Hello everyone. Just started keto recently and have a couple questions I can’t find on the net. My lean weight is about 150 lbs, I’m 48 years old. I work 3 days a week for about 11 hours a day, strenuous work. The rest off the week is little to no real exercise. After starting keto I lost about 7 pounds (burning off carb stores and water I’m sure) but now things are kind of stalled. Body fat calipers and scale say not much has changed. My intakes are 10-15 gr carbs, 50-100 gr protein and 130 or so fats. My keto strips are almost always a medium purple unless I drink a fat shot (mct oil and heavy cream) then it turns dark purple. I guess my big question is are my keto strips turning because of the fat I’m eating or the body fat burning off? Is calorie deficit the only way to start burning stored fat?
New guy, just started
Hello and welcome! The way you burn fat on a Keto diet is by lowering your glucose load & therefore your insulin load. As long as your insulin is high (from too many carbs, from eating too frequently, from insulin resistance) you cannot burn fat.
You can be in ketosis weeks before your body is fat adapted & burning fat stores. The Ketogenic way of eating takes weeks & months to work its magic as you literally shift your fuel system from glucose to fat. If you have any metabolic derangement like a lot of us here, other systems in your body also need time to heal.
So keep calm & Keto on!
Hey Rusty,
Also 48 here, been doing this for a little over 2 years now. I can tell you how this worked for me.
First of all, those Keto urine strips don’t really tell you anything useful - just that there’s some wasted ketones in your urine. I wouldn’t chase after that color change, as your body’s likely going to stop wasting those ketones eventually.
As for everything else, no red flags that I can see.
For me, eating at a deficit absolutely sped up my weight loss. As much as people love to say it’s not really about energy balance/cico/whatever - there’s a point where too much food is just too much food, and you have to store it somewhere. But everyone’s limits are different. Some people can scarf down 4500 calories a day and never gain an ounce. Then there’s people like me who can gain 11 pounds by staring at an oreo.
You had to say Oreo didn’t you lol. I use the keto sticks out of curiosity, I put most of my faith in calipers, scales and tape measure. Lose weight or not keto has made my arthritis and general aches and pains way better
Funny you should mention that…
I have psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. Eating keto didn’t help my skin all that much (not as much as the Stelara injections I take for it) - but holy crap, my arthritis was VASTLY improved by eating this way.
I’m not sure if it improved because of diet or because I lost 140lb that was previously bearing down on my joints… but either way, i’ll take the improvement 
I’m not a huge fan of testing for ketones personally. I can understand why people want to do it. It’s just that I like data that makes sense - and when testing for ketones previously (with a Ketonix breath meter) I would every so often get a reading that made no sense.
It drove me batsh*t crazy, so I stopped testing and did the KCKO thing. I’m not saying testing is BAD - just that it definitely adds stress to my life when I get a number I can’t explain, and I could use a little less stress in my life.