Hi there! Am new to all this, so would really love to get some expert / seasoned Keto advice!! Have just started to be intentionally “Keto” (was already low carb as I’ve been generally following an anti-inflammatory diet) over the past few days. I started my day today pleasantly surprised that I my blood reading was 1.3! I ate “properly” this afternoon, but still dropped to .7. I got the reading after a nap, so I wasn’t all that worried. But then I ate dinner, which was a couple of eggs, spinach, onion with a bit of goat cheese (cooked in olive oil) followed by a small orange and about 6 strawberries. I took my third reading for the day about an hour after my meal and didn’t even register on the meter*!!!?!? And yes, I did a second reading to make sure I didn’t do it wrong - same result. What the what!?! How can I drop that much in one day? Especially when my food intake was exactly what it should have been according to all of the books / forums (and to mention it, it wasn’t a stressful day at all and my workout was relatively light). How can it drop so far so fast!?! And I get that oranges & strawberries have carbs, but not over 30g!!?! Can someone please explain what might be happening? In advance - thank you!!!
Help! Huge drop in blood readings in just one day...!?!
Orange and strawberries could easily give you enough sugar in one shot to cause you to not register ketones.
What are your goals with a ketogenic way of eating?
There are certainly many therapeutic reasons someone may want to maintain a certain level of ketones, but for general weight loss and/or repair of metabolic issues, the ketone level doesn’t really matter. It’s simply a path to fat adaptation.
OK, so a “small orange” could easily be 9g+, and six medium strawberries another 4g. That’s in addition to the eggs (1g+), onion (5g+ in a small one) and spinach (1.4/100g).
Adds up VERY quickly if you’re not careful, especially in one hit.
Thanks for your response, Baytowvin. I can’t say that I have specific goals WRT ketogentic eating (just yet) - as I haven’t fully committed (e.g. Im not measuring each gram of food I eat in a day - I’ve done that in the past and have proven that I am - yet again - a freak of nature. FYI: Multiple doctors can’t seem to figure out what is wrong with me beyond a frighteningly high C-reactive reading (>16!!). I’ve been doing research to see if keto could be the right way for me to go (especially as I know that low carb/sugar eating is what is best for me) - and part of that has been to measure my ketone levels over the past couple of days to see where Im at.
I was freaked out to see that it could drop so much so fast, especially after eating so few carbs over the course of a single day (aren’t we allowed ~ 5%? If so, a small orange and a couple of strawberries don’t seem to be enough to take a person from .7 to nothing in the span of less than two hours…). Here is the interesting thing… Im back up to .8 this morning… so maybe it was a reading issue?
Thanks for the response, Juice. I think my question was really how could an “approved keto meal” (BTW: it wasn’t a full onion… maybe 2 tbs chopped) could drop me from .7 to no ketones in less than two hours. It seems to take some people weeks to get into ketosis… is it really so simple for a single meal to kick one out of it (especially a meal without grains or a genuinely high carb content…)?
It is the sugar in the fruit, I have to agree with @Baytowvin. That sugar increased the blood glucose and your body burned it before using ketones for fuel. Ketones are produced by active fat burning if there is no glucose to use first. So when you are burning glucose, ketones will not registered because the glucose is being used, not fat
The reason it takes a while to get into ketosis is that you have to get through the glycogen stores in the muscles and liver. Once that is done and the body has to start burning fat, you’re in ketosis. If you then give yourself a boost of sugar (orange and strawberries) that can go right to the bloodstream, then ketosis shuts off for a while because you have a nice supply of fresh gycogen until that is used up.
That orange is full of ready-to-burn sugars, so that’s probably what did it. You’ll go back into ketosis soon if you don’t keep supplying the quick-use carbs.
I’ve eaten six whole strawberries at once but those were the only carbs during that meal - as dessert with a little whipped cream. Add that plus an orange plus the onions and that probably gave your body enough easily used sugars to tip the balance.
The other folks who talked about your cumulative carbs are right. Until you are fat-adapted (which takes anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months), your body will JUMP at any chance you give it to use carbs for energy. You must keep your glycogen stores depleted and eat very low carbs (under 20) to force your body to get used to using ketones. Once that happens, it’s easier for your body to switch back & forth if you eat more carbs than that occasionally.
I’ve never seen any place that recommended eating oranges on keto. Do you have a link?
I’m not really sure what either of these things really mean, TBH. Everyone is different, everyone processes different foods in different ways, so there’s not real “approval” mechanism, per se. And if there was, your meal wouldn’t really fit into it anyway, IMHO, for the reasons I gave above. There’s a BIG difference between eating an orange (fructose) and getting the same number of carbs from other sources such as vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, etc.
I saw the orange in the original post, and my first thought was, “why?”.
Oranges (as well as most fruits) contain FRUCTOSE and Sucrose. Sucrose will easily be changed into glucose, which can easily shut down ketosis. FRUCTOSE on the other hand is the devil. Talk about a double whammy. Fructose puts your body into fat storage mode (iirc) because our bodies can’t use it for energy as is. First it gets converted to fat, then stored (which I think is will shut down ketosis as well, can’t store and burn at same time). Fructose is really a guarantee fat maker if I understood how it works correctly.
Okay - thanks all for your responses. I understood how the sugars in the orange / strawberries would move my keto number down, but it is now much clearer that the impact is a lot bigger than I originally thought it would be. Like I said, I have only been considering the keto diet and have been gathering information to see if it is right for me and my particular health situation. I now have a lot more to consider and discuss with my doctor. Best to all