Will One Cheat Day Ruin Ketosis?

So you’ve started keto, & eventually at one point you had a cheat day.

Maybe your relatives peer pressured you to try their brownies, or you just fell into temptations & ate a whole tub of Ben & Jerry’s watching Netflix.

We’ve all been there before.

But, you may be wondering, would one cheat day ruin ketosis?

In this article I’ll discuss if one cheat day would ruin ketosis or not, & how to get back into ketosis as fast as possible if you went off track.

How Does Keto Work?

Keto is an eating plan where you don’t eat any carbs & instead focus on eating high-fat foods. The goal of keto is to reach ketosis, a metabolic state where your body can use its own fat for energy. This can help you to lose weight with less hunger compared to other diets.

After lowering your carb intake to under 50 grams a day, you’ll get into ketosis within a matter of days.

But, if you do go off of ketosis, then the carbs left in your system would need to get used for you to go back into ketosis.

Basically, the liver creates ketones whenever it senses that there isn’t enough carbs to use as energy.

This is your body’s way to use its own fat as energy.

But, when it senses an abundance of food with carbs, then it decides not to burn its own fat for fuel & instead store fat for later.

Should You Have Cheat Days on Keto?

No, you shouldn’t have cheat days on keto. This is because it takes a couple of days to get back into ketosis after a cheat day. So, even if you had one cheat day a week, for around half of the week you wouldn’t be losing any weight.

Instead, focus on eating strict keto as much as possible if you want to lose weight.

However, if you’re on vacation & you don’t mind not losing any weight, it would be okay for you to eat carbs.

If you do choose to eat carbs on your vacation, then still make sure to eat healthily & not to snack too often.

Will One Cheat Day Ruin Ketosis?

Yes, one cheat day would ruin ketosis. However, we can’t control what we did in the past. As long as you eat under 50 grams of carbs per day, you’d get back into ketosis quickly.

Even though one cheat day would kick you out of ketosis, it’s just a small obstacle in your weight loss journey.

As long as after each cheat meal you pick yourself back up & continue to eat keto, you’ll keep losing weight.

I personally had dozens of cheat days & binge eats on keto, but each time I did I just made sure to come back to eating keto & I eventually lost all the weight I needed to lose.

But, if you just quit after one cheat day, you’d never lose the weight.

Build Discipline

Eating healthily isn’t just about losing weight or becoming physically healthier.

It’s also about developing your own mental strength & discipline to come back to eating healthy even after a break.

How Long Does It Take to Get Back Into Ketosis?

If you eat under 50 grams of carbs per day, you can reach ketosis within 2 – 4 days. However, if you’re bigger & exercise more often, it may take around 1 – 3 days to reach ketosis. But, if you’re smaller & don’t exercise as often, it would likely take around 3 – 5 days to reach ketosis.

How Can I Get Into Ketosis Faster?

The amount of time it takes for you to get back into ketosis depends on how many calories you burn, how many carbs you eat, & how often you eat.

You can affect these factors with small changes so you can get into ketosis faster.

Exercise & Weight

If you’re bigger & exercise more often, you’d use more calories compared to someone who’s smaller & doesn’t exercise frequently.

This helps your body to use the old carbs in its system much faster.

This would help you to get back into ketosis faster because your body has no choice but to use its own fat for fuel.

How Many Carbs You Eat

If you eat on the higher end of the carb limit, like under 50 grams of carbs per day, then it may take you longer to get into ketosis compared to someone who eats less carbs.

This is especially important if you’re a smaller person or don’t exercise as much since it would take your body more time to burn through the old carbs left in its system.

So, if you’re a bigger person who workouts frequently, then you could still get away with eating ~50 grams of carbs per day. 

But, if you’re a smaller person who doesn’t workout often, you should aim to eat under ~30 grams of carbs per day.

How Often You Eat

If you eat more often, then your insulin would be raised more. This would lead to you reaching ketosis slower compared to someone who eats less often.

If you want to reach ketosis faster & lose weight faster, I highly recommend starting intermittent fasting with keto.

Intermittent Fasting

With intermittent fasting, you eat for around 8 hours of the day & don’t eat for the other 16 hours of the day.

This helps you to lose weight much faster because it eliminates a lot of snacking, lowers your insulin, & lowers the total amount of calories you eat in a day.

So, even if you had a cheat day & ruined your ketosis, if you just ate low-carb & did intermittent fasting, you’d get back to losing weight really quickly.

OMAD Fasting

Personally, after I did intermittent fasting, progressed to OMAD intermittent fasting, which is one meal a day. OMAD is like normal intermittent fasting, but it helps you to lose weight much faster.

This helped me to maximize my weight loss. 

With keto alone I lost around 1 – 2 pounds a week, but with OMAD & keto, I lost around 2 – 3 pounds a week.

If you want to learn more about how to start OMAD, here’s my article where I discuss the benefits of OMAD, how I started OMAD, & how you can too to speed up your weight loss.

How Can I Get Back Into Ketosis ASAP?

If you want to get back into ketosis as fast as possible, I recommend doing prolonged dry fasting & exercise. Doing both of these things would help you to burn through the old carbs in your system extremely quickly. 

What Is Prolonged Dry Fasting?

Prolonged dry fasting is a type of prolonged fast where you don’t eat or drink water for multiple days. It’s the most advanced type of fasting, but yields the fastest results. You can lose up to a pound of fat a day with prolonged dry fasting.

Prolonged dry fasting has been a part of many religions across the world to help people develop their discipline & so they can live & understand the life of people who don’t have access to abundant food or water.

How Does It Work?

Prolonged dry fasting works because your body can combine the hydrogen in your fat with the oxygen in the air to create H²O. This helps you to burn fat much faster compared to wet fasting.

This is because not only does your body burn fat through caloric restriction, but it also burns fat just by creating its own metabolic water.

Even whenever you don’t fast, your body creates its own metabolic water from fats. 

However, this amount of water is pretty insignificant compared to your daily water intake.

But, when you dry fast, your body starts creating more metabolic water.

This makes it possible for your body to go much longer without water than you may have otherwise expected.

In the animal kingdom, camels are the kings of dry fasting. 

Camels have humps of fat in their back as a way to survive through dry conditions.

But, you may be wondering, why should I even dry fast?

What Are The Benefits of Prolonged Dry Fasting?

The biggest benefits of prolonged dry fasting are weight loss & autophagy. You lose a lot of weight with prolonged dry fasting because your body not only burns fat from caloric restriction, but also from creating water. Dry fasting is also the fastest way to reach autophagy.

Weight Loss

In our situation, the biggest benefit of prolonged dry fasting is weight loss. Since your body turns the fat you have into water, it burns much more fat compared to wet fasting. On average you can expect to lose around a pound of fat a day with dry fasting.

You can also expect to lose around 1 – 2 pounds of excess water weight per day that you dry fast.

Autophagy

Another huge benefit of prolonged dry fasting is that it’s the fastest way to reach autophagy.

Autophagy is a state your body goes into when there’s less food and it realizes that it must start recycling its old cells. 

With autophagy, your body recycles its old, useless cells to feed the stronger, more necessary ones.

The biggest benefits of autophagy are that it decreases inflammation, helps reverse aging, & decreases your risk for cancer.

How Prolonged Dry Fasting Helped Me

I never used prolonged dry fasting to get back into ketosis faster, but I did use it to lose weight whenever I hit a plateau.

After doing keto & intermittent fasting for a long time, I stopped losing weight.

Even after adding OMAD (one meal a day) on top of keto, I still eventually plateaued. 

To break my final plateau and lose all the weight I wanted to lose, I had to do prolonged dry fasting.

To get into the deepest state of ketosis possible, I did keto & OMAD for most days of the week, but added prolonged dry fasting for two days of the week.

This helped me to burn fat much more faster than with just keto & OMAD alone.

How Can I Implement Prolonged Dry Fasting With Exercise?

If you want to reach ketosis as fast as possible after eating carbs, or if you just want to lose weight, do a two day prolonged dry fast & exercise on both days. This would help you to eliminate calories, lower your insulin, burn fat through the metabolic water process, & by burning calories from exercise.

This would help you to get rid of all of the carbs in your system super fast.

You’d probably reach ketosis your first day after doing this, but fasting the second day would help to burn even more fat.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you had one cheat day on keto, though it would kick you out of ketosis, you shouldn’t worry. As long as you eat under 50 grams of carbs per day, you’ll get back into ketosis & keep losing weight. But, if you want to get into ketosis & lose weight as fast as possible, I recommend doing a two day dry fast with exercise.

If you want to learn more about if you should carb cycle or not, in this article I talk about who should carb cycle & how to carb cycle correctly.