I’ve been testing my blood ketones for a while now, and also my breath ketones. I’m beginning to wonder if blood testing is useful or useless. I bought newer blood ketone monitors to get cheaper strips. I bought one for work and one for home. I’m interested to see what happens when I exercise, say after 36 hours of fasting, or not (that is, eating the day before). I’ve found using a continuous glucose monitor that my blood sugar skyrockets when I exercise after 36 hours of fasting (goes from say 86 before to 106 after exercise, and stays high for quite a while). But if I’ve eaten the day before, my blood sugar barely budges after exercise.
Meanwhile, I thought that fasting for 36 hours then working out would cause ketones to plummet. I can’t tell if that’s true, because my monitors read differently using their different strips. That is, I’ve tested them with a testing solution and got the exact same reading, but then used their individual strips (one bottle of strips for each monitor), and got Lo for one and 0.7 for the other. Yikes!
Today, I tried this and got 0.3 for one and 0.9 for the other. Again, this is two different monitors from the same company, but with different strips for each. I buy one set of strips for each so that I don’t have to take strips back and forth to and from work. These values are after exercise. Before exercise, I got 0.5 using the monitor and strips that gave me the 0.3. Did my ketones go down or up?
Given these discrepancies, should I be using strips from the same package in both monitors?
Or should I just give up? I’m trying to figure out what happens to ketones when I exercise in a fasted state (meaning I fasted the entire day before, so 36 hours of fasting), a non-fasted state (meaning I ate the day before, so 8-12 hours fasting), or even if what I ate the day before has any effect. If, however, I can’t get accurate results, then my values are meaningless.
Do you measure ketones, and if so, when and why?