How long did it take for you to become fat adapted?

conversationstarters
keto
newbies
science
fat-adapted

(Jane) #10

I don’t know why I still turn a pee stick pink (unless I eat too many carbs) and I do not take exogenous ketones. I am definitely fat-adapted for over a year.


(Carl Keller) #11

It took me five to six weeks to become FA and I knew it when I fasted for 36 hours without so much as a belly grumble and my high energy never tapered. I will note that I’d been insulin sensitive for most of my life and my metabolic derangement was probably not as bad as most people.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #12

It’s not an either or sort of thing. You don’t go to sleep one day not fat adapted and wake up the next morning fat adapted. Done deal, here’s your diploma. It’s a gradual process that takes a very long time as liver/metabolism synch with the demand for energy in cells and organs. You’re not out of synch one day and in synch the next and that’s the end of it. You might get more and more in sych over time, or not. You might reach a point where it’s ‘good enough’. Or it might fluctuate over time such that you’re more or less in synch from day to day. Just how in synch you are, how consistently or inconsistently you remain at a certain degree of in synch varies with yourself as well as between individuals.

In such a dynamic system, subjective criteria are not useful. Sure, I feel more alert and energetic today than I felt yesterday, therefore I’m fat adapted. But what happens when I feel dull and listless tomorrow? Am I no longer fat adapted? What’s going on? If @CarlKeller knew he was fat adapted when he could fast 36 hours and his energy never tapered… What if I can’t? Why can’t I?

I think most of us here realize it’s more complicated than we imagine. The variables are legion. I think it better to use whatever tools we have available to try to determine objective criteria, even if those tools are imperfect. Otherwise, don’t sweat the details. KCKO.


#13

I am 3 mo in now and believe I am just now becoming fat adapted, my energy is by no means phenomenal, but is more consistent (less fatigue during the day) and I pretty suddenly lost all desire for snacks, 3 eggs with a little salami and artichoke heart has held me over for 8hrs for the past 5 days.


#14

And to be clear being fat adapted is different than being in ketosis.
From linked article:
“Plainly put, “fat adapted” is the metabolic state your body is in once you’ve been in ketosis long enough that your body has efficiently transitioned from burning carbs/sugar for energy to burning fats from your food, body-generated fats, and your stored body-fat reserves for energy.”

Urine keto strips are less helpful when you are fat adapted, though many people still use them. Blood ketones are most accurate for telling you are in ketosis.
Here’s an article that answers the question about how long and when you know you are fat adapted.
[Keto-Mojo Fat adapted] (https://keto-mojo.com/pages/kickstart-what-does-fat-adapted-mean-and-how-long-does-it-take)


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #15

Off hand, I would not expect eating carbs to cause an acetoacetate ‘dump’. Although maybe if you had a substantial acetoacetate concentration in your blood and you introduced a surge of glucose, the acetoacetate might get dumped to reduce the overall energy load. Have you ever done a blood test after a positive urine test? It would be interesting to see the concentration of β-hydroxybutyrate when your urine is positive. I wonder if the β-hydroxybutyrate would get converted back into acetoacetate to get dumped. I’m not a pins and needles kind of person, so I don’t do blood tests, but I certainly see their usefulness in various situations.

I test breath acetone multiples times per day and experienced a huge spike one afternoon which I describe in the following. I suspect that I likely had acetoacetate dumped via urine at the same time and I suspect you probably would show elevated breath acetone when your urine test positive. Maybe.


Fat Adapted and Still Excreting Ketones in Urine: Survey :mag_right:
(Daisy) #16

5 weeks, both times. I highly recommend not needing to find out the second time. The first time I lost weight easily. Now, I just keep gaining weight. I wish more than anything that I hadn’t screwed it up the first time. :sob:


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #17

@Janie @Regina You two piqued my curiosity so I bought a box of urine test strips while at the market today. I had intended to do so anyway so I could carry out this experiment sometime soon:

I’ve been in ketosis for 99% of almost the past 2 1/2 years and well enough fat adapted that I’m fully conscious and functional (most of the time :wink:). I’ve had low breath acetone (BrAce) all day (at or below 5ppm), even though I’ve been fairly active, at least active enough to burn some energy. For comparison I would usually be in the range of 10-20ppm. I haven’t eaten much today, so far less than 750 calories (and there’s no way I’m going to make it to 2700!) and I feel hungry. So for all intents I should be burning body fat and producing a solid level of BrAce. But I’m not! Go figure.

So I tested my urine. It was NOT zero! Somewhere between zero and the first colour on the chart, so somewhere between 0 and 0.05 mmol/L, probably closer to 0. Either that or I’m colour blind. So why would I be dumping acetoacetate when my liver is probably synthesizing less the usual amounts of it. Not much, to be sure, but detectable.

As I’ve said, this stuff is very complicated and often doesn’t behave like you’d expect.


(John) #18

I just tested with my last urine strip. Still showed solidly in the middle range - 40 mg/dL.

This is after almost 9 months, over 90 pounds lost. Had a fairly carby breakfast (yogurt, blueberries, pecans) and no lunch. Hunger is well managed, I don’t run out of energy if I don’t eat, and I am still losing weight so fat is being burned.

I am pretty sure that by now I am fat adapted. Yet the urine strips have always been in the 40 to 80 range every time I have tested since I started.


(Empress of the Unexpected) #19

I have - they always are at similar levels. Early on, I could not turn a pee stick purple no matter how low my carbs. This has started at one year in.


(charlie3) #20

I’ve been keto for may be 13 months. I believe fat adaption might progress rapidly in the beginning but continues to improve for years after that.


(Jane) #21

Well done!!!

Glad you tested and refuted as a poster here is fond of saying “nutty keto dogma”

All us lay-people can do is report our own personal experiences, even when they don’t jive with conventional wisdom and people think we are lying.

Our bodies are amazing engineering marvels. Being a chemical engineer myself I can only observe and note data.


(Empress of the Unexpected) #22

Again, I am one year in. Sometimes I can eat twice a day, other times, four times a day. I cannot fast due to GI issues. I had good energy and brain clarity prior to keto. I am excepting more health improvements. My trigs are way down, as is my FBG. When I was eating SAD, I cycled in and out of ketosis for years, because I had no appetite.


(Full Metal KETO AF) #23

I have absolutely no idea. I felt better energy after the first week and that’s what stood out in my mind. I did notice around two months I usually didn’t feel like lunch, or it would be replaced with a snack. Eventually I realized two meals and no snacks was easy.

It was a process of letting go of habits and listening to signals. It’s gradual I think and continues to develop for a year or two. It’s not like one day you’re not fat adapted and during the night a Magic Keto Fat Adaptation Light Switch gets flipped. It’s more like those dimmable lights if you could sit there for a year or two turning it up, 6-10 weeks is just the beginning. :cowboy_hat_face:


(Jane) #24

Exactly!!!

I became fat-adapted before I knew what it was. I was working a shutdown with a crazy 12-14 hour workday and discovered I’d forgotten to eat lunch and it was after 3 pm. How the fuck did THAT happen?!


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #25

OK folks! This topic got me interested in why already fat adapted individuals, myself included, would show detectable acetoacetate on urine test strips. We’ve all been told repeatedly that ‘pee sticks’ are useless after two or three months and only useful at all to newbies. Well…maybe not. Maybe upon closer examination many of us fat burners are leaking acetoacetate and didn’t notice only because we didn’t bother to look. “Only useful for newbies, don’t ya know”.

So I decided to open a new topic to take a survey of forum participants on whether or not they have detectable acetoacetate:


(Raj Seth) #26

Same here. The absence of hunger was a feature I had not learned existed in this Ketoverse. Its occurrence was stunning!


(Alec) #27

Fat adaption is a continuum/process, not an on/off switch. Therefore whether you are “fat adapted” or not is a difficult question. How far along the continuum is “fat adapted”?

[edit] A better question would be: how fat adapted are you? But then you have the question of how you measure this.


(mole person) #28

@Janie is right. This is just an oft repeated keto dogma. Most people here are aware that we continue to waste some ketones in our urine long after we are fat adapted. I think the problem is that there is a slight shift downwards and for some people that’s enough for negative results after fat adaptation. Since some people do show nothing after they are adapted it’s important to inform people concerned about a lack of a result, and who insist that they are doing everything else correctly, that the sticks my simply have stopped working for them. This doesn’t mean that it’s even the more common state of affairs however.


(Kirk Wolak) #29

This is a REALLY Hard Question!

Why is the sky blue is easier to answer!

First, YMMV, and Every Body is Different.

Second, Define Fat Adatped?

For daily activities?
For Gym Routines?
For Intense Workouts/Hikes?
For doing an Ultra Marathon?

I liken the understanding of this to:

  1. Ability to use Ketones (your brain goes first, it’s fast)
  2. Ability to make enough ketones (Your liver health, and size, and Insulin Resistance, etc). Sometimes your body will keep dumping glucose from your liver, delaying the changes.
  3. Mithochondrial Adaptation. Your cells can process ketones (urine ketones start dropping)
  4. Liver can make enough Ketones on Demand and FAVORS ketones over glucose, and can meet ALL of your energy needs, including explosive/continuous demand!

I have been (with the exception of a couple of days) in Ketosis since July 2018. And I feel I have barely made it to #3 above. I can walk 20+ miles in a day, fasted. I was NEVER a runner… But I feel over the next couple of months, I may have enough energy and health to actually run a bit.

But your question begs clarification.

How long before you felt NORMAL in ketosis might be what you are asking.
And that took WEEKS for me, with small milestones showing up every couple of weeks, for a month or two.