How to Overcome A Weight Loss Plateau on Keto

So you read about the keto diet, started keto, and lost a lot of weight, but then you eventually stopped losing weight. 

The same thing happened to me. 

When I stopped losing weight I was confused and frustrated. 

However, I kept searching for the answer and I eventually found it. 

In this article, we’ll discuss exactly how you can break your keto weight loss plateau and how I did it.

Why You Lose Weight on Keto

You lose weight on keto because you cut out carbs. This leads to you eating healthier foods that keep you fuller. 

Doing keto also puts you into a state of ketosis, where you can burn your own fat for fuel. 

This means that every day your body can use its own fat for fuel, leading you to lose weight.

Even if you completely ignored the benefits of ketosis, still, just by cutting out foods high in carbs, like desserts, bread, and pasta, you would automatically eat less. 

This is because foods without carbs don’t give your brain as much dopamine or pleasure.

Why You Stop Losing Weight on Keto

You stop losing weight on keto because your body eventually adapts to the food you’re eating, so it starts to burn fewer calories.

If you ate fewer calories for a long long time, then your body’s metabolism would slow down.

This is more common for low-calorie diets, but it also happens on a keto diet. 

Your body senses that it is getting fewer calories each day, so it just starts to burn fewer calories.

How to Overcome A Weight Loss Plateau on Keto

To overcome a weight loss plateau on keto, you must start fasting. Fasting helps lower your insulin and automatically makes you eat fewer calories, so it is a great way to break your weight loss plateau. If you stop losing weight even after fasting, do more intense types of fasting like OMAD.

The reason fasting is a great way to overcome your weight loss plateau is that it is a new stimulus to your insulin and metabolism. 

If you stop losing weight, then it’s because your insulin levels and metabolism adjusted to what you were doing. 

However, if you add fasting on top of keto, then you’re going to start losing weight again. 

But, eventually, even with fasting and keto you’ll stop losing weight again, so then you must add a more intense type of fasting.

Intermittent Fasting + Keto

Intermittent fasting is a type of fasting where you eat for a certain part of the day, but then you can’t eat for the rest of the day. For most people, this looks like skipping breakfast or dinner.

When I just did keto alone, I lost around 50% of my total weight loss goal. 

But, when I did intermittent fasting + keto, I lost around 75% of the weight I needed to lose.

When I added intermittent fasting on top of keto, I broke my first weight loss plateau.

Intermittent fasting is probably the easiest way to lose weight. This is because you still eat the same types of foods, you just don’t eat a certain meal, like breakfast or dinner. 

The reason intermittent fasting works is that it restricts your eating window to a certain period, like eight hours of the day, and then the other sixteen hours you fast.

This means that your insulin would be lowered, and you’d automatically eat fewer calories because you’d have fewer opportunities to eat.

The most common type of intermittent fasting is 16:8 fasting where you eat for eight hours of the day and fast for the other sixteen hours. 

During the sixteen hours, you can drink beverages that have zero calories, like water, unsweetened tea, unsweetened coffee, and diet sodas.

But, once you hit another weight loss plateau with intermittent fasting + keto, then you must restrict your eating window even more.

For example, go from 16:8 to 17:7, 18:6, etc, all the way until you hit 23:1, which is OMAD

OMAD + Keto

OMAD is one meal a day. It is a more intense kind of intermittent fasting that lowers your insulin even more and automatically makes you eat fewer calories throughout the day.

Once you progressed from 16:8 fasting to more intense types of intermittent fasting, OMAD becomes easy. 

However, if you jump straight into OMAD, then it may be a little hard.

When I did intermittent fasting plus keto, I reached around 75% of my weight loss goal. 

But with OMAD, I lost around 90% of the weight I wanted to lose.

However, even if you do OMAD, eventually you’ll stop losing weight.

You’ll just have a couple of pounds that don’t seem to come off. 

Prolonged Dry Fasting + Keto

Prolonged dry fasting is a type of fasting where you don’t eat or drink water for multiple days. It’s the most effective type of fasting and can help you burn 1 pound of fat per day.

After I did OMAD, I stopped losing at around 90% of my weight loss goal. To put the nail in the coffin, I had to do prolonged dry fasting.

Prolonged dry fasting works because your body combines the hydrogen in your fat with the oxygen in the air to create H²O.

Camels store fat in their humps so they can create their own metabolic water in the desert.

Prolonged dry fasting is better than prolonged wet fasting because, with dry fasting, your body is burning fat by creating water.

This makes dry fasting around 2x more effective than wet fasts for overall health and fat loss.

Autophagy

Fasting, especially more intense types of fasting, like prolonged dry fasting, put your body into a state of autophagy. 

In autophagy, your body recycles its old useless cells so it can keep the strong cells alive. 

This is really good for overall health, but it’s specifically good for preventing neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.

How to Do Prolonged Dry Fasting

If you did OMAD + keto for a while, then I recommend your first dry fast to be around 48 hours.

My longest dry fast was 5 days, but each one of those days I wanted to quit. 

The image above with the guy sitting down? That’s how you feel like on a fast. 

It’s hard to restrict yourself from food and water, but as long as you slowly progress, you’ll get the strength to do it. As long as you slowly progress, your discipline is your only limit.

Fasting not only is great for fat loss, it also greatly improves your discipline.

Conclusion

If you do keto for a certain period of time, you’ll eventually stop losing weight. To prevent this, you must start fasting. Eventually, you’ll stop losing weight again, but just keep doing harder variations of fasts and you’ll reach your weight loss goal.

If you want to read my step-by-step guide, where I answer every question you have about keto, you can read my article here.