This is purely anecdotal, but when I do Dr Fung's one meal a day fast, I don't lose much weight following the fasting day, I'm more likely to show a loss the morning following an eating day. Who knows why? Am I retaining water on the fasting days? Who knows? I think we make a mistake trying to correlate ketosis with weight loss on a day by day basis. Step back and analyze a week or a month of a new eating plan and see what that looks like.

And, it may be that the patterns of weight loss are different for women than for men.

Yes, that's right…if you can do it. Two meals a day is also OK, a ketogenic diet should make 18-24 hour fasting periods easily doable. But when you get to only one meal a day, how is that different from continuous calorie restriction? The alternating days for fasting seem to give me the leeway to enjoy higher carbs and still be in ketosis. But I don't know! just plugging along with my low BG numbers and slow weight loss.

I did check and make sure there wasn't a 28 day pattern.


Unfortunately we have four months of data and it does NOT support higher ketosis equals higher weight loss. Not for one day, four days or ten. Again, I know this is n=1 but there's no reason to think one way or the other if Dr. Edes is an outlier. All we can say for sure is that in her case the conventional wisdom was incorrect.

I want to come back and debunk my own statements. At the top of this plot,
http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/wp-con.../06/graph-2.jpg

She has the days she exercised marked with red arrows. This is an outstanding plot, BTW. Tufte would be proud of her. On the LHS, beginning at about day 60, it shows she starts exercising frequently. Eight days later (providing some back up to the four-to-ten-days-later rule of thumb) her morning/resting ketones jump up by 2x to 4x. This indicates that in at least her case more exercise led to increased fat metabolism but did not significantly enough increase the metabolism of ketones.

Are you trying to correlate with a monthly cycle? I wasn't even thinking of that... Just that women may not lose the day following the higher ketones....it may take a few days for the body to catch up with it.




Again, maybe for men, higher is better, for women there is a lower sweet spot? Or maybe just for Dr Edes? Maybe we all have a personal sweet spot where a certain level of ketosis leads to best weight loss and higher is counter-productive? I remember someone on these boards who was getting ketones up in the 5.0 mm range and it was not resulting in ANY weight loss, so perhaps Dr Edes is not the only one for whom higher ketones do not = greater weight loss.

PS I like your idea that ketones go up, then are used by the body and go down. That could be one explanation for why ketones are generally lower in the morning, higher in the evening, in JM's experience.

I eat one meal a day, but don't particularly restrict calories - I eat around 2000-2500 calories in a meal (very high fat meals). I don't have long term data on how my current regime affects weight loss yet - but I feel so much better on one meal a day, it feels natural.

Should have been written, "On the RHS" for right hand side. Gah!

Congratulations on your amazing weight loss in a short time, Merpig. Inspired by your success, I did one 24 hour fast, without any difficulty; unfortunately, the next day, I was uncharacteristically cranky, and unhappy, and the following day I was ravenous all day in a way I haven't been more months. I'll take that as a failure of something or other. But I'll have another go at it today, I too would love to get below the 200 mark.

I've learned on this thread that low-carb is not necessarily keto, and keto is not necessarily weight-loss enducing. We have to become bleeping scientists to make it all work. The keto chart that JEY pointed us to http://www.flexibleketogenic.com is very interesting.

Oh good, you explained RHS, because I had no idea what LHS meant.

Ketones lower in the am and higher in the pm, was not just JM's experience, the 40 study subjects for the breath ketone meter also showed that. There is a caution in the book if you get no ketones in AM, you could still be in ketosis most of the day. Using them up at night makes perfect sense to me too.

I keep thinking back on the Calories Proper expert interview, being in ketosis is no guarantee of weight loss, especially if you are close to goal weight (and Dr Ede never really looked overweight). EDIT: Hi Pivione, we were typing at same time

One 2000 calorie high-fat meal? You're a star on the KetoClarity meal plan. And if you eat the foods on Dr. Fung's list..his too.

Getting ready to hit the road in the next hour or so - fasting day for me today so won't have to worry about any "road food" issues, . I won't be able to follow things totally - last night gave my last 1/2 dozen eggs and my remaining 1/2 bottle of apple cider vinegar to the neighbors. Nothing left now except two cans of sparkling water which I'll drink on the road. I'm having my last coffee with last small splash of cream, and waiting for the garbage men so I can bring my garbage cans back inside the house before I leave. I'll do my best with the fasting, and the eating plans - sometimes tough when others are cooking for you as will happen on the road.

But next Saturday or Sunday I'll be back home again and can start to organize my home kitchen and shopping. I'll miss being able to walk out into the fields and pick my own fresh blueberries! But their season is over in about a week anyway so not much longer I could have done it. Even now the pickings are sparse because the gulls and crows have gotten most of them.

Whether or not weight-loss correlates with ketones might depend. A protein sparing modified fast or a diet like Stillman's or even the infamous Kimkin's can work for weightloss, and sometimes decreases appetite.

And maybe ketones can go up and down for slightly different reasons in different people. One person's ketones could go down because they've eaten above a certain level of protein or carbohydrate. Another's could be more responsive to the level of dietary fat they've eaten in the day. There's no question that a 500 calorie non-ketogenic diet will, barring water retention, probably lead to more predictable weightloss than a ketogenic diet with calories to appetite. So we kind of know going in that weightloss won't necessarily correlate with ketones in all circumstances.

Um, no. I have to disagree. That's not what we have been told half a thousand times on this site citing one blogger's n=1 "experiment." We've been told that getting blood ketones up to 0.8 will at least be a symptom if not a cause of fat burning weight loss. We are supposed to reduce our carbs and reduce our protein intake and even buy a gizmo with $5 a shot cards and magic will happen. Again, it's been stated many, many, many times as the truth.

Here we have data from a very credible source with just as many trials, 1, as was used to create that 0.8 false certainty.

JM addresses some of your questions in Chapter 12 - Keto Qs and As. Among the questions: "I'm showing great ketone levels, but I'm not losing weight. Why?"

He quotes Dr Bill Lagoskos: "The level of ketones in circulation does not accurately reflect the degree or speed of weight loss. The mere presence of ketosis and an energy deficit but not the depth of ketosis, per se seem to be the primary mediator of weight loss."

Also in the same chapter, Dr Westman says: "The ketogenic diet is a not a weight-loss diet - it's a fat-burning diet. If you have excess fat stores, the body will use them up. If you don't have excess fat stores, your body will use the fat you eat for fuel, and it will let you know when you need to eat more fat by making you hungry."

I didn't see this in JM's book, but Gary Taubes certainly speaks to the idea that we are not all designed to have the same BMI or % of fat, particularly the currently popular 17-25 BMI or 10-20% body fat.

I'm sorry but that's shifting and redirection. You've now shifted the argument to say that JM's n=1 result is actually not what he's been saying while the truth is he's made a career of his n=1 result. I won't let him off the hook by citing something someone else said.

I'll say it again. "We are supposed to reduce our carbs and reduce our protein intake and even buy a gizmo with $5 a shot cards and magic will happen. Again, it's been stated many, many, many times as the truth."

The best and latest example is the poster elgrayso. The guy has been desperate to lose some fat. Check out his posts and note the advice to reduce protein.

I know that has been my and JM's experience and I *think* Ede's experience. She states, "I stopped measuring evening ketones and evening blood sugars to keep expenses down" implying that the data was at least not as useful as morning ketones.

What I really want to do someday is sketch out an energy sink and source diagram for the human body. I think it would show ketones as the product of fat metabolism and the brain and other secondary organs as consumer of ketones. There are some really interesting things going on there. I was starting to conflate ketones with blood glucose but teaser set me straight in his journal. My current question is what causes lypolosis of fat in the fat cells (the break down of triglycerides to free fatty acids) and how are free fatty acids metabolized. Those are the two rate limiting steps for fat loss I suspect.