Can’t figure out urine test strips

(John) #1

Hi everybody. I am fairly new here, I have been on the keto diet for four weeks. I check the labels for carbs protein and fat before eating anything. I have done really good without cheating. On the first week of keto I bought some urine test strips. And have been testing my urine for ketosis every day Sometimes multiple times a day. During my research I read that the longer you go without food the higher your Keytone should be. However I have noticed that if I don’t eat breakfast or lunch and test for key tones in my urine About 3:00 pm , my Keytones show a much lower amount in the mid afternoon than they were in the morning. This does not make sense to me.

I just got back from a 4 day road trip with my wife and daughter and carefully watched what I ate during the trip. I made sure to stick with appropriate items. I had 4- 1/8 th pound hamburger patties with two slices of cheese for dinner last night because we were at McDonald’s and that was one of the only options I had. This morning my key tones were registering about .5 on the Keytone strips. I did not eat breakfast or lunch but measured my Keytone’s at 3 PM right after eating the first thing today, a Polish dog. The Polish dog had 4 g of carbs. My urine is showing little to no key tones this afternoon.

I did read that measuring Keytone’s with urine strips after you’ve been in ketosis a while is not all that accurate. Can somebody please let me know why my Keytone strips are showing so low.

Thank you.

(John) #2

A few more things about myself for information you may need. I am 48 years old, male and weigh 212 pounds now. I started at 232 lbs four weeks ago. I am using the carb manager app. I have kept my total carbs below 20 g for the last four weeks. Most days it is under 10 g. I do walk daily and sometimes take jogs or go hiking up some hills. Sometimes my protein gets a little high but I try and keep the fat and protein and carbs all in check. About a week and a half ago I tried to intermittent fast for a few days. I had no problem going from dinner around 7 PM to lunch/dinner at about 3 to 4 PM the next day without anything in between. I did this for about four days. This is when I started to notice that my Keytone’s later in the day before eating were lower than in the morning, but they always measured some trace. Today I had a hard time telling if it measured anything.

#3

If you’re sticking to 20 net carbs per day, you’ll be in ketosis.

#4

Hi John,
One thing that I noticed about the urine strips is that they are a lagging indicator of ketone level. I usually do Intermittent Fasting (IF) while on Keto but was bad over the holidays. One dinner I had a large amount of alcohol, definitely more then 30g of carbs. When I woke up in the morning and tested my urine, the measurements were showing as ‘high’, but not because my body was producing a lot of ketones at the time, but because I had ketones in my blood but after I drank alcohol my body stopped using the ketones and started to use the alcohol for fuel instead, so I had an excess, thus the high rating.

By the afternoon (no food) I was showing that I had a ‘trace’ amount of ketones.

So my theory, and smarter more experienced people here can correct me if I’m wrong, is that your body was creating ketones even when you were asleep but because of lack of activity you weren’t utilizing them efficiently so many of them were discarded in your urine. When you started to move around and do things, those ketones started to go to work, thus less in your urine. My bet was that by around bedtime that your ketone levels would be higher.

(Little Miss Scare-All) #5

Random story: I’m a born and raised NJ person. I moved out to Illinois for a year and a half back in 2016. Whilst out there, I got a job at a nuclear power plant, working in the cafeteria cooking and doing food prep. My boss gave me the days menu and to start prepping. The menu said “Today’s Special: Polish”. I thought it was a typo. “…Polish…Polish what?” I thought to myself. So I said to my boss that I think there’s a typo, because this just says the word POLISH. She’s like “uhhh…like a Polish sausage?” And I said “but how are people supposed to know its a sausage??”, she laughed at me and said everyone knows what a Polish is around here. Id never heard of such a thing. We dont call them that here at alllllll. Kielbasa, various wursts; sure. But just the word “Polish” said in NJ means literally a Polish person, and not any kind of slang for a type of sausage.

(John) #6

Yep that’s funny. I have always known them as polish.

Costco-Removes-Polish-Hot-Dog-From-Food-Court-Menu
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(John) #7

Mavro, thanks for that explanation, I guess the ketones in our urine are just extra ketones our bodies did not use. If our body is using all the ketones that it is making, then that might mean less waste ketones in the urine. So maybe at the end of a fast, if we were active enough to burn the ketones our body produced, then our urine might be low in ketones. In the morning since dinner had a large portion of fat and we didn’t do much exercise during the evening or while sleeping, there would be extra ketones produced from the fatty foods we ate like you stated.

There you go, I just reiterated what you just said above. We will go with that for now until there is a better explanation.

Thank you.

(Little Miss Scare-All) #8

My dad is all about those hot dogs :rofl::rofl:

#9

Polish??? That looks like a regular frankfurter to me.

(John) #10

The Kirkland polish dinner franks aren’t your ordinary Oscar Meyer wieners, but they probably don’t come close to stacking up against a real home stuffed polish sausage.