Last night, after I shut down the computer, I just sat here for a while feeling defeated. I’d spent two weeks doing what I thought was everything right. I tracked everything I ate. I stayed away from bread, potatoes, sugar, and all the things people immediately associate with carbohydrates. Then I tested my ketones for the first time and… nothing.
According to that little strip of paper, I wasn’t in ketosis at all.
It felt like failure.
For a while, I sat here thinking that if I’d already failed, I may as well eat whatever I wanted. The temptation was immediate. I wanted pizza. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I didn’t have one in the freezer. What I did have was pasta. Bowties, specifically.
I put a pot of water on the stove and waited for it to boil. While it heated up, I started making the dinner I had originally planned to eat anyway: two mashed hard-boiled eggs, a can of chunk chicken breast, and a couple of generous dollops of mayonnaise. Mixed together, it wasn’t exactly gourmet, but it was filling, and it fit the diet. I could have stopped there.
The truth is, I wanted to.
I remember standing there looking back and forth between the bowl in my hands and the pot of pasta boiling on the stove. I wanted the pasta, but at the same time… I didn’t.
That surprised me.
Two weeks ago there wouldn’t have been any internal debate. Pasta would have gone into the bowl without a second thought. Last night, though, there was a genuine hesitation. I knew that if I didn’t eat it, no one else would. It would just end up in the trash. That seemed wasteful.
So, I waited.
When it was done, I drained it and mixed it into what had been a perfectly keto-friendly meal. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t delicious. After two weeks of limiting carbohydrates to almost absurd levels, those noodles tasted amazing. But while it tasted right, it also felt wrong.
I finished dinner, went to bed, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then I woke up this morning.
My mouth was dry. I felt sluggish in a way I hadn’t for a while. Not sick, exactly. Just… off. It’s difficult to describe, but my body felt different than it had over the previous couple of weeks.
Yesterday I was ready to write off those two weeks as a complete failure because a test strip didn’t give me the answer I wanted, and today I’m not so sure.
Maybe I wasn’t technically in ketosis. Maybe I was making mistakes somewhere that I still haven’t found. I honestly don’t know yet.
What I do know is that, despite the keto flu, despite being cranky at times, I’d actually been feeling better. It wasn’t until I stepped away from what I’d been eating that I noticed how much better I’d felt while I was doing it.
Sometimes you don’t realize something is helping until you stop doing it.
One bowl of pasta isn’t the end of the world. It isn’t some dramatic fall from grace, and it certainly isn’t a reason to quit. If anything, it taught me something that a bathroom scale or a ketone strip couldn’t. My body noticed. And maybe that’s the measurement that matters most.
So today, I’m starting again.
Not because I failed yesterday.
Because yesterday reminded me why I started in the first place.