Have you had a “cheat day” or a carby meal and are now wondering about how to get back into ketosis?
Depending on how many carbs you ate, it’ll take anywhere between a few hours to a couple of days to be back in ketosis.
Fasting?
Many people ask if they need to fast to get over the cheat day, but it’s honestly not necessary. Fasting will get you back into ketosis minimally faster than just eating keto food. However, with the fasting, there is also the mental effect of what is effectively punishing yourself for not eating keto.
Jump straight back into eating keto – even if it’s the same day you ate something that wasn’t keto. Just get back into eating keto as a baseline way of eating.
Ketone sticks showing positive, even though you ate carbs?
If you test with keto sticks, you might find that you are still showing ketones the next day after a big amount of high carb food. This will often take a day to show negative as the effect is delayed through urine.
Weight gain?
Many find that the day after they have a big cheat, they lose weight… This doesn’t happen in the few days after that though and often weight gains happen 2 days after it. The reason for the gain is for every gram of carbs, your body needs to hold on to 3-4 grams of water to process it.
On the day/day after you might be a lot thirstier (as your body stores that water). It’s when we start to store it that people often see the loss, then freak out a bit the next day – it’s just water and it’ll disappear pretty quickly when you eat keto again. It can be a pretty substantial amount of water too (as you tend to hold onto more than you did pre keto whilst your body figures it out).
Remember, just jump back into eating keto and know that you’ve got this! 🙂
P.S. I hate the word cheat as it has connotations of doing something wrong ❤ But it’s the word people will search for, so I’ve used it here 😊