I also cut WAY back on my cherished Crystal Light Raspberry Iced Tea. I always made it half strength anyway. But I read the label on that and saw sucralose so it went to a splash and the rest water!
It’s all based on what is more important to YOU.
Oh…and this morning…138.6.
2 weeks ago my blood ketones were .2.
This
morning: .5
My GKI went from 25 to 10!
And my pants are falling off.
RC - please consider Glenn Livingston’s free ebook Never Binge Again. I finally made the plunge to do something about my lifelong addiction to chocolate, pastries, cakes, and other sweets. I couldn’t even make the Keto thing work because I was so addicted to fat bombs - even without any artificial sweeteners, cheese, etc. I replaced my sugar addiction with fruit. I had to kick one addiction at a time. I was eating bags and bags of berries to deal with the other sugar addiction. So that journey took about a month - of course, there was no weight loss. Then the next step was to go cold turkey on the berries. I’m down about 12 pounds but it has been painfully slow (as in four months). So now, I’m completely sugar (cake, chocolate, fruit, all sweeteners, etc.) free. I consume some full fat cream in coffee during the day and eat a huge leafy green lettuce salad at night with an egg, some bacon, some cheese on it, a couple slices of peppers, a mushroom, olive oil, vinegar. One glass of dry farms red wine. Weight loss is at a snails pace or nothing at all, but at least I’m no longer addicted. My next step is to do Intermittent Fasting consistently, but I enjoy my cream to much and I’ve already given up almost everything there is to give up. Try Glenn’s free book. It’s not about will power. He teaches you in super simple terms how to slay this addiction. You don’t have to give up anything completely, but you may find it’s best for you. Give it a try. It’s so freeing.
Congratulations on those stats! I am a 57 year old woman and have been on KETO for almost a year. Initially I lost 30 lbs but have been at a plateau for the last 6 months.I would love to se stats like what you have listed here. That’s great!
I’m trying to break my plateau by 36 hour or longer fasts and by increasing my exercise. That scale just doesn’t want to move. That makes me even more impressed by your weight loss. Keep up the good work and when you’re ready, maybe you CAN have those delicacies again! 
I fasted last year and calorie restricted to 130…and tanked my thyroid in the process. My TSH was 8.25! No more of that! I tried fasting again this year…no loss at all. That’s when I knew there was another problem in my diet.
137.6 this morning.
Eating 1500 cals.
Happy? You bet.
I too have an addictive personality. Drugs as a teen, sweets thereafter. When I was eating a SAD , I could eat a WHOLE bag of cookies, half a birthday cake, a quart of ice cream…why would keto be any different? You are so right…you just trade one addiction for another.
It wasn’t until I quit the sweeteners that I stopped craving desserts. Was that all of the problem? I doubt it. There are emotional issues but it’s a start.
I listened to an interview with Dr Eric Westman about 3 months into this journey and some of the things he said hit me right between the eyes! Forgive my lack of link and probable inaccuracies but my take away was something like this: he finds that for about 70% of the people he sees in his clinic, education & support is what is needed and off they go losing weight and getting healthier…but when he sees people who have not lost (30?) pounds in (5?) months there are other (issues? emotional? food addiction?); they omit items from their food log, under report quantities, etc (not truthful?).
Well, I just realized then he was describing about ME! WOW! I had to try wearing that around for a few days – it was so uncomfortable to confront myself with that TRUTH: I’m a food addict, it’s emotional, etc!
Then, it made such perfect sense to me why it seems so many people just jump on board with keto, lose 50-100 pounds in months or a year and talk about how easy it was and how they were never hungry. But not me! Every ounce I manage to lose is a battle because this is NOT just an educational process, it’s an EMOTIONAL/MENTAL/BEHAVIORAL process and it is NOT comfortable, happy and rewarding, especially not in the beginning.
Every time I hit a stall of a month, I know I need to make further changes in what I eat, how much and when. It’s not enough to keep carbs under 20 and only eat keto foods. It gets down to eating less keto foods, less often and giving up more. Fasting cleaner and longer. Experimenting to find out what it takes me to make the scale move. NSVs are great but 30 or more days of no downward movement on the scale tells me I need to make more changes. I’m not pushing myself too awfully hard because these emotions, beliefs, behaviors, habits are a bitch to contend with. It took me 5 1/2 months to lose 20 pounds. Now a month can go by with maintaining only a 1.5 pound loss but little by little I’m chipping away at years of food craziness and food abuse.
Absolutely true! I also had to face down my food demons, as well as a few others ( and those won’t just go away over night but at least we’ve started to drag a few skeletons out of the closet!)
What I find liberating and interesting is how I fasted and fasted and lost MAYBE a pound, and now I am eating 1500ish good clean calories a day (10 gms carbs and more like 5) and I am dropping like a rock.
I owe a HUGE apology to some people on here from last year when I was saying “Don’t overeat fat!” Lol! Live and learn!
So I think this is the mystery behind Stevia: it is well known that it DROPS blood sugar. They even BRAG about it! But this is what happens
" If your BG goes down, it means the sweetener caused an insulin release - exactly what you should be doing your best to limit."
So I imagine using a little bit occasionally may be ok, but when I was using it constantly all day long, my insulin must have been pumping out REGARDLESS of how low my carbs were.
We have to use common sense with Keto. Yes, you can eat fat bombs but you also need to be aware of the calories. And, no , you don’t have to exercise but you will be healthier if you do. Keto is not a miracle diet. The quality of the fats matter. The number of calories matter. Ideally, you are eating a lot of low calorie vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, etc. along with good fats like eggs, avocados and mozzarella cheese. If you need something sweet eat some watermelon or some blueberries or raspberries. Gorge on the the salads. Use almond flour instead of wheat flour. Make crustless quiches using 18 eggs, cream, bacon, various vegetables and cheese. You have to be various various vegetables for a few hours but you can get but you can do it.
I didn’t control my calories at first. My goal was to get into ketosis and adapt to burning fat as fuel. My husband and I started this WOE together. We both use the lose it ap and it really has helped us to stay on track. Are you also doing Keto with her? Can you both go for a walk in the evening? I had a few food items that caused me to crave sweets so I stopped and now I’m doing better. I really believe each person has to tweet things to work for them, it does make it easier when you have family and friends eating this way too. Stick with it and with her and she will get there 
I’m in the dark about what TSH is. Thyroid __ Hormone? I don’t know my thyroid levels and don’t know what is high/low.
Did fasting contribute to tanking your thyroid? I hope that isn’t the case for me. I can’t seem to move the scale no matter what I do and fasting is my last resort. I can fast and am better at fasting than I am about calorie reduction in general. I will have to see what other problems are happening for me that I am having so much trouble.
Thanks for the book suggestion! I am always looking for reads on this topic lately… I have been going thru the “steps” of my sugar addiction and finally I am beating it “one day at a time”. It was hard to admit I had the addiction (just like any I guess) but I finally did 
and learning the science behind foods and how it works in my body has been KEY I Had no idea how blindly I was eating…also identifying the emotional end of the addiction as well has been crucial. Thanks again! 
Awesome work on breaking the stall and ditching the sweeteners! New found encouragement I hope as well as being stuck like that can just suck the life out of you.
TSH is thyroid stimulating hormone. Normal is low, around the 1.0- 2.0 area. They put me on meds when it was 4.5 so you can see how bad I made things.
I fasted constantly back then, as well as restricted calories. A really bad combination.
My advice: make 100% sure you are fat adapted. Test your ketones! Test your glucose and learn what your Glucose-ketone index is. That is probably THE most helpful thing I learned, and it’s scary that none of the years of reading I did ever had that information. If your GKI is 9 or above, there is something in your diet causing issues. Then use bg testing to narrow it down.
I forgot…fasting isn’t a bad thing. It can be beneficial in many ways. But before this, I could fast for up to 96 hours and lose 3 lbs and then gain it all back. Now I’m eating 1500 calories a day and dropping like a rock. Which sounds better to you?!