Last week your stick was dark? How can it be dark when you had 164 carbs Monday May 12 eating cobbler, potato salad and beans?

Well, Thursday May 15th you had Texas Roadhouse with lots of carbs, Sunday Monday you had 37g carb eating Sugar Free Cinnamon Bear Gummies.

I eat under 20 net carbs a day (maybe 21, 22) and my keto stick still says light.

I wouldn't worry about it. A keto stick is like a pregnancy test. You either are or aren't, there's no in between. The slightest indicator is a positive.

All ketosticks do is tell you that you HAVE been in ketosis in the last 3 days. So its no indication that you are in today...just that sometime in the last three days you have been.

albertabeefy and Leonidas have the similar black shirts and the same post for their avatar picture. It must be a keto men thing.:laugh:

/random observation

Some info regarding ketostixs:

From: The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living, p163-164

Ketones - To Measure or Not

Nutritional ketosis is defined by serum ketones ranging from 0.5 up to 5mM, depending on the amounts of dietary carbohydrate and protein consumed.
...
Within a few days of starting on carbohydrate restriction, most people begin excreting ketones in their urine.

This occurs before serum ketones have risen to their stable adapted level because un-adapted renal tubules actively secrete beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate into the urine.

...

BOHB and acetoacetate are made in the liver in about equal proportions, and both are initially promptly oxidized by muscle.

But over a matter of weeks, the muscles stop using these ketones for fuel. Instead, muscle cells take up acetoacetate, reduce it to BOHB, and return it back into the circulation.

Thus after a few weeks, the predominant form in the circulation is BOHB, which also happens to be the ketone preferred by brain cells.

...

the strips that test for ketones in the urine detect the presence of acetoacetate, not BOHB

...

Over time, urine ketone excretion drops off.

These temporal changes in how the kidneys handle ketones make urine ketone testing a rather uncertain if not undependable way of monitoring dietary response/adherence.



From ketopia:

Why You Need To Stop Worrying About The Color Of Your Ketostix

...

Of the three types of ketones (acetate, acetoacetate, and beta-hydroxybutyrate) produced by your body, ketostix only measure acetoacetate.

...

your body produces different quantities of these different types of ketones depending on how long you’ve been in ketosis.

...

When you first start your ketogenic diet and you are not yet fully ketoadapted, your kidneys actively excrete two types of ketones into your urine: beta-hydroxybutyrate .. and acetoacetate

...

first your muscles use both beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate for fuel, but after awhile, they begin taking the acetoacetate and converting it to beta-hydroxybutyrate, and returning that to your serum

...

As a result of the continued conversion of acetoacetate to beta-hydroxybutyrate, the serum and urine volume of acetoacetate (the only ketone detected by ketostix) is significantly reduced.

...

Even though we lack the sophisticated understanding of why kidneys downregulate ketone secretion into urine, we know that it happens and we know that the volume of acetoacetate in your serum drops as you become more fully ketoadapted.

So quite literally, after a few weeks into your low carb ketogenic diet, you’ll likely start seeing a change in your ketone levels as measured by ketostix.









TLDR: Ketostix are essentially useless.