6 Easy Ways to Test For Ketosis

So you heard about ketosis and you know it’s a state in which your body switches metabolic pathways and begins predominately using fats for fuel. So you start a ketogenic diet, or you try fasting, or your cycling your carbohydrates and counting every last carb that goes into your mouth. But you’re left feeling unsure, unaware, and simply unable to verify whether you’re actually doing the right things to get yourself into ketosis. Well, that’s exactly why I decided to make this video, I want to give you guys 6 very simple tests and signs that you can look for that’ll show whether you are in fact in this fat adapted state of ketosis.

Let’s start with the very first sign that’ll you’ll experience as you get closer to ketosis and that’s fatigue and a decrease in your performance levels. When you start something like a ketogenic diet or fasting where you’re cutting your carbs really low, your body isn’t just automatically going to switch over to efficiently using fat for energy. It’s going to take time for your body to stop metabolizing carbs and switch over to fats even if you’re not eating any carbs at all. This is due to the fact that your body stores away carbohydrates for this exact scenario.

So before your body even begins to try to become more fat adapted it’s going to draw out and use all the stored carbohydrates in the form of glycogen from your liver and your muscles. Normally when you workout even when you’re not on a low carb diet this process of using stored carbohydrates is happening anyway. But the major difference is that at the end of the workout and throughout the rest of the day the carbs that you’re eating will refill those glycogen stores in your liver and your muscles.

However, when you’re following a low carb, ketogenic, or fasting diet plan you’re never really restoring these glycogen stores. So this in-between phase where your glycogen stores are running low, but your body is not yet fat adapted and it’s not efficiently using fats for energy, this phase is many times referred to as the keto flu. And even though it may sound nasty and it may feel pretty nasty to be in this in-between phase, it’s the first sign that you are starting to enter ketosis. You’ll experience things like general fatigue throughout the day, a reduction in the amount of weight you can lift at the gym, and a reduction in your endurance levels as well. The good news is that after a couple weeks your body will fully switch energy pathways and you’ll feel a lot better because your body will begin efficiently using fat for fuel. In fact, one study found that athletes that were on the ketogenic diet burned 230 percent more calories from fat during exercise than athletes that were not following the keto diet. As you start feeling your energy levels go back up this becomes an additional sign that you have now actually entered ketosis.

Now this symptom of ketosis obviously has its pros and cons. The good thing about using fatigue as a measurement of whether you’re getting closer to ketosis is that all it requires is for you to assess how you’re feeling rather than any kind of additional testing equipment. The downside to testing this way is that just because you’re experiencing fatigue doesn’t 100 percent mean that you have entered ketosis, so this is definitely not the most accurate way for a conclusive result. But if you’re looking for a more definitive result then you’ll love this next testing method, that you can do right at home. And that’s using ketone urine test strips.

Now when used incorrectly these are definitely not a hundred percent accurate so I’ll give you some tips on how to ensure that you get more of an accurate reading in a second, but first let me briefly explain how they work. You can either pee in a clean dry container and then dip the testing strip into it, or you can take a ketone test strip and hold the testing side of the strip directly under your stream of urine. Regardless of how you do it, you would then wait 15 seconds for your results. The result you would compare to the color guide that comes with your test strips, but usually, a darker purple color will indicate higher levels of ketosis. Ideally, you would want to be in the low to mid-level ranges of ketosis.

Check out my client Khalid’s transformation where he put on a whole bunch of muscle.