(Charlotte) #7

Hey Dan! Been there done that! I would bounce back really quickly in the beginning and after a few months I stopped bouncing back so quickly… Now if I cheat it takes me about a week or two to get back to where I was. In my personal experience I think in the beginning your not fat adapted so its easier to recover because your body knows what to do with the sugar and carbs, but after you’re adapted it takes much longer because your body had to figure out how to process the large amounts of junk all over again. But thats just me… So my warning is that quick recoveries don’t last, be very careful in the future.

#8

Well, I wouldn’t be trying more experimentation on this. Let’s just say you dodged a bullet and move on. :slight_smile:

I think @Luckymisslucy makes a good point. Your body is still adapting from burning glucose to burning fat, so I wouldn’t be too quick to to assume much about this episode.

Let’s just say you had an educational moment on how to avoid risky situations. Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dan. You’ve just started, and you’ve got the rest of you life to enjoy the benefits of keto. :+1:

(Dan Kirwin Jr ) #9

No I have zero intentions in having a repeat episode lol. By monitoring i meant checking my progress today as time progresses. Im skeptical that i got away with last night completely unscathed, proof is in this a.m.'s not so pleasant feeling. I think @Luckymisslucy hit the nail on the head more than likely. I was surprised to see ketones this a.m., even though small, but im grateful that i didnt take myself completely off track, granted i probably wont be as lucky in the future.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #10

There are a bunch of things going on. Here’s my guess what happened. While alcohol metabolism is not supposed to interfere with ketogenesis, ingesting enough carbohydrate will raise insulin to the point where ketogenesis comes to a halt. Insulin also instructs the muscles to burn glucose as a priority over ketones and fatty acids, so what I suspect happened is that your muscles and brain switched to consuming glucose, leaving your ketones to continue circulating. Remember that testing for ketones only measures the quantity going around, not how much you are making or metabolising. Since you were neither producing not consuming, you continued to get a reading.

ETA: Since you are still new to this way of eating, your liver is producing enough ketones to waste in your urine. It makes sense that they would continue being wasted during the period you weren’t using them. Then, as you discontinued eating sugar and all the glucose finally got cleared from your blood, your insulin dropped, your liver started making ketones again, and your kidneys resumed excreting them at the same high level they had been at before.

(Dan Kirwin Jr ) #11

@PaulL definitely a sound explaination and more than likely part of what’s going on. Im assuming that my body is not utilizing said ketones at the moment, and may not for a few days til im back on track for a couple of days. Ive been floating around the idea of getting the breath meter. While i know its not as accurate as the blood test, i dont think ill be able to the blood test lol. Call me a whimp and ill agree. Im curious what everyones experience or knowledge with the breath meter is? Is it a good indicator for ketosis even if not as accurate as the blood test? I know the urine test is basically null and void for knowing if youre in ketosis. Its simply a tool for detecting ketones

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #12

I’m not entirely clear how you are using your terms. You are definitely producing ketone bodies, if you are eating less than 20 g/day of carbohydrate, and your body is using them, because you are not eating enough glucose to feed every cell that needs it. I personally consider that “being in ketosis.”

On the other hand, the definition of “nutritional ketosis” devised by Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek is a serum β-hydroxybutyrate level of 0.5 mmol/dL or above, though they admit that it’s somewhat arbitrary.

The thing you will hear on the forums over and over again (and it’s true) is that the breath and urine measurements are ketones that are being excreted, so they are useful really only to show that your liver is actually making ketones.

But to some extent that is true of the blood measurement as well, since it is measuring circulating ketones, not the amount being made by our liver or the amount the rest of our body is using. @richard has a formula for calculating how much we are actually producing, but I don’t trust myself to do it justice. Perhaps we can persuade him to post it here and explain it himself.

(Dan Kirwin Jr ) #13

Ah gotcha. See all the reading ive been doing and i was put under the impression that high levels of ketones in the urine wasnt accurate for knowing your mmol/L and that a blood test was the most accurate way to test. Not privy on the breathalyzer. If someone were trying to find the most accurate mmol/L urine wouldnt suffice because level of hydration plays a factor and only suggests unused ketones processed by the kidneys out of the blood. Its very subjective, or atleast so i thought. I know optimal is 1.5 -3.0mmol/L for fat burn, i was just curious if the breathalyzer was more accurate than urine.

(Jane) #14

I have a breathalyzer and a ketone blood meter.

The numbers on the breathalyzer do not correlate at all to blood ketone numbers, but it WILL confirm you are burning fat from ketones (can’t tell the difference between plate fat and body fat) and my n=1 is the numbers climbed every day I fasted until I broke my fast and it blows 0 when I know I ate too many carbs. Cheap way to verify fat burning and whether you overdid the carbs.

I thought my cheapie was broken because I kept blowing zero so I drank a rum and Diet Coke and set it off big time. It was sneaky carbs and lazy tracking on my part. I tightened my belt after that!

I like the data from my blood meter and finally bought one after a year on keto. Not anything you need to go keto. The test strips are spendy so I only use it if fasting for multiple days as a curiosity.

(Marianne) #15

For real? Does this help?

#16

Depends on what you need help with. It doesn’t stop alcohol consumption, but it helps with not eating carbage. Who needs chocolate if they have bacon… Fat is also a better with alcohol than carbs. Carbs will cause much more discomfort the day after.

#17

Truer words have never been said.

That’s a great tag line, @Taka! You should use it. :slight_smile:

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #18

True, but bacon-wrapped chocolate is nothing to sneeze at, you know. Just saying. :smile:

(Richard Morris) #19

When we are forced to make glucose we steal one of the important intermediaries in the kreb cycle - which is this set of 7 reactions that go around in a circle turning our fuel into energy. It’s a molecule called oxaloacetate. What that means is that when we make glucose in our livers we stall out our cells ability to turn fuel into energy - although practically we’re just stopping one in every few cycles not completely stalling the process. What happens to fuel showing up to be converted? Well it gets turned into a ketone, namely acetoacetate.

That’s the one we measure excreted in urine. It’s the first one we make, and it’s the only one we directly burn for energy. The problem is that if you leave a beaker of acetoacetate on a bench, and come back the next day most of it will have turned into acetone and carbon dioxide. It does that spontaneously. We can’t directly use acetone for energy. It’s a wasteful process, we end up outgassing it from our lungs and the surface of our skin. It’s why when you’re in ketosis your breath may smell slightly of nail polish remover. That’s what we measure in breath - acetone.

Our body has a trick for stopping that waste - we can convert acetoacetate (AcAc) to and from a shelf stable molecule called betahydroxybutyrate (BOHB). Now BOHB is water soluble so we can store a reserve of that in our 5 Litres of circulating blood. That’s what we measure in blood tests for ketones. The strips contain the enzyme that converts BOHB into AcAC and in the process they release an electron that we can measure.

If you want to measure how many ketones you are making - acetoacetate is what you are making but there is a problem measuring it. The amount of acetoacetate in our urine is the amount we made - the amount we used for energy - the amount that turned into acetone - the amount we converted into BOHB x our kidney’s efficiency at filtering it out. Lot of factors.

But what is useful is breath acetone is a ratio of the acetoacetate you made. So measuring acetone is a good proxy for creation of acetoacetate.

Measuring BOHB is a good proxy for how much your brain has, because the amount in the brain varies linearly with the concentration in the blood. The higher concentration in your blood, the more makes it across the blood brain barrier. So in terms of neurological effects BOHB is a good proxy for the outcome of ketone production.

Is that the formula you meant?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #20

Judging from how much my head hurts, after reading that, yes. Thanks, @richard!