Welcome to the forums! You’re infor an adventure.
A ketogenic diet is primarily about metabolic health, the weight loss many people experience is actually something of a side-effect. It works well for weight-loss, don’t get me wrong, but it’s helpful to think of it more as a new way of eating than as a quick-loss temporary diet.
Twenty pounds is not all that much to lose, so don’t expect the process to be as quick as some of the stories you’ve read. The people who lost tons quickly had a lot of fat to shed, and even they slowed down once they had only ten or twenty pounds left. So don’t be discouraged if the weight fails to melt off instantly, give things time to work.
It is also possible to put weight on, in the form of stronger muscle and denser bone, while at the same time losing weight in the form of fat. This confuses your scale, so we encourage people to keep track of their measurements as well as their scale weight.
Moreover, women have a different experience from men on keto. A lot of the healing can involve getting hormones sorted out, and many women here report that it took some time, occasionally several months, before they started losing fat. So again, don’t get discouraged, and be patient.
The essence of the diet is keeping carb intake low, so as to allow insulin levels to drop. Once your insulin drops, your fat tissue is free to release fatty acids for your body to burn as fuel. We recommend no more than 20 g/day of carbohydrate, and we find that leafy greens and fibrous vegetables are good choices. Eat a moderate amount of protein and then fill in the rest of your calories with fat, which has the least effect on insulin, so it is a safe source of calories. And since fat has just over twice the calories per gram as carbohydrate or protein, it doesn’t take as much to fill you up.
Eat to satisfy your hunger, and don’t eat when you’re not hungry. Insulin rises after every meal, so we want plenty of time during the day for it to remain low. Eat enough so that you don’t have to snack between meals. You are likely to soon find yourself skipping meals, because you just aren’t hungry—let your body be your guide on that.
Welcome to the forums, and remember that the search function is your friend. Feel free to nose around in the different forums and see what there is to learn. You can always ask questions, but a lot of them are already answered, so we do encourage people to search first, and then ask.
