Intermittent fasting 16/8 paired with a slow carb style eating regimen. Usually max out at 150 grams or carbs per day (lentils, veggies, etc).
I took my blood ketone readings and was shocked it said 0.5 when I regularly eat 1/2 cup lentils for lunch with veggie which is 90 grams of carbs alone.
Depends on the veggies you’re eating. Lentils are high in fibre, as are a lot of vegetables… so you need to subtract the fibre amount from your carbs (body doesn’t break fibre down, so it doesn’t count as net carbs…)
Technically your body always produces ketones, it’s usually just not in high enough concentrations to measure. So there’s nothing unusual about having them in your system.
With the variability possible in home testing devices (vs. having a lab do it) you could have been near 0 but it read 0.5. Or you could have just been running low on ingested carbs or stored glycogen, so your body ramped up some ketones.
It’s been awhile, but I went through a period where I thought being in ketosis was the Rosetta Stone for weight loss. My fasts were always clean and I had those piss sticks to check my status perpetually.
One interesting aspect I picked up on was that the longer I fasted the larger the barrier I had to climb in terms of food to get out of a state of ketosis. Though difficult does not mean impossible. So I have never been “stuck” per se, but I have been somewhat impressed by the sheer volume of sugar required to snap my bod out of it.