Can You Be In Ketosis and Not Lose Weight

Can You Be In Ketosis and Not Lose Weight

In 1972, Dr. Atkins introduced the world to the concept of carbohydrate sensitivity.

He talked about the damage that excessive carbohydrates can do to your metabolism, suggested that overweight and obesity was caused from a metabolic defect, and played up the necessity of being in the state of ketosis to achieve effective weight loss.
___________________________________________________

If you dedicate yourself over the next 21-days and follow The 3 Week Diet as outlined, you will be walking around with 12 to 23 pounds of body fat gone from your waist, hips, thighs, belly and butt. Your clothes will be looser, you’ll look healthier and more attractive…and you’ll have more energy than you’ve ever had in a long, long time.

The best food for good health to maintain the system of your body I really engaged for. 

Find out here: Fast Healthy Weight Loss
___________________________________________________

Since then, many low-carb dieters have mistakenly thought that the number of ketones that have backed up in the bloodstream is what makes the diet work. It doesn't, and this strong misconception -- that ketones are vital to the fat loss process -- has caused a lot of confusion.

While being in ketosis is essential to initially trigger the metabolic changes needed to switch from predominantly burning glucose to predominantly burning fats for fuel, you can certainly be in ketosis but not lose weight.

Here's why:

[Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you decide to buy something by using one of those links, I might receive a small financial compensation, at no cost to you.]

What to Do if Low Carb Doesn't Work


If your metabolism is average, you lost a decent amount of weight during the first two or three weeks of following your low-carb diet of choice, but then suddenly, weight loss slowed down.


For some people, weight loss completely stopped. For others, you might have gained some of that initial water loss back.

The frustrating part is that you know you’re in the state of ketosis. The Ketostix are turning pink or lavender, and your appetite has severely dropped.

(If you think you might NOT be in ketosis, and you're wondering why you're still struggling to get there, check out our article on 12 reasons why you might not be in ketosis to clear up any misconceptions you might have about ketone test strips, available at Amazon, or ketosis itself, so you can get your low-carb diet back on track.)

You also haven’t eaten anything off plan. You’re drinking plenty of water, sprinkling salt on your foods, and eating your vegetables, but you’re still not losing weight.

Confused, you begin to wonder if dieting is worth all the effort:
Maybe you’re doing something wrong.
Maybe you’re not really in ketosis.
Maybe a low-carb diet just won't work for you.
Can you be in ketosis without losing weight?
Misconceptions surrounding the state of ketosis and what makes a low-carb diet work are rampant within the low-carb community. Bad advice and tales of fantasy are common. A low-carb diet isn't magic, even though it's often presented that way.

If you're struggling to make a low-carb diet program work for you, here's what you need to know about ketosis and weight loss.

Ketosis and Weight Loss

Weight loss on low carb is fairly fast when you restrict carbohydrates for the very first time because you’re using up your carbohydrate stores in the liver. Once those stores have been dramatically reduced, your weight-loss pace slows to a normal speed, but fat loss usually doesn’t stop.

The state of ketosis causes you to eat less.

You go into a caloric deficit without having to count calories. You feel great because your hormones are balanced, you’re eating nutrient-dense foods, and you're easily burning fats for energy. You quickly discover that a low-carb diet lives up to its reputation.

So what goes wrong?

How can you be in ketosis but not lose weight?

There are several reasons why ketosis and weight loss do not always go hand-in-hand. Some of those reasons have to do with the myths surrounding the state of ketosis, but not always. There can be legitimate reasons why effective weight loss on low carb is more difficult for you, than for others.

Is Insulin Necessary to Store Fat?


Eat Too Many Burgers and You Can Easily Gain While in Ketosis
Can You Gain Weight
if You are In Ketosis and
Eating Zero Carbs?

Several years ago, some of us were having problems losing weight on the Atkins Diet.

Since I was also having problems controlling my blood sugar, I decided to go on a zero-carb diet. Eating absolutely no carbohydrates was supposed to lower insulin dramatically and eliminate food sensitivities for those having problems on typical low-carb diets. Or so the theory goes.

I was also having gastrointestinal problems at the time and didn't know I had celiac disease and Grave's disease. Since a low-carb diet isn't automatically gluten free, I used that no-carb diet in the same way as you would use an elimination diet. My hope was that it would make discerning problematic foods easier to spot and eliminate.

One of the misconceptions within the low-carb community is that high insulin levels are absolutely necessary for you to store body fat. According to the insulin hypothesis, presented by Gary Taubes in his book, Good Calories Bad Calories, if your insulin level is low, you can eat as much as you want of low-carb foods without gaining weight.

What I, and several other low-carb dieters, learned during that zero-carb experiment was that the insulin theory is not true.

While high basal insulin levels can cause a wide variety of health issues, you can have very low insulin levels and stall on your weight-loss diet.

You can even gain weight.


Low insulin levels do not protect you from weight gain, nor do they guarantee that you’ll be able to burn your fat stores for energy. This is because the body has an alternative fat metabolism pathway.

Body fat cells are actually an endocrine organ. They secrete various types of hormones that affect metabolism.

A substance known as Acylation Stimulating Protein (ASP) is secreted by your fat cells. This ASP increases the activity of Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL), an enzyme that helps you break down dietary fats into a form that can pass through your upper small intestine and into your bloodstream.

Triglycerides are too large for the body to absorb the way they are, so the pancreas secretes LPL into your small intestine where it can break down the fats you eat into smaller particles. Once these smaller particles pass through your small intestine, they are picked up by LDL cholesterol molecules or encased by chylomicrons and transported into body cells for fuel.

They can also be shipped to the liver.

In the liver, chylomicrons are either converted to VLDL and used as energy, or they are sent to the fat cells for storage. ASP plays a similar role to insulin inside the fat cell. Rather than being secreted by the pancreas when you eat carbs, the fat cells produce ASP whenever they come into contact with chylomicrons.


Role of Dietary Fats in Stalls or Weight Gain

When you eat a high-fat diet, you make more chylomicrons in order to transport those triglycerides. This results in additional ASP, which stimulates greater fat storage. ASP is what allows fat to be removed from chylomicrons.

This activity is independent of insulin.

The fat that’s encased in chylomicrons does not need insulin to be stored because body cells are free to take from them whatever fatty acids they need. This is not true for the VLDL that the liver converts fatty acids into, so not everyone has a problem with a higher load of dietary fats.

It all depends on what your liver decides to do with the fat it receives from those chylomicron transporters.

If your body is prone to fat storage rather than fat burning, which can easily happen if you’ve already lost a large amount of weight, you’ll store a lot of the fat the liver receives whether you’re in ketosis or not.

If you were overweight or obese for a long time before going low carb, the body will believe your starting weight was your normal body-fat level.

When you lose over 100 pounds as I did, the body will panic since it believes a diet is a famine. It will literally do everything it can to regain those lost fat stores, and that is the part of the weight-loss game that most dieters do not understand.

Role of Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL) in Fat Metabolism


One of the theories I investigated a couple of years ago had to do with dietary enzymes. I was interested in these enzymes because I had gained a lot of weight eating nothing but meat, and I was questioning my body's ability to digest fats. These dietary enzymes are needed to digest the macronutrients you eat.

Macronutrients are:
protein
fats
carbohydrates
Each macronutrient has a different enzyme that participates in breaking down that nutrient. Those with celiac disease like me are more likely to have a problem digesting fats, due to intestinal inflammation, but they could also have problems with protein or carbohydrates.

The same holds true for those with food sensitivities. Anything that causes inflammation in the body can interfere with the way your food is absorbed.

Fats need Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL).

LPL is secreted into your small intestine by the pancreas. LPL is what breaks down dietary fats, so the fat molecules can eventually pass into the bloodstream. Without LPL, you cannot break down fats. They would simply pass through your digestive track undigested.

A shortage of LPL can cause your weight loss to stall because the lack of digestion would put your body under a certain degree of stress. Higher stress levels means high cortisol levels, which interferes with weight loss and can even cause weight gain.

However, a lack of LPL cannot cause you to gain weight. Fats cannot be stored in your fat cells without first being broken down by LPL and then pass through the intestine and into the blood.

The other problem is one of up-regulation. While you might produce a normal amount of LPL and be able to digest a certain amount of dietary fat, a high-fat diet might be too much.

Not everyone has the capacity to produce the additional LPL needed to digest the high amount of dietary fats found on a low-carb diet.


For that reason, many experts recommend taking digestive enzymes to help break down fats, proteins, and carbs. However, everything I have read about LPL says that LPL deficiency is hereditary with no cure.

It cannot be fixed through dietary supplements because fats are not broken down in the stomach.

Current scientific thought is that the acid in your stomach breaks down supplemental LPL and makes it inoperable, the same as many probiotics. But I honestly don't know if it would help those who can't digest fats very well or not. Since I have celiac disease, my own dietary fat issues may or may not be related to a lack LPL. It could just be an inflammation problem for me.

What Can You Do?

I tried taking digestive enzymes several years ago, but that was back before I knew that I had celiac disease and autoimmune thyroid disease. They were not effective for me, but I've heard others say that they gave them more energy.

To date, the only thing that has been effective for me is lowering the amount of dietary fat I eat, as well as my total calories, but that decision upset a lot of low-carb folks.

Sure, a large amount of fat makes dieting more luxurious, but we are all individuals and what works for one low-carb dieter won’t necessarily work for another. We each have different metabolic issues and different types of metabolic damage, so your low-carb diet will have to be fine-tuned at some point to address your individual issues.


Yes, you can be in ketosis and not lose weight, but most of the time, it’s fixable -- if you’re willing to live with the dietary changes and tweaks for the rest of your life.

The truth is:

Everyone cannot do what’s required to be thin. But then, maybe being thin isn’t as necessary as we’ve