Help I'm so confused

#21

I lost on Keto and then fell off the wagon and gained 2 stone. I returned to Keto but was in the same boat as you. I posted on here and got some great advice - search the post ‘Too much protein - need advice’. Unfortunately I fell off the wagon again at Christmas and regained 2 stone! I went back to keto 5 weeks ago and like you I lost in the first week but nothing since and I know it’s because I’m making the same mistakes as the first time I returned to Keto. I’ve just re-read the ‘Too much protein - need advice’ post and I’m going to start taking the advice today and hopefully start to lose again…! (Thanks again to everyone for their great advice and help on that post).

(bulkbiker) #22

So looks like diet drinks aren’t that good for you…
Eat plenty of carb free food and give it some time… I’ve no idea if you are male or female but for women I’m afraid it can take more time to adapt especially if you’ve been trying to diet in other ways as your body might need some “healing” time before it decides to drop some weight.

(Confused!) #23

Thanks Mark. I’m the dreaded female. Not been dieting for a while. Only thing it could be is the Diet Coke or medication :+1:

(bulkbiker) #24

If you want to really bump start things maybe try eggs and bacon with tea, coffee (with a small amount of cream if necessary) or water for a week. Cook the eggs in butter or the bacon grease. Eat that for every meal maybe 2 or 3 max per day and don’t snack in between.
Yes it may be “boring” although personally I love it but for 7 days it will be pretty sure to get you into ketosis. You don’t have to weigh or count anything… just eat until you feel you’ve had enough without being stuffed.
I have any extra bacon cold or reheat.
See how you feel after that. Pretty much a zero carb diet in a nutshell.

#25

Hi Bailey,
I agree with a lot of the advice I’ve seen given already. When I first started this WOL over six yrs ago, a wise old dr advised me I was insulin resistant. His belief (now mine as well) was that anything sweet created an insulin reaction in your body whether it was artificial or real. If you’re like me, I nursed a can of soda all day long, as I didn’t like the taste in my mouth. Keto does that. But his belief was that I was keeping my body in a constant state of insulin production as long as I had the soda in my hand.
Toss the sugar free mints and the mint flavored mouthwash as you don’t have to swallow to get the reaction. Following his direction I was able to break the stall and see some remarkable weight loss.
The Keto lifestyle was spun from LCHF which stood for low carb high fat. Low carb, high fat, moderate protein. Swap those percentages, lose the sodas and I’ll bet you see better results. Good luck.

#26

Also you mention Keto Tex Mex. I take it you’re referring to a casserole? Make sure you’re making your own spice mix. commercially prepared mixes almost use sugar and corn starch. Search out sugar free recipes and make your own.

(hottie turned hag) #27

@bailey22 I second that emotion. I’ve been doing this since Aug 2017 and never counted cals/macros/ketones and lost a LOT (60+) lbs and am now 116lb.
Struggling to get last 10lbs off, I recently began to read more about ratios and am V CONFUSED as well! :thinking:
Not that I don’t understand what I’m reading, rather that some recommendations work at times (up fat, say) and not at others/in other cases.

Having much med sci background I KNOW and preach that medicine is -should be- case by case and not by protocol. I know one adjusts tx to suit the case and should do so based upon pt reaction not protocol and sometimes treat symptoms (soft data) despite labs (hard data) that may conflict but all this having to adjust/switch things up just to achieve goal is confounding me and exasperating AF!

I can tell you that until I got to these last 10lbs, it may encourage you to hear that it was EFFORTLESS and I counted NOTHING as stated above. All I did (didn’t even know I was doing “keto” at the time) was eliminate ALL carbs and I mean, all, except what was inherent to the few veg (cabbage, peppers, tomatoes, celery, avocado -not a veg-) I included, no artificial sweeteners, no snacking, ate (still do) once/24h.
Effortless I tell you and that’s why I got spoiled by the ease of it and my awesome results until these last 10 maddening pounds :japanese_goblin:

Neither should have any effect on weight loss.

(Todd Batitis) #28

Perhaps I missed it (don’t think so) but it would be very helpful to put your real life stats in here. The specific numbers for someone who is 4 feet tall and 400 pounds are not the same as they are for someone who is 6 feet tall and 400 pounds and BOTH of them would require different things from someone who is 5 feet tall, 150 pounds with a BMI of 29.3 who is NEEDS to not gain anymore weight because they have a wedding dress that they had fittet at 110 pounds and a BMI of 21.5.

Noone here is going to judge you based on your numbers but we also can’t accurately know what you should be eating without knowing them. I could tell you that I am eating 25g or less of net carbs, 105g Protein and 176g of fat and between 1800-2800 calories a day but that means nothing without knowing whether I was the 6 foot tall man at 356 pounds where I started or the 195 pound man I am today who is much more metabolically healthy and less than 10 pounds from my goal of 187 (which would be 200 pounds down from my known peak).

My advice to you is to log everything you eat, in grams. Weight it unless it is pre-packaged (if the sausage says they are 85g each… they are gonna be pretty close). Go into My Fitness Pal or Cronometer and set it for a sedentary lifestyle with a macro breakdown of 5% carbs/20% protein and 75% fat. Pay less attention to the calories but strive to hit your macros and you can adjust your macros to whatever you need to get it to around 20g in the end so if you are very short it might be 3% for something like that to get it to around 20g. Subtract your fiber intake from your total carb intake to get your net carbs and keep it there. So if you eat a lot of high fiber food (such as a chia seed pudding) it might say 14g carb and 12g fiber so only 2g count toward your total.

You are already doing 16:8 intermittent fasting, good. The more fat you have the easier it is to do that and longer. I have been doing daily 20:4 IF for just under a year and it amplifies the results with keto since they both work on the same principle, reducing the need for insulin and giving your body more time accessing fat stores.

As for your diet cokes. I routinely have diet sodas but ONLY during my eating window. While they may not cause a glucose spike, for many people they can create an insulin response so if you are taking them outside your 8 hour eating window they can interrupt your fasting time and slow things down. Taking the meds is fine though. Not long ago I did a 69 hour water fast and still took not only my gout medication but the other 12 supplements I also take and had no problem with staying in ketosis.

Your macros are a bit backwards for this kind of thing and it is easy to get confused with different groups that advocate different things. One group I am in on Facebook is all about protein and how us “butter chuggers” are doing it wrong. How eating too much protein can’t knock you out of ketosis and all that matters is the carb level. They go on about how Dr. Fung lies and the hormonal model isn’t real or proven and that the only way to get fat loss is by eating at a caloric deficit. And yet here I am, going from the 287 range when I started Intermittent fasting and keto to 195 pounds just over a year later while eating 1800-2800 calories a day with a very sedentary lifestyle and eating 5% carbs/20% protein and 75% fat. They would say “Yeah, but you actually would have lost a lot of lean mass doing that.” Nope, I got DEXAscans (low grade xray that shows exact body fat, lean mass and bone density) for just that reason and get them every 3-4 months. My Body Fat % has gone from 34.6% in June 2018 to 28.1% in October, to 23.1 in January and to an amazing 11.9% in May 2019. All the while I HAVE lost about 7% lean mass (12.7 pounds) most - about 8% - of that was in the very beginning but I have lost 76% of my fat total going from 97.4 to 23.2 pounds of fat. So as you can see, it does work. For women though, it can work a bit slower at first due to the hormone differences between men and women.

I also highly recommend getting a blood meter to monitor ketones. Personally I recommend the keto-mojo. Test often to start with to get an idea of where you really are at based on what you eat and time of the day. Precision Ultra is also used by many as the strips are a bit easier to pick up but tend to cost about twice what the ones for the keto-mojo does. The keto mojo reads (with different strips) both glucose and ketones.

(Jennibc) #29

Yes! I experimented having a single 12 oz diet ginger beer one night after not having any artificial sweetener for over a year and I gained over a pound otherwise staying on plan.

(Confused!) #30

Thank you

#31

Naproxen causes severe water retention for me…if you lost anything on that I would say it’s a miracle!!!

(Confused!) #32

Couldn’t restore the scales this morning and another 3lb down? Only thing I’ve changed is Pepsi max!!! Fingers crossed I’m on the right

(Kelly Silverman) #33

Hey Mark… When you started out, did you use the carb counter app?

(bulkbiker) #34

No I have my own spreadsheet with all my daily food diaries for the past 3 years and blood sugar/ketone measurements…
I’m a data nerd and it has become my hobby.
Apps I have found are only as good as the data inputs and when many people have been involved in the input I find a lot of it is garbage.

(Kelly Silverman) #35

Awww man, I’m not that smart to make a spreadsheet! :joy::joy:

But I did read where you mentioned to keep those carbs at 20 net carbs day (I recently heard Dr ken Berry say the same thing)

Because I assume I can’t go wrong with 20 net carbs. Its actually the reason I got the carb app so I won’t be doing lazy Keto which may not yeild the results I want.

(Bunny) #37

I could warn you further about artificial sweeteners, the problem is they do not come from complex carbohydrates which are digestible and undigestible sugars that occur in nature that keep your gut flora in balance.

You take anything and highly refine it to such a degree that it becomes unnatural and does damage in ways we cannot see yet (but hints are in the pre-existing research) especially to the gut microbiota.

(Allie) #38

Actually there are masses of people who have issues caused by artificial sweeteners. You may not be one of them, consider yourself lucky, but no need to be so offensive.

(The crazy German guy) #39

there are also masses of people that claim COVID is artificial, Trump is a smart guy, etc…

What are those issues people report?
I cannot have artificial sweeteners because they give me a bad taste all day long.
Do they work in the sense of staying in Ketosis? Absolutely.

The science on artificial sweeteners vs insulin is quite clear. The science on whether or not we need to consider artificial sweeteners as healthy or not is not clear. Hence, i stay away from them.

The reason why people don‘t stay in ketosis is because they‘re simply eating too much of the wrong stuff and underestimate the impact.
Start with the basics before you go to the details… and mostly people don‘t get the basics right.