can I lose weight on keto?

I’m now 62 and struggled with being over weight practically all my life.  This past year I’ve lost 50 lbs and I’m now committed to the Keto way of eating forever.  I lost about 1 pound a week, sometimes less, sometimes more, some weeks nothing at all according to the scale at my local gym.  But I had to buy smaller clothes, from size 44 pants to now size 34 inch wait pants.  My goal is to lose 20 more pounds by next January when we go on vacation to Hawaii.

My mother at 65, went High Fat Low carb for almost a year. Not quite Keto but close enough. Without any exercise, she lost 20 lbs and her type 2 diabetes disappeared.

I echo all of the other comments,  I am 63 and have been on a keto regimen for almost 6 months.  I’ve lost a total of 22 pounds, with little or no exercising (back injury in February kept me pretty immobile for a while).  Most of the weight cam off in the first 6-8 weeks, but I am still losing weight at a slower pace now.  For me, I don’t care if I lose another pound, the life-changing difference in the way I feel will keep me on this path indefinitely.  There’s decades of poor eating habits that my body is now trying to heal itself from and I’m willing to be patient with it to get the job done.  It sends me messages every day that tells me whether I’m helping or hurting those efforts.  The human body is amazing in it’s ability to heal itself if we’ll just get out of it’s way!

I’m 48 and started eating keto about 3 weeks ago. I was already doing mostly lower carb so it was more of a tweak for me than a major change.  I’ve lost 7 pounds so far and I definitely have more energy and feel hungry less often (usually when I do feel hungry it’s time to eat).  The past two days I’ve incorporated some intermittent fasting (18 hr – 6 pm to 12 pm) and have been amazed at how easy it was to make it to lunch without eating.  The keto plan is so doable once you wrap your mind around it.

I use My Fitness Pal to track my macros, and actually each evening I sit down and plan out my eating for the next day.  This way I can make food choices based on what I need instead of doing it in the moment.  I can tweak each meal or snack to make sure I’m getting enough of everything and not too much.  It gives me a plan to follow the next day without having to make any choices and I don’t have any end-of-the-day surprises like having not enough fat or having too much protein.  Honestly the hardest thing for me has been learning how much protein is enough.  I didn’t realize how much I had been overeating protein.

Personally, I believe that Keto is the best way for most people to lose weight.  I don’t believe that there is a perfect way, but keto is great for a few reasons:

1. Metabolic Flexibility.  One of the biggest reasons many people struggle when dieting is because of a lack of metabolic flexibility.  What this means is that many people’s bodies can extract energy very well from sugar but not from fat.  And what happens is that you then get hungry, tired, and moody when you haven’t eaten for a while, because your body can’t access and metabolize your fat stores.  That makes normal dieting very hard.  But a keto diet – while hard for the first week or so – actually forces your body to burn fat, so you get less hungry, less tired, and more energetic.
2. Less Willpower Required.  Once you get into ketosis, most people find that they’re actually not very hungry.  There are a lot of reasons why being in ketosis does this, but the end result is that losing weight is much easier and requires less effort/willpower.
3. Gut Issues.  This is less proven as far as the science goes, but practically what happens when many people go keto is that they start cutting out most or all of the foods that are exacerbating various gut conditions, such as Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth.

Again, keto is not a magical solution, but for anyone who is significantly overweight or has been struggling to lose weight for a long time, it usually works better than almost anything else.

The only thing I’d throw in is that you also want to make sure that you’re eating a high-quality keto diet (cutting out all processed/packaged foods, avoiding dairy, etc.).

I’ve personally found keto to help me lose weight. I don’t have a lot of weight to lose, but if I do keto and exercise (weights + lots of walking) at the same time, I lean out pretty quickly and gain a lot more definition.