How Quickly Can You Expect to Lose Weight When You Eat a Keto Diet?

This is one of those questions that gets asked a lot so I wanted to address it in this post.

I know that one of the things that excited me about starting the ketogenic diet in the beginning was reading about all these crazy weight loss success stories that some women seemed to experience. You know, the ones where they lose 14 pounds in the first three weeks and then continue to lose 4 pounds a week for the next 6 months and voila they’re at their ideal weight.

I loved the thought of getting into a fat burning state and just watching the excess pounds melt away.

In actuality, it took me about a year to lose 30 pounds. However it didn’t take a year for me to start feeling and looking a great deal better, though. This actually happened in a matter of weeks.

Every Woman is Different

The thing about losing weight on the keto diet is every woman is different. Those who have a lot of excess fat will find that it comes off more quickly. Those who have a lot of metabolic derangement or hormonal healing to do will find that it takes longer.

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Your body’s main goal is always survival and health. It doesn’t care about how it looks, it cares about how it’s functioning.

When you start eating keto with weight loss in mind, you kind of have to trust the process. What you are doing is feeding your body all the nutrients it needs to heal, build, release and do whatever it needs to do in order to move towards optimal health. Some women will experience this as a fairly drastic weight loss, and others will experience this as a slow weight loss.

If you have a great deal of healing and balancing to do internally, you may even experience a little weight gain in the beginning. (I know, few women want to hear this).

Embarking on a journey of health is a little like embarking on a journey of trust and faith. You give your body what it needs and you trust that it has the intrinsic knowledge (which it does), to do what is necessary.

The ketogenic diet is not a fad diet, it’s a lifestyle of health. And one of the most common things I hear from women who have embarked on this journey is that they learn so much about their bodies and their minds along the way.

With that being said, here are the most common weight loss patterns that I have heard women experience when eating keto:

Common Weight Loss Pattern on Keto

    • An initial ‘whoosh’ of weight loss in the first week ranging from 3-10 pounds. This is water weight which is released because you have lowered your carb intake. This is very common and most women experience it.
    • Around week 2 or 3, weight loss seems to stop or stall for a couple of weeks. This also seems to be very common, and my opinion is that this is the time frame in which your body is doing the most adjusting and learning to burn fat as fuel instead of glucose.
    • After the first 3 weeks, a lot of women will then experience a gradual weight loss that goes in fits and starts. For example, losing 3lbs and then staying the same weight for another 2 weeks and then seemingly unexpectedly dropping a further 4 pounds before stalling again.
    • Some women experience the initial water weight loss and then seem to put on a few pounds over a month or two before then steadily losing weight. I believe women in these cases had a lot of healing to do before their body would release excess weight.
    • A lot of women find that when they are within 10lbs of their goal weight, weight loss stalls. I have found that weight loss nearly always slows right down as you near your goal weight.

Out of all the weight loss scenarios I’ve heard of, the most common one by far is where women get despondent because they feel like they are not losing weight fast enough. And they are completely disregarding other things that are happening that indicate their health and well-being is increasing.For example, better sleep, more energy, clearer skin, higher libido, more regular and easier menstruation, and even inches lost.

With my journey, you know when I was happiest? It was when I stopped weighing or measuring myself at all and trusted my body and the keto process.

I realised that if I hadn’t lost weight one week, it meant that my body was doing something else equally (if not more) important, and it was all good.

It’s not all about the number on the scale – far from it.

I highly encourage every woman these days to let go of weighing and measuring and instead focus on health, well-being and nourishing body, mind, and soul. When you do this, you can be sure that your body will happily reach the perfect weight for you at exactly the time it’s supposed to.

I hope this is helpful, as always I’d love to hear any comments below!

Framed image linking to ketogenic diet guides and plans

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