Hi all,
I’m posting on this forum with the hope to understand what is happening to my body.
I’m gonna start with a bit of context, I started Keto in may 2020, at the start of the pandemic following the advice of my girlfriend at the time. As the pandemic prevented me to go out and see friend it was super easy to follow the keto macros stay in Ketosis. I lost around 10kg in 2+ months with periods where I would lose around 400 grams per day over multiple days.
I then stopped keto and went back to eating normally. As the pandemic continued and my moral lowered, I regained some of the weight I had lost. I restarted keto in February of 2021 and there again, managed to lose weight pretty damn fast.
Forward to September 21 and again, not feeling great, my weight goes up and I try to do keto again. Except this time it does not work. Probably coming from the fact that I was hanging out with friends often and eating outside which complicated things.
– End of context –
We are now at the beginning of 2022 and I decide to start keto again but this time well determined to keep my weight after that (I was losing weight organically before that, keto was only supposed to be a boost) As lockdown kind of restarted where I live, getting into keto is easy again. I have my macros on spot, I eat 75:25:5 and I even manage to eat little amount of calories.
But my weight did not go down much (100g per day max). I then thought that I was simply not in ketosis, even though I didn’t eat any carbs on some days. So I bought a blood ketone meter to check. Turns out, I’m basically constantly in ketosis (1.5-2.6 mmol/L).
I thought at the beginning that I was not eating enough, slowing down my metabolism and preventing weight loss. So one day I ate the amount of calories needed to keep my weight. The next day my weight dropped the famous 400g I was looking for. However I tried the next day as well and suddenly, I gained 1kg. And checked ketones and still in Ketosis.
So all in all I really do not understand why my body keeps retaining water, and also why I’m not losing weight as fast as I used to in my previous attempt.
Also important to mention I guess, I do sport quite often (3-4 times a week) mostly climbing and dancing, sometimes skiing.
I am rarely hungry and I feel like following my hunger might lead me to very low calories values, and I’m not sure if that’s a great idea, also I need some extra energy before I go climbing so I often force myself to eat to reach some kind of minimum energy level before climbing.
I would like to understand what is the best approach here, I would like to lose weight as fast as possible because I don’t necessarily want to stay in keto for too long due to the large amount of saturated fat that I ingest.
Should I force myself to eat to reach a certain amount of calories to prevent my metabolism from slowing down?
Should I listen to my hunger, risking to not eat enough, potentially shrinking my muscles and slowing down my metabolism?
Should I do something else all together? (I have been taking MCT oil recently, maybe that’s good to enter ketosis but slows things down afterward?)
Thanks in advance for all your answers!