HCG Diet - Is Stevia affecting your Ketosis?

It turned out that all the Stevia I was having was keeping me out of Ketosis, how I did not see this thing before I am still unsure. Today, of course, I have everything clear in my mind – the Stevia, the fruit, everything fits perfectly in my puzzle of missing weight losses.

Stevia is a strong sweetener and if you never had before, first impact is really powerful, after a while – as everything else – you can get used to it. I started using Stevia with my first Round of HCG and at that time I was having only a couple of drops. After using it for so many months the amount increased gradually, the taste became so familiar and so delicious that I was adding 10/15 big drops in anything I was drinking, this count for up to 15/20 times a day! You can imagine that having such a constant sweet taste on everything I was having couldn't possibly let me go into Ketosis, so in this round – despite avoiding altogether the grissini and the melba toast – I never been able to reach a good level of burning fat, this thing was somehow puzzling me since first VLCD days, but I thought it might due to the large amount of liquids or just the inaccuracy of the Ketostix.

Switching to 15/20 highly sweet drinks a day to basically zero is not an easy task to do, I had to mentally prepare myself for this change – I tend to do a mental preparation on lots of things I do anyway, it may work differently for other people. But what helped me in this hard task it's been a YouTube video that I watched the other night, a girl that was using Stevia since 9 years! She quit one day, not for ketogenic reasons but just for the realization that here, we're trying to avoid sweets and sugar and at the end we consume such a big amount of this sweetener that confuses and tricks our taste buds like regular sugar. This concept made so much sense to me! Am I avoiding sugar giving to my body lots of sweet things? How this thing actually can be logic? It wasn't and what made me understand what was the best way to get rid of the Stevia was something she said in the video. She admitted that, the first time she tasted something without Stevia, it didn't taste right at the first sip but on the second one she thought was better to focus on what she was drinking, rather than what was missing in it, so she started to discover new flavours, enjoying teas, coffees and everything else in their natural form, in their true flavour.  

So today is my first day Stevia free, everything tastes awful of course but I'm sure I'll get used to it, I want to enjoy a black coffee as it is, a green tea or a chamomile for what they are and not for what Stevia make them taste like. Another drinking option I am seriously thinking on having regularly is a warm broth, rich in protein and tasty. I hope this change will help me getting into Ketosis soon and maybe one day, during P4 I can start again on using some Stevia here and there.