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Introduction: How to tell if you're in ketosis
There are nine very clear signs that will tell you if you're in ketosis or not. Now, being in ketosis is very, very important, not just to lose weight but to get rid of a lot of health problems, diseases, and inflammatory conditions that someone has. The problem with testing yourself for ketones to see if you're in ketosis or not is that when you're doing a urine test, for example, or a breath analyzer test, they're not very accurate. Well, maybe at first they might be a good thing, but as soon as you start to burn ketones more efficiently, those extra wasted ketones are not going to show up in your urine, and they're not going to show up in your breath, but those values could be zero. So those tests are not very accurate. Now, a blood test is pretty accurate, but it's expensive, you have to stick yourself, and there's a little pain involved. But I'm going to show you nine different signs or clues to tell you if you're in ketosis or not.
Signs of ketosis
Number one relates a bit more to transitioning into ketosis. Usually it takes about two to three days, depending on how low your carbs are, and there are usually three symptoms that a lot of people have if they don't do either the B vitamin supplements or electrolytes and sea salt, because all three of these transitional signs or symptoms can be related to something missing in the diet. When you do keto, you need more B vitamins, and a lot of times you need more electrolytes. Those would be: number one, keto flu; number two, keto fatigue; and number three, keto rash.
Now, if you're doing the healthy version of the ketogenic diet, and you're really making sure that your foods are nutrient dense and higher quality, the chances of you getting these symptoms are much less versus someone doing the dirty version of keto, which is basically just doing low carb and not paying attention to the quality of foods. Another side note on that: if you get diarrhea, for example, that usually is related to consuming a lot more vegetables. I recommend that you include a good amount of greens or salad on this program to get certain minerals and certain vitamins, but some people are just not used to consuming seven cups or ten cups of salad per day, and because they don't have the microbes to break all that fiber down, they might get diarrhea. On the flip side, people who have keto breath usually have it because they're not consuming enough greens to counter some of the ketones that you're breathing out.
But let's go to number two. This is a big one: weight loss. You're going to lose weight initially. You may lose a lot of weight, like 7 to 14 pounds in the first one to two weeks. Why do you lose so much weight initially? Simply because the first part of this weight loss is going to be water weight. When your body has been consuming a lot of carbs, with that stored glucose you also store a lot of water. For every gram of glucose that you store, your body stores 3 grams of water, so it's like three times as much water. People who do a high-carb diet are literally filled with water. When you start getting them off carbs, they dump and get rid of a lot of water weight. So the first week or even week and a half they might lose a ton of weight, and then it comes down to one to two pounds of loss, and they're usually depressed at that time because they think, "Wow, it's not working anymore, so maybe I should go into another diet," when in fact it was working; they just didn't realize it was water weight. You have to realize that the most fat you could possibly burn per week is about two pounds, and that's with a healthy body. That's not including a lot of fasting; that's just going on this keto plan. If you start adding more fasting, and you're fasting for some days, the weight loss goes up to three, four, five, or even a little more pounds of actual fat loss per week. But when you start losing weight, especially after the second week when all the water is gone, you can kind of know that you're burning fat, and that's the way it's coming off.
All right, number three. This is a good one: your clothes are looser around your midsection. This is a really good indication that you're in ketosis and that it's working, because the first thing that's going to happen is your liver is going to start dumping fat. When you start getting rid of the fatty liver, you also start losing weight around your organs, and that's called visceral fat, and that's in your midsection. So as your midsection shrinks, it's a really good indication that it is working, which is way more important than losing weight. Because of this, what you're fixing when you're doing the ketogenic diet is insulin resistance. The insulin receptor is becoming more receptive, and it's working. One of the functions of insulin is to help you absorb nutrients, especially amino acids, so you're healing the body with more proteins. Especially if you're menopausal and you have atrophy, that's a good thing, so you're getting more protein, and protein is a bit heavier per weight if you compare that to actual fat per weight. It's all about getting healthy to lose weight, not losing weight to get healthy. Part of getting healthy is being able to absorb these nutrients and allow these proteins to get into your body. When a lot of people start out, they have insulin resistance, and they're usually deficient in amino acids because they can't pull them in, so they have a hard time absorbing protein.
All right, that was number three. Number four is energy increase. Why? Because ketones come from dietary fat and your body fat. If we take a look at the two fuel sources, we have fat and glucose. Looking at the calories per gram, fat has nine and carbs have four. That's less than half of the calories, so there's more than twice as much energy in fat than in glucose. When you go into ketosis, you're tapping into all this stored fat, your potential energy, so you get to have that back and use it to actually get things done. When you're not in ketosis, you're running on glucose and you're dependent on the next meal you eat, because you're eating so frequently. The burning of fat and ketones is much more efficient and cleaner fuel.
Number five is that your cognitive function increases: memory, focus, and attention. That's because ketones help your brain. They help the nerve cells if you have damage in your neurons from too much sugar, because that damages the mechanism and starves out the neurons. This is why diabetics have a greater incidence of dementia and problems with cognitive function, because of the destruction in the brain. But when you're in ketosis, these ketones feed the brain cells directly. They bypass this damage, and finally your brain cells get fuel and your cognitive function increases. For example, when I am fasting in the morning, I'm really in hardcore ketosis, and when I make these videos I have much less editing. I can just go right through it very fast, whereas if I eat and try to do a video, it takes a lot more editing.
Number six: ketones help with inflammation and pain. Why? Because ketones are anti-inflammatory molecules. If you have any type of inflammatory condition, whether it's an autoimmune problem or arthritis, and you go on the ketogenic diet, you're going to feel a lot less inflammation, and that's a really good clue to tell if you're in ketosis or not.
Number seven: when you eat food, you are going to feel more satisfied. This relates to another thing I talked about. When you have insulin resistance, you can't absorb as much nutrition, because insulin is not working to help transport those nutrients into the cell. So when the cell becomes more sensitive to insulin, you are now going to absorb more nutrients, and you're going to feel more satisfied when you eat. Before, you're eating, eating, eating, and nothing is filling you up or satisfying you. It could be the type of food you're eating is not nutrient dense, but there's also the factor of your body absorbing the nutrients.
Number eight: better mood. If you were depressed before, or if you had anxiety, you're going to find that you're just happier and that you feel better. It's going to uplift your mood. Why? Because there's this thing called brain insulin resistance, and you're fixing insulin resistance in the brain. The neurons are getting more fuel, and that greatly helps the neurotransmitters, your hormones, and your mood. I looked at 15 studies that associate changes in mood with the ketogenic diet, but the results are kind of mixed, and I'll tell you why. Some of the studies are on mice, and how do you really know if a mouse had a shift in mood? It's difficult. You can't really compare a mouse in depression with a human in depression. That's a difficult comparison. Also, just because something is high fat doesn't mean it's a ketogenic diet. In some of these studies, they're using just a high-fat diet, but the carbs are really high, like 30 percent of the calories are carbs, when it should be about five percent of the calories. Other studies just use ketones; they don't actually put the person on the ketogenic diet, and then they say, "See, the ketogenic diet doesn't work for uplifting your mood," because they used ketones. But taking ketones is different from doing the ketogenic diet.
Number nine, and this is the best indicator out of all of these that you're in ketosis, is no appetite. You lose your appetite. You can go for a longer period of time without being hungry, because your body is finally eating fat when you're not eating. When you're going between meals, you're no longer dependent on carbs; your body can actually eat the fat on your own body, which is a new concept for a lot of people who are dieting. Not having an appetite makes it really easy to stick to long term.
All right, now that you have that information, the next best thing to know is what the best version of a ketogenic diet to start with is and how to do it. For that, I put up the video right here.