Keeping your carbohydrate intake under 20 g/day is by far the most important thing. Nothing good can happen if your insulin is too high. All the rest is about how to eat to keep insulin low. You need protein, you need fat, but protein can spike insulin under the wrong circumstances (though less likely to do so if carbs are low), so fat is the safest thing for getting enough calories.
You want enough calories. If you don’t get enough, your body reacts by slowing things down to compensate. So counter-intuitive as it sounds, eating more will help you lose weight (up to a point, of course!). And likewise, eat fat to help your cholesterol. Saturated fat will help raise your HDL; monounsaturated fat will give you energy (therefore, think butter, tallow, lard, and bacon grease for cooking). Eat fat to satiety; in other words eat while you’re hungry, don’t when you’re not. If you’re getting enough food at meals, it should be easy to go for hours without getting hungry before the next meal. Eating to satiety means not having to cut calories.
Lastly, women’s hormones affect their weight-loss pattern. The stories you hear about people losing a lot of weight right away are usually about highly overweight men. Also, women often restrict calories too much, so when they go keto their body may want to put on muscle mass. It’s denser than fat, so you can lose inches without necessarily losing weight. Go more by your clothing size than by your scale weight, and if your scale drives you crazy, give it to someone you don’t like, lol!
