Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Your age, height and weight, your activity level, your goal. What you are eating and drinking in a day and when?
@RobC is right. Some people need to be very strict about their carbs and only count total carbohydrate grams and not net.
It’s also possible that you are having too much protein although that’s hard to tell without some more information. I’ll tell you that for me (52 years old, moderatly active and 5’5) 93 grams of protein (which is 25% of 1500 calories) will stop any weight losses dead. Not everyone needs tighter protein control on keto but plenty do.
Also don’t use the percentages. They are really useless on a ketogenic diet except in the early adaptation phase (which you are past) and after you have achieved your goals.
The only macro you need to try to hit is protein. So find out what your protein macro is in grams (there are many keto calculators online) and shoot to hit a weekly average of that amount. Some day to day variability is fine. As long as you are not consistently under or way too high.
Carbs are simply not required and should be minimized as much as possible.
Fat is your new fuel. But you already have lots of fat on your body. The whole point of this diet is to change your metabolism to fat burning so that it easily and efficiently has access to those fat stores. So you don’t have to eat your entire fat macro. You’re just supposed to add enough fat to your meals to leave you fully satisfied. This is not a calorie restriction diet. You shouldn’t be walking away from your main meals anything but fully satiated but stuffing additional fat down to hit a macro is actually completely counterproductive.
On the flip side, the hunger regulation that a ketogenic diet gives should allow you to give up snacking and that offers the power of extending the periods that your body is in a low insulin state and having the best access to the fuel in your fat. You want to extend the timing between caloric intake. Snacking is the enemy of that.
For more targeted advice it’s necessary to know more about you.
The urine strips still work for me just fine and I used them all the way through my weight loss journey and still do even now in my maintenance phase to check that I am on point. I think that if they were really so useless most keto doctors and scientists wouldn’t recommend their use, but they mostly seem to. That’s not to say that everyone gets the same results however. Some pee very dark pink, some faint and for some apparently nothing is visible.
The easiest way to find out a bit more information about where you are on that spectrum is to do a short test fast. If you are already eating low carbohydrate (as you are) then it needn’t be long. Do you think for one day you could go from dinner to dinner the next day without calories and only water and black coffee or tea? A urine test before dinner at the end of that should give you better information about where you are on that spectrum.
Good luck to you. Keto works wonderfully well but for some it requires more dialing in at the beginning and, unfortunately, it’s more often the case for us women.
Could any suppliments or medications be blocking it? I read that Vitamin C can block the results on the test strips so I quit taking that, but anything else?
