Been on Keto for a few months. Been struggling with not seeing a lot of results. Switched to a ketone breath meter and began to see ketone levels in the low 1.0-1.5. (Had been on pee stix but got rid of them). I was frustrated that I was not losing much weight. I think I’ve lost a few pounds, but there have been odd fluctuations. Recently my ketone levels have been 3.0 to 3.3 consistantly. I most trust readings first thing in the morning right out of bed, but check at other times once in a while out of curiosity. I’ve been restricting calories a bit to lose weight, but about 200ish for about the same time my levels are higher. Based on this graph of ketone levels, am I perhaps in the right “zone” for losing fat? Slight starvation mode so my body is turning to body fat? I know the “optimal zone” for ketosis is much lower at 1.0 to 1.5.
Ketone levels and weight loss
According to your profile info: When I began Keto: April 15 2020.
So you’re in 2 months. How many years/decades did you eat SAD? Keto is not magic and it’s not miraculous. It’s a generally slow and gradual process of metabolic normalization. Excess weight/fat is a symptom of metabolic disorder and often the underlying causes of the excess weight/fat are more important to deal with first. Depending on how much and what needs to be fixed, this takes time. Your weight will follow the trend towards normalization, but maybe not as fast as you wish or expect. Stay consistently in ketosis and you will be OK. As @Polly1 warns, don’t be too concerned about calories at the moment. You need to give yourself enough fuel to keep the process moving.
Just make sure the carbs stay below 20 grams per day and the lower the better. Eat enough fat and protein so you don’t feel hungry. Hunger before meals is OK; it’s just your body’s way to remind you it’s time to eat. But constant or recurring hunger throughout the day is not OK; it’s your body’s way to say you’re not eating enough.
Your levels don’t matter, being in ketosis does. Higher ketones don’t equal faster fat loss.
At 49 I’m 6’1 and at 206.5lb. Never been over 225 which is where I was three years ago. I went back to working out and exercise and lost weight. The past year concentrating on losing weight. Eating high protein and low carb to gain muscle and doing a lot of cardio. Got to 203 and hit plateau. Then the pandemic hit and that shut down my workouts. Couple weeks in I decided to try keto. I had heard two colleagues had lost a lot of weight but didn’t like the concept of no carbs. Felt like maybe a big diet change would be good for me. So started keto slowly and now been pretty serious for two months or so. Overall been frustrated with lack of changes (weight ups and downs, etc). Been doing a lot of learning (reading things like this and videos on YouTube) and that’s produced a lot of conflicting info too. Also learning about the individual experiences. I didn’t think losing 20 pounds would be this hard after hearing all these amazing keto stories. (At 140lb lean muscle mass, 180-190 seems to be where I’d like to be). I do wonder if my metabolism is just pretty slow and not changing very fast. I am eating around 1900 calories which I thought was my base calorie needs, so was trying to eat 1700 or so (and adding exercise) to promote weight loss. Carbs 20-30g, and all of them come from broccoli, lettuce, occasional nuts, cheese. Nothing starchy. I test my breath keto just to know I’m in Ketosis. Not trying to hit a certain number. Hard to understand what I’m burning if not fat and not carbs. Stopped worrying about too much protein.
The stories of people losing great quantities of weight in a very short period of time are from people who had great quantities of excess fat to lose. But even their rate of loss slowed down as they approached a more normal weight.
Two hundred three pounds is a healthy weight for someone who is your height. You may have trouble getting your body to lose further. Have you had a DXA scan to assess your body composition? It’s not perfect, but it’s a better tool than an impedance scale. If you are working out, it is possible that you are adding lean tissue as you also lose fat. If this were the case, your scale reading might not change, because the weight gain and the weight loss would cancel each other out. How are your clothes fitting? Are they getting any looser?
Our terminology conflates “weight” with “fat,” and the two are not the same. Muscle weight affects the scale just as much as fat weight. But which one is it that you want to lose? Do you really want to lose muscle mass and have less-dense, more-brittle bones? Surely it is the fat that you want to lose, right? And surely you want to lose only the excess, not the basic amount of body fat that we need as a cushion against hard times.
We are beginning to learn that the body’s hormonal response to the types of food we eat is far more important than the amount of calories we eat. For one thing, a high-carbohydrate diet raises insulin (as a response to all the glucose flooding the system). Not only is this elevated insulin damaging to the system in its own right, but insulin is the primary hormone causing the adipose tissue to store fat. Protein affects insulin levels, but it has a much-reduced effect in the absence of carbohydrate, and the effect of fat on insulin is so low as to be negligible for all practical purposes (and in any case, we do need some insulin in the blood in order to live). In addition, elevated insulin interferes with the hormones that regulate appetite and satiation. Once we lower it by greatly restricting our carbohydrate intake, the brain receptors are again free to register these hormones, and the appetite thus becomes a reliable guide to how much food to eat.
You may find this of interest/usefulness:
Finally, this to help calculate how much you can play around with: