UPDATED BY FRANZISKA SPRITZLER, RD, CDCES
If you’re like most people who start a keto diet to lose body fat or for other health benefits (like improving your blood sugar control), you’re probably eager to see and feel immediate results. You might be diligently eating healthy fats, tracking carbs, and testing your blood glucose and ketone levels, only to wonder why your results fluctuate or why blood sugar doesn’t drop and ketones don’t rise instantly.
To this we say, have patience! One of the biggest hurdles to success for new keto dieters is a mindset that you’re “supposed to be” further along on achieving your goals or more in a state of ketosis than you are. Plus, people can react differently to a ketogenic diet or any diet, so there’s no need to compare.
Retraining Your Body
Getting into nutritional ketosis, also known as euketonemia, doesn’t happen immediately. It takes your body anywhere from 2 to 7 days to get into ketosis, depending on a variety of factors, including your unique body, health, activity level, and dietary choices.
Why does it take so long? Because you’re retraining your body! Ketosis is a natural metabolic process, where your body uses fat stores as its primary fuel source rather than glucose (carbohydrates). To activate this process and change your body’s preferred source of energy and metabolic state, you need to deprive your body of its usual go-to fuel by drastically lowering your carbohydrate intake and upping your fat intake while maintaining adequate protein intake. Then, you need to give your body time to adjust and your liver time to convert fat from your food and your body (adipose tissue) into ketones, which will be used for energy.
What You Eat: Macros Matter
Regardless of how long it takes you specifically, getting into nutritional ketosis has everything to do with what you eat and don’t eat. General guidelines for a ketogenic diet are to consume approximately 70 to 75 percent of your daily calories from fats, 20 to 25 percent from protein, and 5 to 10 percent from carbohydrates, give or take, depending on your lifestyle and other personal factors.
As long as you’re eating within your optimal macros (find out more about those here) and following the keto low-carb diet, you’re on your way to reaching sustained ketosis. So rather than pushing yourself to the result, enjoy the journey.
The first month or two on keto is a learning experience, where you’re getting to know the diet, discovering how your body reacts to various foods, and physically adjusting to burning fat rather than carbs for energy. You may experience keto flu symptoms, including keto breath (it smells like acetone), and find that physical activity allows you to consume a few more daily net carbs as you retrain your body to burn fat.
If you don’t see results as quickly as you like, don’t be discouraged. Just remind yourself you’re embarking on a new, fat-burning, healthy keto lifestyle and keep on the path of low-carb living. In time, the results will come.
How To Jumpstart Ketosis
Practicing fasting or intermittent fasting may get you to enter ketosis faster, but it’s not necessary and it may be a bit more than you want to take on right out of the gate. (Learn more about fasting here.)
So, whether you’re exploring the keto diet and ketone bodies for fuel for fat loss, weight loss, or other health reasons, be kind to yourself during this transition. You will soon be in ketonemia and thriving.
For practical tips to help you achieve and maintain optimal ketosis, read Biohacking Your Keto Diet: 5 Strategies for Enhanced Ketosis.
