Hi. I use the strips and find them helpful(you'll see thats a hot topic on the boards). What I find is that my system takes 3 or 4 days to reflect my diet - When I started it took almost 5 days to turn them light purple. So maybe like me you have a slow system tostart. Now I find that they reflect what I ate 2 days ago. I keep a log of the reactions as well as a food diary. This has really allowed me to add certain carbs with no problem and stay away from the ones that kill me - like:grapefruit juice wrecked my ketosis but a big potato in beef stew did not. This is after induction of course.

Hang in there!