I’m now through 3 full weeks of the keto diet, and I’m getting less hungry by the day.

For me, the first week garnered the biggest weight loss, which is as expected. The body stops storing glycogen, and the “weight” of glycogen is mostly water. I went from around 200 down to 195.

At that point, my weight loss slowed down substantially, and I felt “stuck” at 194. Only for the past 2 days have I seen readings under 194. That’s almost 2 full weeks without any weight loss, which definitely felt frustrating.

I finally did a blood test to make sure I was in ketosis, and I was. Even though I’ve felt positive effects more than I had after 10 days, I was definitely curious why the weight loss wasn’t occurring at a higher clip.

As a result, I started tracking my calories very carefully and deliberately for the last five days, and that’s provided a clearer picture. On a “normal” day, I’m consuming somewhere between 2500-2800 calories. I’ve been almost exactly at the recommended guidelines of 70% fat, 25% protein, and 5% net carbs.

My Fitbit has me burning about 3,000 calories per day on average. Aha! Now it all makes sense. At a calorie deficit of 300 calories per day, it would take right around 12 days to lose a pound.

In other words, after the first week, there’s no “magic” to the weight loss, at least if one doesn’t start with more than 10-20 pounds to lose. (This seems like it could be different for people with a more substantial amount to lose, but I’m not sure.) For me, though, it appears it’s going to be calories in/calories out.

For the past couple of days, I’ve dialed back the calories to around 2300 per day. And here is the interesting part to me: I’m not hungry.

I think that’s likely the “magic” behind keto. At right around the 2 week mark, my appetite fell dramatically. And I’ve heard one’s appetite keeps falling as the body gets used to creating the right blood sugar concentration using fats (and proteins) instead of carbohydrates. There’s a nearly unlimited source of fat available in our bodies, and the ketogenic diet adds even more.

To me, that means the additional weight loss will come over time as I just eat less. If I stay under 2500 and keep up my exercise level to burn 3000 calories, I’ll get into a rhythm of losing one pound per week from here.

I had suspected I’d only need around 2 months of keto to lose upwards of 15-20 pounds overall. Now, I’m thinking it will take around 3 months. The fortunate part is that it seems very easy to do from a hunger perspective. The only worry I have about maintaining ketosis is that I’m needing to find more interesting and healthier meals than I’ve been having.

My go-to meal has been sausage and cheese with hemp hearts and olive oil thrown in. It’s already getting old, and I think the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is far too high to be considered healthy.