So I am on day 10 of Keto. My weight dropped about 7 lbs(water weight?) and has stayed about the same for 3 days. My ketones in the Irvine seem to be dropping. My fat intake is about 73% of my diet with only about 3% net carbs(track everything I eat to the oz). I know that it will drip off in the urine, but this fast??
Ketones seem to be dropping in urine
Dread1840
(Chris)
#2
The strips only show what ketones are being wasted as a part of adaptation. They’re a waste of money if you’re not type 1 diabetic.
CarlKeller
(Carl Keller)
#3
To expand on what @Dread1840 is saying, less ketones in your urine indicates better efficiency. Your body is not over producing and getting better at managing your energy needs. If you really want to know your true ketone levels, invest in something that measures your blood ketones.
Other things that might influence low ketone amounts are the time of day. I found mine to be very low just after waking up or after a meal. At these times, we don’t need a lot of ketones so production declines. Then there are others who always show a trace amount or a really dark color, all the time… which is a reflection of how inaccurate the strips can be.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#5
My understanding is that the reading you get from the urine sticks is affected by how hydrated you happen to be, in addition to the issues already mentioned about ketone production. Since you are only ten days on a ketogenic diet, it is a bit early for the liver to be cutting back on ketone production, would be my guess. Your muscles are still switching over from burning glucose to burning fat, so they are in need of ketone bodies to replace the glucose, which is why I would expect your liver to still be producing ketones in quantity. Full fat adaptation takes around two months, because of the necessary changes at the cellular level.
If you read around on the forums, you will see many posts about people having trouble with the urine strips for various reasons, many of which have to do with either quality control problems or the inherent inaccuracies of that type of measurement. The strips were invented to give Type I diabetics a rough-and-ready means of telling whether they are at risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, so they weren’t designed for precision measurement in any case. Even the home blood ketone meters have a certain degree of inaccuracy.
ETA: The other thing to bear in mind is that there is no way of measuring your actual level of ketone production, nor how much of that production is actually being used. Even the blood meter only measures what’s circulating in your blood at that moment, not how much was produced and taken up by cells.
David_Stilley
(Full Metal KETO AF)
#6
Thank god I never felt the urge to test, it was easy for me to trust the process and how I felt without a need to confirm ketosis and obsess with the fluctuations that seem to upset pretty much everyone who falls into using them and puts stock in the data which is basically is uninterpretable in any meaningful way. I suppose it can put someone at ease during the first few days to know they’re producing ketones at all, but overall the information past that point is useless. Just my humble opinion. The companies that produce them surely are happy to profit on the new keto trend that’s growing even though they’re not really very useful. 
jcmorning
(John)
#7
I have been staying super hydrated as well as still working out every day, so that could be playing a roll.
