Bawdy - I think very highly of Dr. Westman, and I believe his approach works. However, sometimes there are stalls and plateaus that can't be explained, and I know you've been experiencing these, as many of us have at times. My recommendation is to get into one of Marty Kendall's programs like Data Driven Fasting (DDF) or the Nutritional Optimisation Masterclass.
DDF is not a radical fasting approach; rather, you literally eat to the meter (as Dr. Bernstein recommends). You start with a 3-day benchmarking exercise by measuring your blood glucose first thing in the morning (to gauge the dawn phenomenon) and then right before and an hour after each meal. He provides you with a spreadsheet to record the data, and using your data from the first 3 days, it helps you find when it's time to eat (based on your BG which tracks your personal hunger threshold). After that you check your BG just before meal time, and if it's higher than your hunger threshold, you wait until it becomes within the threshold before eating. This trains your body to know when you're truly hungry and helps to lower both personal hunger and personal fat thresholds. Several people on this forum have participated in the DDF Challenge and have had excellent results. The next DDF challenge starts on March 6.
The Nutritional Optimisation Masterclass is a more detailed journey into analyzing one's diet and nutrition requirements at both macro and micro levels. Several on this forum are participating in the current NOM that lasts for 6 weeks. If you haven't already been there, you can see the thread here:
https://forum.lowcarber.org/showthr...014#post9396014
One of the reasons I like Marty Kendall is that he uses Ted Naiman's P:E Diet approach to achieving better health. It's a very analytical approach to nutrition that emphasizes increased healthy protein, healthy vegetables and micro-nutrients, a reduced emphasis on fats (in other words, keto with a realistic approach), and elimination of unhealthy manufactured fats from seeds. Increasing my protein consumption and reducing my fat consumption to only what rides with the foods I eat a couple years ago helped me tremendously.
I know you know what you're doing and you're also very knowledgeable and disciplined, so often it's just a couple minor adjustments that can make all the difference. You would master either program mentioned very quickly, so it might be a consideration if you haven't considered it already.