The keto or ketogenic diet is a low carbohydrate, high fat, and moderate protein meal. It offers numerous health advantages, such as weight loss, longevity, and blood sugar control. The common goal for individuals on a ketogenic diet is to attain ketosis, which is a natural state where your body can burn fat for energy.
Nevertheless, determining if your diet requires adjusting to attain and maintain ketosis is hard. So, using keto test strips becomes handy.
In this post, we explain how to use keto test strips to measure your ketosis and how to attain this state via a ketogenic diet.
What transpires during ketosis?
If you adhere to a standard high carbohydrate diet, the cells will use glucose as their energy source. The glucose comes from the carbohydrates in your meal, including sugar and starchy foods such as pasta, vegetables, and bread.
However, suppose you avoid such food, like when on a keto diet; your body will not have sufficient glucose to meet its energy requirements. In that case, it will consider other alternative energy sources.
The body achieves this by transforming stored fat into ketones and fatty acids. The ketones substitute glucose and supply the energy to your brain’s requirements, leading to a physiological state known as dietary ketosis.
Being in dietary ketosis improves ketone levels, which are detectable in blood, urine, and breath.
Measure ketosis with a blood
This is one of the ways to use keto test strips. Ketone blood meters are accurate and reliable when measuring the ketones in a body. Initially created for individuals with diabetes I, they appeal to those who follow a ketogenic diet as an accurate way of measuring ketosis.
You can find how to use keto test strips at any place that carries urine stripes. Nevertheless, you’ll require a meter to read the stripes.
Most blood glucose readers will detect blood keto stripes, even if the glucose stripes tend to be different from the keto strips.
How blood ketone meter works
- Wash your hands well
- Load a lancet with a needle, follow the directions offered
- Insert a blood ketone stripe into the meter
- Prick the finger to draw some blood using a lancet
- Allow the strip to get in contact with blood and check the reading
- Discard the lancet and strip as indicated in the guidelines
Measuring ketosis with urine
When you want to know if you are in ketosis, urine strips are a convenient and cheap way to find out. So, to check your ketones every day, stick with a particular time, such as in the morning, many hours after the last meal of the day. This offers you the best comparison.
The procedure of how to use keto test strips includes:
- Washing your hands and taking the urine sample in the container
- Deep the absorptive end of the urine strips into the sample for a couple of seconds and remove
- Wait for the time indicated on the package for the urine strip to turn
- Compare the strip with the color chart
The color corresponds to the concentration of the ketone in the urine. This ranges from zero ketones to higher concentrations. Darker color means the ketone level is higher.
