So last year August of 2021, I weighed a total of 305lbs. Started keto and weight lifting on top of Intermittent fasting. I am 5’11, 39 years old. From august 2021 to about feb 2022 I got down to 225lbs. Stoped due to lack of motivation. Maintained weight at around 230 with just eating whatever. Got back into keto and weight lifting on June 16th 2022, dropped to 221 lbs and remained there for nearly a month with no change. I count calories and I check glucose and ketones with a keto-mojo. When I got into ketosis I was hanging around 2.5-3.1 ketoones and around 82-90 glucose. Until this week when ketones dropped to around 1.2 and glucose sky rocketed to 95-99. Which no change in diet or macros which are 180g protein 205grams fats and I stay below 20g net carbs. Usually around 10-15g. Looking for some insight get lower body fat, estimated around 19-23%.
Restated keto after a few months off
You’ve done great!
Patience is the first advice I have. A month isn’t even much of a stall. Try to retool your thinking so you’re also thinking about health as a goal (fat % or scale weight just doesn’t last that long for most of us, people quit praising us as we grow closer to ideal weight, and motivation wanes). Exercise can increase glucose, but yours is still well under pre-diabetic, so I wouldn’t be fretting about it. (“skyrocket” would be like 180, not 95.)
Are you ingesting anything that isn’t real food? Cut it out–drinks, supplements, and sweeteners. Quit counting net carbs and start counting total carbs, and keep them under 20. If you use heavy cream, cut that out too. If you drink alcohol, stop for a month.
Give it another month and if it still doesn’t budge, think next about a 30-day strict carnivore: ruminant meat, eggs, and salt only, when hungry, to satiety. Water only to drink. Looking at Dr. Shawn Baker and Dr Anthony Chaffee should convince you there is something in that idea. (Chaffee says he only has time to work out maybe twice a month and still looks like that… so… I’m surely convinced.)
Best of luck!
Hey, tell me your workout routine, typically.
I ask because I’m nosey, but also with me, sometimes I have a week where I kill it with my workout routine, but my glucose is a tad elevated and my ketones are meh. .8, .9, 1.0. I find that sometimes I kill it so hard that my body shoots out Cortisol because I’m stressing it tf out. I find this shoots up my insulin a bit and gives me readings that I’m not such a fan of.
I mean it could be a bunch of things, but workouts are my area of expertise, so that’s what I’ll ask you about.
Ketones are going to drop as the liver stops over-producing, once fat-adaptation has been achieved.
And I wouldn’t call what your glucose did “skyrocketing.” Firstly, there is a range of error in even the best home glucometers. Secondly, if you are pricking your finger there are sometimes problems from not getting the hands clean enough. And lastly, the cortisol stress response can raise serum glucose, and so can exercise. So there are a lot of potential explanations that are not problematic.
Last point: if you have a continuous glucose monitor, then look at the graph of your readings. If it is smooth, with undulations up and down, the actual values are not nearly as important. If you have large swings, however, with sharp spikes up and steep drops, that would tend to indicate a problem.
My workout routine is 4x5 full body 3x a week, on an A/B rotation. Work out A squats, bench, pendley rows, super set bicep/tricep iso work( curls, chin up, push downs, skull crushers, extensions)
Workout B squats, overhead press/incline press, dead lifts, super set shrugs and supinated rows.
I am more or less just stuck in that, what I see on YouTube stuff I suppose? They say hit these numbers and you will be successful, so I’ve been trying to stay in the 82-90 range and 1.5-3 range. If those are just bs numbers and it’s not really an indicator of success, then I suppose diet needs to change a bit? I did various macro calcs and went to the r/keto Reddit page and used their calc which suggested at. 15% deficit of like 18xx cals.
The basic biology behind a well-formulated ketogenic diet is to minimise carb intake (we recommend a limit of 20 g/day), so that insulin remains low and stops signaling the body to store fat. Excess insulin also inhibits fatty-acid metabolism. So if the goal is to lose excess stored fat, then the solution is to eat low-carb, to maintain low insulin. That will allow fatty acids to be mobilised from the adipose tissue, and will also allow skeletal muscles to metabolise them.
If one has been on a high-carb diet for some time, the fatty-acid metabolic pathways in the skeletal muscles will have been damaged and deactivated, and there will therefore be a need for a (re)adaptation period, which in most people runs for six to eight weeks.
Because fat has almost no effect on insulin secretion (beyond the bare minimum needed to keep the body alive), it makes a good source of energy to replace the glucose lost by not eating lots of carbohydrate. And because it is denser in calories, it takes much less fat to replace a given amount of carbohydrate. For that reason, and because of the body’s famine response to short rations, we do not advise intentionally eating at a caloric deficit. Instead, eat to satiety, and let your body tell you how much you need to eat. It will set your intake at a level that will allow excess fat to be metabolised along with dietary fat.
As the noted writer L. Amber O’Hearn puts it, “We need a caloric deficit in order to shed excess fat, but we don’t need to restrict calories in order to achieve such a deficit.”