I’ve been religiously following keto for 5 days. I am barely moving the needle on the keto strips. I would have thought by now that I would be in ketosis. Any thoughts/suggestions?
Cannot get into Ketosis
Momof5
(Susan)
#3
Welcome to the forum, Melissa – be patient =)).
I have been on Keto since February 2019 and I have lost 69 pounds so far and I have never used any Keto strips or monitored my ketosis in any way soooo please don’t worry about this too much, and don’t rely too much on those strips.
Relax and just Keto on as @KetoRocks has said above.
If you have any questions, please ask us, we all want to help you =).
KidKeto
(Cristian Lopez)
#4
By Keto strips do you mean the urine strips? Because from personal experience, my ketone blood meter reads me at 0.6 mmol/l (ketosis) 15 hours into my fast but the strips dont show nothing, ever, and from two different brands! I feel like the ketone urine strips have a lot of room for failure, like how long you’ve been keto (which makes the amount of ketones you urine lower since your body uses them up), your hydration level, did you drink alcohol, did you just wake up or are you getting back from a work out.
I honestly felt cheated by purchasing my meter when it came to me. Dont chase ketones, chase results! Lets say your meter reads 0 but your still losing weight and feeling good, than your body is doing something with all that fat you eat! 
In the end, I even branched off to becoming paleo because I figured out what foods did and did not work!
Vic0628
(Vic)
#6
Check for hidden carbs, many things like cheeses can say 0 carbs on the package but do contain some carbs like .4 for cheddar .6 for mozz,Eggs I believe have .6 Also things like tums have carbs cold med and so forth
I also make sure I portion size with things like nuts
Weigh things portion size things
Also, Although now I drink black coffee,When I started, I needed to learn to watch how much HC I put in coffee,
Carbs can be sneaky
KetoType2
(UsedToBeT2D)
#7
The urine strips are worthless. Buy a $50 ketone meter. In any case, it’s too early for you.
David_Stilley
(Full Metal KETO AF)
#8
Welcome Mellisa, I totally agree with @OgreZed, if you’ve been keeping carbs under 20g daily you’re in ketosis. Usually three days max does that. I like @Momof5 have never once tested, going on two years now. I lost about 70 lbs trusting the process. Right now I just eat what I want because my choices fit my keto diet without tracking. Eventually I hope all of us can learn to eat and maintain weight effortlessly because we should be able to sense our needs naturally as nature intended, look at all the others in the animal kingdom and we’re the only chronic over eaters if the lot. That’s modern industrial junk convenience food at work. Keeping your diet simple helps too. Don’t go off the deep end making and eating keto replacement recipes and deserts. Save that stuff to try in a few months if you can do without them and stay on track. If you feel like going off try one and see if it satisfies your cravings enough to keep going forward with KETO. It gets easier the longer you’re doing it, at least that’s my experience and the route I took coming in. I didn’t even experiment with nuts and berries for the first three months as some recommended and I think that worked out for the best in my case. I didn’t taste chocolate for the first four months and when I did it wasn’t as enjoyable as I remembered because my taste buds had changed significantly leaving out all sweet stuff. 
atomicspacebunny
(Bunny)
#9
Some other things to be aware of, if you are highly active those urine strips will test negative even though you are probably producing lots of ketones the glycogen comes in from muscle then insulin flows to wipe out the ketones.
I use to play the urine strip game constantly; as soon as I moved with lots of muscular force it would go negative then go to relaxed mode next 15 minutes it would go dark purple on the strip.