Hello everyone! I am new to keto and I feel so lost. I started Jan 4, 21 and as of today I have lost 19 pounds. I am 49 yrs with a starting weight of 295. I have try to read and research all i can to be able to follow Keto. I had checking my ketones with strips but yesterday I bought a blood meter cause I notice that in the morning I would get .05 to 1.5 in urine and nothing in the evening so I thought that maybe the strips were not good. The thing is that with the blood is the same thing. Yesterday, I used the blood meter in the afternoon and it gave me a 0 . Today, in the morning I got .07 so I don’t know if I am actually in ketosis. I have been eating just breakfast and lunch and nothing else aside from black coffee and water. Does anyone know why I am not getting any ketones in the evening and just a low reading in the morning?
New here lots of questions
I don’t know anything about ketone meters or why they are necessary. I just wanted to congratulate you on your weight loss so far. Almost 20 lbs in two months is impressive. Way to go!
Regardless of what the meter or the strips say, if you are eating under 20 g/day of carbohydrate and are still breathing in and out, you are in ketosis. Ketone readings go up and down throughout the day.
I think you are fine, but if you want us to look over your food, and so forth, feel free to post it, and we’ll tell you if we see room for improvement. We’ll also want to know age, sex, height, and stuff like that, too, if you feel comfortable sharing that stuff.
Every single person I personally know who has started, has felt exactly like you.
Best advise, don’t stop!
Congratulations on that weight loss. That is absolutely INCREDIBLE!
My #1 piece of advice to anyone starting keto is to be aware of prepackaged food claiming to be low-carb. Maltitol and maltodextin are allowed to be listed as sugar alcohol on nutrition labels leading you to believe it won’t run your blood sugar up. It runs mine up just like regular sugar. Have you been eating any “sugar-free” bars or candy?
Losing 2 pounds a week for a couple of months is nothing to get discouraged about. That adds up to 100+ pounds in a year. If you want/need specific food recommendations, as @PaulL advises post what and how much of it you’re eating. We can’t really say much until we know that. Also, do you have any medical/health issues?
Don’t obsess about the numbers your get measuring ketones. That road leads to insanity.
@amwassil thanks for the link!, @kyarn, MG1 , PaulL P_Bash Thank you so much for you responses I wasn’t expecting anyone to answer and be so willing to help. You are awesome!
So, I am 49, F, 5’2, 295lb, and all my life overweight. I have gone through all diets. At 17 I was diagnose with hyperthyroidism and lost 100 pounds in 3 month but eventually I was give iodine to burn my thyroid so right now I have hypothyroidism using Synthroid. On Monday I went to do my labs and apparently because of the diet and weight lost my thyroid was hyper so I have to go to adjust my meds. I am not sure if the weight I lost is due to ketosis, my hyper thyroid or the fact that I am eating low carbs and just having breakfast and lunch. I have read and try a macro calculator but I don’t understand how to transfer that into the food I eat. For example today I ate 3 boiled eggs, a small hass avocado, a cup of coffee with 1 spoon of mct oil. Then for lunch I had a cup of asparagus cooked in one spoon of butter and garlic with maybe 3 spoons of mozzarella cheese , a small avocado and 3 chicken strips that were coated with pork rings. Later on 4 small strawberries.
Take the whole being “in ketosis” thing, and forget that mindset even exists. Throw away the ketone strips. Eat the right foods (sounds like you are) and don’t stress. Unless you’re managing a medical condition don’t worry about ketone levels, they don’t correlate with your fat loss… so what’s the point? Spend that money on bacon.
FWIW: If you show ANY ketones… you’re in ketosis. 0.05 is considered “nutritional ketosis” but even that is made up, it’s not a real medical term. It was coined by Phinney and Volek who are two Doc’s who are geared towards low carb athletes.
If you want to troubleshoot in ways that actually do have an effect like @amwassil said, we really gotta know what you’re eating. If you’re not tracking it’s very hard for many people. Some people can just loose, many of us can’t. There are literally (real) studies showing how terrible we truly are at mentally tracking our dietary intake.
I am a huge fan of the cronometer app to track my macros. I just use the free version and it provides so much information. I was tracking for a while and started to lose a lot of hair very quickly. I began looking back at months of food data and discovered I was consistently low in iron in my diet. So, I started taking a small supplement and my hair started growing back. Long story to say, it is really helpful beyond just macros.
Welcome! I have never checked for ketosis. I keep my carbs under 20, eat one or two meals a day, and I don’t chart my food anymore. However, I needed to chart it when I first began, to get the hang of where the carbs and calories lurk, I used Carb Manager app. Very user friendly. I no longer, chart, and I rarely weigh. Your body and your clothes and the way you feel are the best indicators. There are times when the scale will stall and that can mess with your head. So maybe weigh once a month (at the most) and otherwise, eat when hungry, enjoy the freedom from cravings and urges when sugar is no longer your master. You are already doing great. Don’t overthink it. YOU GOT THIS!
“Made up” is a bit harsh, lol! Though it’s true that Phinney and Volek did coin the term. They wanted to distinguish between the safe ketone levels resulting from a low-carb, high-fat diet, and the dangerous ketone levels of diabetic ketoacidosis, which is life-threatening and can be fatal.
As both Dr. Phinney and Prof. Volek have acknowledged, the 0.5 reading is somewhat arbitrary. Dr. Phinney has described it as the point at which they begin to see some of the benefits of ketosis in most of their patients and research subjects. Dr. Phinney has stated that a reading of 1.0 might be more beneficial than 0.5, but readings above 1.0 don’t appear to confer any additional benefits.
And it is certainly true that a lot of the keto-adapted elite endurance athletes they’ve studied had very low ketone levels (0.2 in one study, as I recall), but no one would question the fact that these athletes were making ketones and using them.
If you are not eating enough glucose (i.e., carbohydrate) to feed the cells in your body that require it (red blood cells, certain kidney cells, and most likely parts of the brain), you body makes it, along with ketones to feed all the organs that can benefit from them (brain, other organs; interestingly, muscles prefer fatty acids over ketones). Since glucose damages the body, ketones are a preferred fuel.
There is no way to measure the liver’s production of ketone bodies, nor the other organs’ consumption of them, so the best we can do is to measure the level of circulating ketones in the blood, but if the liver gets really good at just producing just enough supply to satisfy the demand, that’s going to show as a low ketone level, despite the fact that our body is actually thriving on ketones.
So this is why we try to tell people not to worry too much about their readings.