I'm more Ketarded than You: Receipts

Some Continuous Ketone Monitor data

man burning a lot of oil in barrels for fuel

This is a quick one.

In the last post, I briefly mentioned that I am more ketarded than you. Yesterday I remembered that, while I wore a CKM (continuous ketone monitor) for about 2 months this year, I don’t think I ever posted about it.

The reason I didn’t post: the sensor itself was pretty bad, and the data wasn’t all that interesting. It confirmed I have pretty high ketones, but that didn’t seem to help with fat loss all summer. Story of my life!

So just to make sure this data doesn’t totally go to waste, here are some graphs from my 2 months with the Sibio CKM.

The Sibio CKM is bad

Don’t get it. It’s not approved in the U.S. so you have to import it and trick the app into think you’re not in the U.S. Also the app is buggy as heck. The sensor loses a lot of sensitivity about halfway through its 14 day lifespan. At one point, my sensor lost connection to the app for like 5 days and support was unable to help me.

Just wait until Abbott or someone else makes a good one.

Overall ketone graph

Observations:

• The big gap was when my sensor was broken and couldn’t connect to the app for nearly a week, losing all data, and their support was useless.

• You can see the sensor data drift down towards the end every 14 days. Then, diet unchanged, the new sensor shows much higher ketones again.

• There’s a very strong circadian aspect to my ketones.

• In general, I tend to fluctuate between 1.5-5mmol/l most of the time, sometimes going a little below that and sometimes a little above.

• Never really fell out of ketosis the entire 2 months.

Circadian Ketones

This was honestly the only big insight I got. If you only used the blood prick meter, and if you tested roughly at the same time every day, you’d think “My ketones are around 2.0” or “My ketones are around “6.0.” But they might both be true, depending on what time of day you test.

Let’s take a look at one of those days in detail.

Sort of a diurnal cycle, I guess. My ketones are lowest from early morning until just after noon. They rise rapidly over the course of just 2-3 hours, from around 2mmol/l to over 5mmol/l. Then they dip again, if not quite as low for as long as before. In the early morning there’s another peak, nearly reaching 6mmol/l this time, before it drops down to the 2-2.5mmol/l level before I even wake up.

I wake up around 9am most days, which is the nadir of my ketone curve.

My only real meal of the day besides coffee/cream is typically around lunchtime, so toward the end of the ketone-dip.

My ketones are largely not a function of my acute food intake, but my circadian rhythm, it seems.

All The Days

Somebody suggested I generate this graph, which overlays every single day of CKM measurements.

You can see that the pattern we saw for that one day was relatively typical. Almost all days go like this, with the double-peak pattern in the early evening and again early morning, and the nadir somewhere around 9am-1pm.

That’s it for now, folks. Have a ketarded day.