There's No Such Thing as a Keto Stall: A Kitchen Q&A on Stalls and Missing Nutrients (2017)
I went live in my Facebook group in November 2017, straight from the gym, in a messy kitchen, making a tuna salad. I meant it as a Q&A. About twenty minutes in I realised I couldn't see a single comment: the comments weren't showing when I posted as the page. So it turned into a lecture. It's 33 minutes and never went on YouTube.
In this recording
- [0:00] No warning, bad lighting, a dirty kitchen, and tuna salad with pork rinds for dinner.
- [0:54] My last broadcast covered protein: probably more critical for older people and women than for the athlete crowd it's marketed to.
- [1:38] Group update: past 6,000 members, growth slowing, more spam and bad advice to catch.
- [3:33] Projects I owed the group: a stall troubleshooting thread and a side-effects thread (headaches, hair loss, cramps, bowels, periods).
- [4:15] I'd talked before about writing your obligations in a notebook. Missed meal plans are often priorities, not failures.
- [6:22] How my YouTube videos are built: the question, the short answer, then the longer biology.
- [8:02] Before anything else in a "stall": are you in month one? Week one is mostly water and glycogen.
- [8:35] Weeks two and three: gut changes and low energy. Weeks four and five: you start using ketones and appetite drops.
- [9:32] Notes from a two-hour lecture by a keto clinician I'd watched that day: chasing ketone levels holds people back clinically.
- [11:15] The common hold-ups from that lecture: eating because it's mealtime, not hunger, and social and holiday eating habits.
- [14:59] Hospital-run ketogenic diets tend to be short on some nutrients; that's a supplementation question, not proof keto is unhealthy.
- [16:01] Biotin as my leading suspect for hair loss, with stress and weight loss itself as other causes.
- [17:00] Bruising and iron; the long-term studies on children with drug-resistant epilepsy.
- [20:03] Fortification: cereal, orange juice, milk and white bread carry added vitamins you drop when you go keto.
- [21:33] The broken comments.
- [23:40] There is no such thing as a stall, as if a plastic box were holding you back.
- [25:12] The smaller you burns less: you're not carrying the lost weight up the stairs, and less of you needs fuelling.
- [27:46] I didn't weigh my mayo. That's exactly where an error creeps in.
- [28:15] Track the whole package: if you finish a bag of pork rinds over three days, log the bag.
- [30:45] Three projects for the group: a set-calorie meal plan, a side-effects thread, and a stall-breaker thread.
Watching this in 2026
This is one of my clearest run-throughs of the first-month timeline. Week one is water, weeks two and three are your gut and low energy, and weeks four and five are when ketones start doing the appetite work (live RFTC2543). It's the same schedule as my weight-loss timeline video from that August (timeline), told in a messy kitchen.
The "there is no stall" rant still holds. After the first month, if the scale hasn't moved in more than four weeks, the boring answer is usually calories, and the usual cause is untracked or under-tracked food. I demonstrated it myself by not weighing my mayonnaise. The full-package trick is the most practical tip in this Live. It's hard to fool yourself about a bag you finished.
The picture of someone who's lost 70 pounds no longer carrying the equivalent in bags of rock salt every time they walk to the fridge is the best way I've found to explain why weight loss slows as you get lighter. There's less of you to move, warm and repair, so you burn less while eating the same.
The claim worth unpacking: you lost the fortified foods
My argument was that a standard diet hides its gaps with fortification, so when you drop cereal, juice and white bread you drop those added vitamins too (live RFTC2543). The multivitamins evidence page has two studies that speak to the gap:
- In the A TO Z trial, women on the Atkins diet had shifted toward inadequate thiamine, folate, vitamin C, iron and magnesium by eight weeks. The other diets had shortfalls of their own (Gardner 2010).
- Menu modelling of four popular plans, including Atkins for Life, found none met the reference intake for all 27 micronutrients from food alone (Calton 2010).
So the iron and magnesium part of what I said lines up. Biotin isn't covered on the evidence page, so treat my biotin-and-hair-loss point as my hypothesis. It isn't a finding. Hair loss has many causes, as I said. If it's heavy or lasting, see a doctor, because you want to know which one it is. The bigger picture on multivitamins is mixed: the US Preventive Services Task Force rates the evidence insufficient for preventing heart disease or cancer (USPSTF 2022). My reason for one was filling diet gaps, not preventing disease.
On chasing ketones: a ward study that switched 17 men to a ketogenic diet at the same calories found body-fat loss slowed after the switch (Hall 2016). That study didn't compare ketone levels, but it gives no sign that deeper ketosis means faster fat loss, which fits the advice not to chase the number.
Key points
- Month one is water, gut changes and adaptation. Don't call it a stall.
- After that, more than four weeks without change usually means calories. Weigh the condiments and log whole packages.
- You burn less as you shrink; eating the same will eventually stop the loss.
- Eat when you're hungry, not because it's noon or Thursday night out.
- A keto diet drops fortified foods; look at iron and magnesium, and consider a multivitamin.
- Don't chase ketone levels.
Related
- Guide: Plateaus · Breaking a stall · Hidden calories · Stall or fluctuation · Do you need to test? · Vitamins · Fiber · Protein after 50
- Blog: The week-three stall · Plateau after months · Nutrient deficiencies · Do multivitamins work? · Optimal ketone level · Constipation
- Videos: The notebook to-do list · Keto weight-loss timeline · Gained 5 pounds overnight · Diet and your top three, 2020