Just joined seconds ago. Short story/background then a question. I did keto back in 2018 thru first part of 2020. Loved it. Felt great, lost a lot of weight but then slid back into it my old bad eating patterns. I decided this week that I was tired once again of the acid re-flux, the sugar headaches, inflammation and just feeling like crap OH and then there is the weight that I gained, ugh. Thirty pounds of the 52 pounds I lost. It is so disheartening to look back at how far I had come. Anyway, to my question!!! Does your body remember ketosis - or how could I get back into ketosis so quickly? Tuesday I decided to start my journey. Wednesday afternoon thought I"d get some keto strips so I could test. Had a sweet taste in my mouth so came home and tested. Sure enough I was in a moderate ketosis. Is this a bad test? Thoughts?
Round Two - does your body remember
It might be a good test. I don’t know how long it takes to get back into ketosis, though when they fast people who ate high carb, it can take at least a day or more. But it’s possible to go faster.
In fact, I wonder for those of use who have been low carb/keto for a while, whether we get out of ketosis at all if we have a short period of high carb. I’ve never tested it. May have to do so the next vacation I go on.
There is ketosis, and then there is fat-adaptation. I’m sure you are already in ketosis. That happens pretty quickly. Readapted to fat metabolism? That’s an open question.
Ketosis begins as soon as we deplete our glycogen store sufficiently. We stop eating vast quantities of glucose (in the form of carbohydrate), so serum glucose drops, insulin is not needed to control the excess so it drops, and glucagon rises, which stimulates the liver to make ketones.
However, when our cells go along for a while on a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, they gradually turn off the processes that metabolise fatty acids, not to mention the damage all that glucose eventually does to all our mitochondria. So, depending on how long we were off our ketogenic diet, our cells will need to readapt to primarily metabolising fatty acids again. Dr. Phinney sometimes makes it sound as though one good carb-rich meal can cause us to need as much time to readapt as it took the first time, but I’m not so sure it’s always that bad for everybody. So it’s likely to take you some time to reacquire your fat-adaptation, but how long, nobody knows.