If my ketostix show dark purple, does that mean I'm losing weight?

[pinkfeathers]

Hello!

I am in dark ketosis on the stix. I am drinking a lot of water and making sure I'm getting enough liquid. Does that mean (with the dark color) that I am losing weight? I don't want to weigh myself until the end of my induction as I don't want to be disappointed.

Thanks!

[Georgiana]

If you are following Atkins correctly and eating only to satisfy your hunger, without stuffing yourself with food, then yes, you will be losing weight. But just as a note here, the ketones you see on the stix can come either from dietary fat or from body fat.

[moonlight86]

Yes, dark purple is good!!

[loana]

mine is slightly purple.. I am upping my water today and retest tomorrow am

[Georgiana]

The color on the ketostix is a very poor indicator of your rate of weight loss. The ketostix should come with some instructions explaining how to use them and how they work. If you read those, you should see that what they measure is the concentration of acetoacetate (one of the ketones our body makes) in urine. Therefore you can imagine that the color (i.e. concentration) is influenced by such things as the amount of water you drink, the time of the day when you test (never test first thing in the morning), amount and type of fat you ate (short- and medium-chain fatty acids --- found in things like butter or coconut oil --- are more readily available to use as fuel, so they will likely make ketostix darker), exercise you've done.

Moreover, ketostix only measure the concentration of excess acetoacetate. In the body, acetoacetate can be used for fuel, or it can be transformed into the other two types of ketones: beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone. Only what is left after all the reactions take place in the body is peed out on the stix, so the stix do not measure how many ketone bodies you produce from fat (btw, it's dietary and body fat, not body fat alone), but only how much excess acetoacetate you had left to pee in a certain volume of urine. Other ways of expelling ketones (not exclusively acetoacetate) is through sweat, breath and feces, but the ketostix don't measure these. Even if the ketostix were measuring the total number of ketone bodies, these ketones that your body gets rid of are just "unburned" ones, so the stix would still have no idea what's going on in your body, because acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate are used for fuel.

If the color changes at all, you are in lipolysis/ketosis. Even if the color does not change, you might still be in lipolysis/ketosis, but your body is using all the acetoacetate and nothing is left to pee (or very little, so that is below the concentration threshold of the stix).

Ketostix are fine to use, but they are nothing more than a tool. Your aim is to lose weight, not to make the color of the stix darker, because the two are only poorly correlated. If you are in ketosis, woo hoo for you! A more reliable way to test for ketosis, especially in those cases when ketostix don't change color, is by looking for the physical signs of lipolysis, such as different odor of your breath, sweat and/or urine, metallic/sweet taste in your mouth, increased energy, decreased appetite, thirst.