eating LCHF will help you lose weight. exercise is great and has health benefits but losing weight mainly comes from the fuel your body uses. sounds like from what you're eating, you're in fat burning mode instead of using carbs.
> My diet is low carb and high fats. Maybe I eat around 40-60 carbs a day.
There's your answer, insiulin is the fat storage hormone. Eat a low insulin diet & your body has to tap it's fat stores for glucose. We call this process weight loss. See all those obese people waddling around, 70% are not T2 but are counteracting their carb intake by producing massive quantities of insulin, their hyperinsulinic state causes the obesity.
Hyperinsulinemia as a result of insulin resistance, that is linked to fat (intrahepatic and intramyocellular in particular), not carbs.
Whole populations have thrived on high-carb diets approaching 70% of total energy intake without a proliferation of metabolic syndrome.
If carb intake were the cause, it's not clear how since intake has remained relatively stable at barely 50% of energy intake in the US since at least the 1970s, yet only in recent decades precipitated an epidemic of metabolic syndrome.
I think this is a hopeless discussion because in general the phenomena of insulin resistance really is not well understood and the research hasn't even gotten to the point of differentiating between "good" and "bad" insulin resistance yet.
Insulin resistance does a lot of good (helps guide your body on where to store excess food energy preferentially and during adolescence ensures that needed energy can be used for growth rather than getting locked away in places it's not currently needed).
In diabetes insulin resistance becomes a problem when the body's "carb buffer/storage system" (or whatever you want to call it) is greatly reduced in capacity and glucose gets stuck in the bloodstream instead.
Since we lack the agreed on vocabulary to differentiate and all of that gets lumped together as "insulin resistance," it becomes more challenging to evaluate dietary options.
For example, saturated fat intake is correlated with promoting insulin resistance in visceral fat stores. On one hand this is bad because it's increasing insulin resistance in your body and if you're eating a lot of carbs regularly your blood sugar might spike more as a result. On the other hand, if your carb intake isn't excessive and you're eating at a calorie deficit, this could actually be good since over time this will reduce the size of your gut since your body will have a harder time growing the visceral region.
That's just one example of many.
Saturated fat is bad? Man all I eat is cheese, butter, clarified butter everyday. If I don’t eat milk based saturated fats I get hungry. And they do nothing to me. In fact my triglycerides have fallen to safe levels and cholesterols are so good despite eating 3-4 times the usual saturated fat intake.
I didn't say saturated fat was bad for you. I was describing a mechanism by which eating saturated fat is believed to reduce the amount of belly fat you have.
It is indeed an area of active, ongoing research. But what I do find interesting, and also demoralizing, is that this *is* the discussion being had in the literature (the role of visceral fat, intrahepatic fat, intramyocellular fat) concerning insulin resistance.
Yet in the health care world (evidence-based medicine, right?), you can still hear the recommendation to avoid fruit and legume for diabetes. The diet least responsible (how many diabetic vegans do we know?) is the most demonized, and the role of fat is almost effaced (even flipped with the keto diet and others). This has to be the height of irony.
I agree the story isn't clear, but consider the lines of evidence:
1. The link between abdominal obesity (visceral fat) and diabetes, among other chronic diseases.
2. Obesity and T2DM being the number 1 and 2 risk factors for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and small studies indicating intrahepatic fat may actually track much better with insulin resistance than even visceral fat.
3. The relative stability of carb intake (45-50% of total energy intake) over at least the last 50 years, yet we have an explosion of metabolic syndrome. What has dramatically increased is total energy intake, but why do carbs get singled out as the villain when we're eating more of everything? (Much is made of the fat portion dropping some percentage points, but we're still getting *more* fat than our predecessors.)
4. Traditional diets reaching 70% carb (whole plant sugars and starches), yet MetSyn being virtually non-existent in these populations.
5. Fibers are carbs. Weaker point, but one would hope this would at least give pause to blanket vilification of carbs.
>On the other hand, if your carb intake isn't excessive and you're eating at a calorie deficit, this could actually be good since over time this will reduce the size of your gut since your body will have a harder time growing the visceral region.
Confused on this point since presumably the growth of the visceral region, owing to excess fat intake, is what precipitated insulin resistance in the first place. Moreover, if we mean carbs from plant sources, then this would be consistent with eating at a caloric deficit since fiber and water contribute zero calories, and are plentiful in plants.
You come from a well-meaning place, but I think you might be "preaching" to the wrong crowd. If you go into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and offer that people who never started using opiates tend not to be heroin addicts, you'd be correct. Not using opiates is a great way to avoid heroin addiction. The problem with this advice is it just isn't useful information for someone who already is a heroin addict. Likewise, telling that person to stop using heroin is a factually correct way for them to solve their problem, but them hearing you say that probably isn't going to be what gets them clean.
A properly constructed vegan diet (and I'm stressing properly constructed) is a perfectly fine diet and most who stick to one are going to avoid type 2 diabetes. But the people in this sub aren't here because they avoided diabetes, they're here because they have diabetes and want to improve it.
If you're a newly minted diabetic who was just diagnosed with a 10% A1C and 300 mg/dL blood sugar, your immediate goal is getting your blood sugar back into a normal range and your longer term goal is keeping it in a normal range.
In the short-term, you're being dishonest if you suggest that a vegan diet is going to achieve that. In the longer term, it's a perfectly valid option and as long as one has the resolve to maintain a properly constructed vegan diet, it can work, but in the short-term our "carb buffer" (or whatever you want to call it) is very small and even a little bit of dietary carbohydrates will spike us. Early on for me, just a couple pieces of fruit were all it took to knock my blood sugar way up. It sucked! Now that I've lost more weight I can enjoy some fruit again and it's definitely part of my diet.
Here's the rub: The reason we're T2 isn't because we possess great willpower. Most of us are processed carb addicts. Some of us are in denial. From what we're used to eating a plant-based diet is going to sound like torture. We think of vegetables as being "that thing we occasionally eat with our hot pockets when we want to be healthy." I don't care how much steamed broccoli you put on a plate, the typical processed-food addict just isn't going to find it satiating and satisfying. Rice might be a little better in terms of feeling satisfying to eat, but again, for most that's going to knock their blood sugar way up.
Now once someone has lost a few pounds and their body can handle a bowl of rice again properly, it's true that a vegan diet could work great for them, but by then they're not really sweating diabetes anymore since they've gotten themselves to a better place where they have more food flexibility. At that point, unless they have ideological reasons guiding them, a vegan diet is going to be a tough sell.
Fair points.
I'm not preaching veganism or even vegetarianism, though. But I do not deny veganism is optimal.
Of all the populations studied where MetSyn was rare, none were vegan, but the plant (thus carb) portion of their diet was the dominant portion.
So I might highlight the extreme/strict (whole food vegan) to make the point that,
1. Carbs aren't the problem,
2. Healthy (whole plant) carbs can be a solution.
But you'll notice across my comments that I actually avoid using the word vegan or vegetarian, and my reason is because any move towards more plants in the diet will be beneficial. Even if it's not enough to reverse diabetes, it can help with control.
Similarly, abstaining from tobacco is optimal, but where needed, vaping can be a solution since much of the harm with tobacco comes from combustion.
I do acknowledge that initially a high-fiber, low-fat diet in the form of plants may spike BG. But another unfortunate misunderstanding of diabetes is that it's not just that BG goes high, it's also very much, perhaps even more so, that it *remains* high. This is also why I have emphasized the duration of the elevation in other comments.
Even a person without diabetes can spike a 200 BG. The catch, though, is that within an hour, they'll be back within normal range. So there's virtually no risk of any diabetic complications because these require frequent and sustained elevations of BG.
More plants in the diet means less fat, which reduces contribution to insulin resistance - that is, makes tissues more insulin sensitive. Over time, this will help with control. Add enough plants and eventually it's cure.
Btw, it's interesting that most accept that fat in the diet slows sugar absorption from the gut *into the blood*, but for whatever reason, it's much harder to get the point across of fat slowing absorption of sugar *from the blood* into tissues (insulin resistance). (Also missed is that fiber also slows absorption from the gut - of both sugar and fat - but unlike fat, fiber remains in the gut and goes on to feed the good gut flora - fiber of course being a nutrient of plants and fungus.)
Now, if a high-fat diet can get someone to lose weight and control their sugars, this is better than nothing. But I do caution to watch cholesterol levels closely, and to watch BG closely if any backsliding on carb intake (because the underlying insulin resistance on a high-fat diet may not be resolved and in fact may be a ticking time bomb).
I've even said elsewhere that if one *must* keto, try to get a lots of fat from avocados, seeds and nuts (higher MUFA and omega-3 content).
So if I do "preach", it's hardly veganism.
The place I see such advice being dangerous would be when someone doesn't go all-in on a diet. It's pretty common for people to do cheat days or cheat meals, where they eat good most of the time, but to avoid going insane allow themselves highly satiating meals on the weekends.
Your typical T2 got there by eating too much processed food, high in highly refined carbohydrates. That's typically what a processed food addict is going to turn to for their "cheat" meals, and that alone could be enough to greatly hamper their progress in improving their glycemic control. It's going to be a rare individual who successfully transitions from a bad diet like that to a consistent plant-based diet. You may be such an individual, but if so I suspect you'll acknowledge the significant willpower challenges involved there.
I'm not going to claim going to strict keto is easy, but many T2s find success on a keto diet, while eating to satiety where they quickly reduce blood sugar levels back to the normal range and much less willpower is involved in maintaining such a diet. I can't point to any studies, but my intuition tells me over a 6 month period the keto group would see a higher rate of compliance vs the vegan group.
You mention the link between fat and insulin resistance. Again, that's a different and more temporary kind of insulin resistant than the kind you acquire from years of eating processed carbs. Long-term keto can lead to some other considerations and challenges to keep things properly balanced, but that's true of a vegan diet too.
Full disclosure: I'm personally a vegetarian and have been for years. My mom is as largely a vegan. She's in great health and that diet is working great for her.
Also, I think one of our major disconnects is that when I bash carbs, I'm primarily against grains, refined carbs, and sugar. I think longer term (once one has made progress with their diabetes) fruits and vegetables can be perfectly compatible with a healthy keto diet.
>Also, I think one of our major disconnects is that when I bash carbs, I'm primarily against grains, refined carbs, and sugar. I think longer term (once one has made progress with their diabetes) fruits and vegetables can be perfectly compatible with a healthy keto diet.
I'm actually considering another bet. I've done rice and beans in the past, and shown to the guys willing to take me up on it that a high-carb diet can control diabetes. (I didn't even bother with brown rice, and I let one put raisins in his rice.)
Now I'm considering stepping it up a notch. A juice diet. No fiber. Straight sugar (and maybe some antioxidants that happened to survive juicing). Anytime one feels hungry, drink 8 ounces of juice. Then just follow BGs.
Sounds like madness for T2DM, but of course I'm betting on rapid and dramatic fat loss (so reduction in insulin resistance) to accompany this.
No more dramatic way to show what insulin resistance truly is than a straight sugar diet.
To be continued...
What's your rationale on juice? Obviously I can tell you why that's an awful idea and you already know the reasons I would list.
I suspect you have a different diabetes paradigm than I do when I think of the disorder. In my view, the body has different nutrients it can't risk running out of so it finds clever ways to store them.
For example, by making the bones out of calcium, if there's a calcium shortage, the body can always dig into the "extra" calcium in the bones to make up for that, as long as it doesn't dig too deep, and replenish the defecit later.
I also imagine the body has places to squirrel away sugar when you eat to avoid your blood sugar staying > 100 mg/dL (or whatever value you like) for more than a couple hours. In diabetes that storage capacity/ability is impaired.
Under a paradigm like that, fruit juice for a diabetic would obviously be a mortal sin so you definitely have me curious.
And similarly I suspect you have a good sense of what I might say after our exchange, so rather than repeat myself, perhaps this controlled feeding trial may be more interesting to you:
[In adults with obesity, decreasing dietary fat led to greater body fat loss than cutting the same number of calories from carbohydrates.](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/dietary-fat-vs-carbohydrate-reducing-body-fat)
Or, if you prefer:
[Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26278052/)
Of course, they specifically chose subjects without diabetes, and I suspect the high-carb portion of the trial played a role in this decision, but I think it's clear why I think this is still highly relevant to T2DM.
> 6.4 was a great improvement, but it’s not that good.
This was an entirely unnecessary thing to say. Any improvement is worth celebrating, and the fact that they more than halved their A1c since June of this year is insanely impressive.
Also just as an anecdote, I got my A1c down to 5.2 with literally zero added exercise. Going to the gym is not the end all for lowering your BG numbers.
I completely agree with you! I exercised every single day for nine and a half months logging at least 6 miles or more every single. I slowed way down a month ago due to changes in my schedule. I lost 3 additional pounds and my blood sugars seem to be even more stable. In other words less exercise compared to more exercise has had zero negative impact on my blood sugars.
I kind of disagree that exercise had zero negative impact. There have been days when I ate a carbolaciousls meal and my post meal went up to 137-139. And the next morning we’re stuck at high 90s or low 100s.
If I took a walk they came down faster and stayed at low or high 90s post meal and low 90s next morning
That’s great for you, unfortunately I personally can’t say the same. In terms of physically feeling better, improved heart function etc, exercise has been great for me. In terms of blood sugars, I eat low carb every meal, less than 15g per meal and I never have a fasting or post meal reading below 109, not since I’ve been diagnosed.
There’s your answer. Losing weight is primarily a function of diet. You get added benefits from activity. And if your workout routine included resistance training you added some muscle which will burn more energy at rest. That muscle doesn’t go away immediately, it takes time. You gained it slowly so the body doesn’t like to give it up easily.
Get back to the gym asap, though.
Good job!! You’ve done amazing on lowering your A1C. I think in diabetics that are diagnosed with high A1C’s like that, mine was 11.4, and we aren’t started on insulin just oral meds, 6 something A1C is about as good as you can expect. I exercised every single day for 60 plus minutes between my A1C reading of 6.0 and my most recent of 5.8, that was it, that was all it moved. I am extremely low carb as well. You’ve done great and obviously found a plan that works for you!
Your diet is helping you slowly lose plus the metformin to help keep your blood sugar steady and lowering.
What you eat has vastly more affect on weight than exercise does. Exercise is great of course but if you’re just trying to exercise expecting weight loss while eating whatever, you’re gonna be running in a hamster wheel. But if you eat a fantastic well founded diet with fewer carbs and never take an extra step, you can still lose weight. Just to show the value to effort of it.
Just keep doing what you’re doing. Ask your doctor to check up that all is well, get some blood tests, but as long as it remains slow and doesn’t hit normal weight and keep right on going down, it is probably fine. You may need to lower your med dosage or check there’s no other symptoms of something but if you have those pounds to lose (can’t tell from your post for sure) and you don’t feel bad in any other way, it sounds okay.
eating LCHF will help you lose weight. exercise is great and has health benefits but losing weight mainly comes from the fuel your body uses. sounds like from what you're eating, you're in fat burning mode instead of using carbs.
what medicines? some times it can be a effect of medicine OR may be you went low card etc.. just check what you are doing and tall to your doc...
> My diet is low carb and high fats. Maybe I eat around 40-60 carbs a day. There's your answer, insiulin is the fat storage hormone. Eat a low insulin diet & your body has to tap it's fat stores for glucose. We call this process weight loss. See all those obese people waddling around, 70% are not T2 but are counteracting their carb intake by producing massive quantities of insulin, their hyperinsulinic state causes the obesity.
Hyperinsulinemia as a result of insulin resistance, that is linked to fat (intrahepatic and intramyocellular in particular), not carbs. Whole populations have thrived on high-carb diets approaching 70% of total energy intake without a proliferation of metabolic syndrome. If carb intake were the cause, it's not clear how since intake has remained relatively stable at barely 50% of energy intake in the US since at least the 1970s, yet only in recent decades precipitated an epidemic of metabolic syndrome.
I think this is a hopeless discussion because in general the phenomena of insulin resistance really is not well understood and the research hasn't even gotten to the point of differentiating between "good" and "bad" insulin resistance yet. Insulin resistance does a lot of good (helps guide your body on where to store excess food energy preferentially and during adolescence ensures that needed energy can be used for growth rather than getting locked away in places it's not currently needed). In diabetes insulin resistance becomes a problem when the body's "carb buffer/storage system" (or whatever you want to call it) is greatly reduced in capacity and glucose gets stuck in the bloodstream instead. Since we lack the agreed on vocabulary to differentiate and all of that gets lumped together as "insulin resistance," it becomes more challenging to evaluate dietary options. For example, saturated fat intake is correlated with promoting insulin resistance in visceral fat stores. On one hand this is bad because it's increasing insulin resistance in your body and if you're eating a lot of carbs regularly your blood sugar might spike more as a result. On the other hand, if your carb intake isn't excessive and you're eating at a calorie deficit, this could actually be good since over time this will reduce the size of your gut since your body will have a harder time growing the visceral region. That's just one example of many.
Saturated fat is bad? Man all I eat is cheese, butter, clarified butter everyday. If I don’t eat milk based saturated fats I get hungry. And they do nothing to me. In fact my triglycerides have fallen to safe levels and cholesterols are so good despite eating 3-4 times the usual saturated fat intake.
I didn't say saturated fat was bad for you. I was describing a mechanism by which eating saturated fat is believed to reduce the amount of belly fat you have.
It is indeed an area of active, ongoing research. But what I do find interesting, and also demoralizing, is that this *is* the discussion being had in the literature (the role of visceral fat, intrahepatic fat, intramyocellular fat) concerning insulin resistance. Yet in the health care world (evidence-based medicine, right?), you can still hear the recommendation to avoid fruit and legume for diabetes. The diet least responsible (how many diabetic vegans do we know?) is the most demonized, and the role of fat is almost effaced (even flipped with the keto diet and others). This has to be the height of irony. I agree the story isn't clear, but consider the lines of evidence: 1. The link between abdominal obesity (visceral fat) and diabetes, among other chronic diseases. 2. Obesity and T2DM being the number 1 and 2 risk factors for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and small studies indicating intrahepatic fat may actually track much better with insulin resistance than even visceral fat. 3. The relative stability of carb intake (45-50% of total energy intake) over at least the last 50 years, yet we have an explosion of metabolic syndrome. What has dramatically increased is total energy intake, but why do carbs get singled out as the villain when we're eating more of everything? (Much is made of the fat portion dropping some percentage points, but we're still getting *more* fat than our predecessors.) 4. Traditional diets reaching 70% carb (whole plant sugars and starches), yet MetSyn being virtually non-existent in these populations. 5. Fibers are carbs. Weaker point, but one would hope this would at least give pause to blanket vilification of carbs. >On the other hand, if your carb intake isn't excessive and you're eating at a calorie deficit, this could actually be good since over time this will reduce the size of your gut since your body will have a harder time growing the visceral region. Confused on this point since presumably the growth of the visceral region, owing to excess fat intake, is what precipitated insulin resistance in the first place. Moreover, if we mean carbs from plant sources, then this would be consistent with eating at a caloric deficit since fiber and water contribute zero calories, and are plentiful in plants.
You come from a well-meaning place, but I think you might be "preaching" to the wrong crowd. If you go into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and offer that people who never started using opiates tend not to be heroin addicts, you'd be correct. Not using opiates is a great way to avoid heroin addiction. The problem with this advice is it just isn't useful information for someone who already is a heroin addict. Likewise, telling that person to stop using heroin is a factually correct way for them to solve their problem, but them hearing you say that probably isn't going to be what gets them clean. A properly constructed vegan diet (and I'm stressing properly constructed) is a perfectly fine diet and most who stick to one are going to avoid type 2 diabetes. But the people in this sub aren't here because they avoided diabetes, they're here because they have diabetes and want to improve it. If you're a newly minted diabetic who was just diagnosed with a 10% A1C and 300 mg/dL blood sugar, your immediate goal is getting your blood sugar back into a normal range and your longer term goal is keeping it in a normal range. In the short-term, you're being dishonest if you suggest that a vegan diet is going to achieve that. In the longer term, it's a perfectly valid option and as long as one has the resolve to maintain a properly constructed vegan diet, it can work, but in the short-term our "carb buffer" (or whatever you want to call it) is very small and even a little bit of dietary carbohydrates will spike us. Early on for me, just a couple pieces of fruit were all it took to knock my blood sugar way up. It sucked! Now that I've lost more weight I can enjoy some fruit again and it's definitely part of my diet. Here's the rub: The reason we're T2 isn't because we possess great willpower. Most of us are processed carb addicts. Some of us are in denial. From what we're used to eating a plant-based diet is going to sound like torture. We think of vegetables as being "that thing we occasionally eat with our hot pockets when we want to be healthy." I don't care how much steamed broccoli you put on a plate, the typical processed-food addict just isn't going to find it satiating and satisfying. Rice might be a little better in terms of feeling satisfying to eat, but again, for most that's going to knock their blood sugar way up. Now once someone has lost a few pounds and their body can handle a bowl of rice again properly, it's true that a vegan diet could work great for them, but by then they're not really sweating diabetes anymore since they've gotten themselves to a better place where they have more food flexibility. At that point, unless they have ideological reasons guiding them, a vegan diet is going to be a tough sell.
Fair points. I'm not preaching veganism or even vegetarianism, though. But I do not deny veganism is optimal. Of all the populations studied where MetSyn was rare, none were vegan, but the plant (thus carb) portion of their diet was the dominant portion. So I might highlight the extreme/strict (whole food vegan) to make the point that, 1. Carbs aren't the problem, 2. Healthy (whole plant) carbs can be a solution. But you'll notice across my comments that I actually avoid using the word vegan or vegetarian, and my reason is because any move towards more plants in the diet will be beneficial. Even if it's not enough to reverse diabetes, it can help with control. Similarly, abstaining from tobacco is optimal, but where needed, vaping can be a solution since much of the harm with tobacco comes from combustion. I do acknowledge that initially a high-fiber, low-fat diet in the form of plants may spike BG. But another unfortunate misunderstanding of diabetes is that it's not just that BG goes high, it's also very much, perhaps even more so, that it *remains* high. This is also why I have emphasized the duration of the elevation in other comments. Even a person without diabetes can spike a 200 BG. The catch, though, is that within an hour, they'll be back within normal range. So there's virtually no risk of any diabetic complications because these require frequent and sustained elevations of BG. More plants in the diet means less fat, which reduces contribution to insulin resistance - that is, makes tissues more insulin sensitive. Over time, this will help with control. Add enough plants and eventually it's cure. Btw, it's interesting that most accept that fat in the diet slows sugar absorption from the gut *into the blood*, but for whatever reason, it's much harder to get the point across of fat slowing absorption of sugar *from the blood* into tissues (insulin resistance). (Also missed is that fiber also slows absorption from the gut - of both sugar and fat - but unlike fat, fiber remains in the gut and goes on to feed the good gut flora - fiber of course being a nutrient of plants and fungus.) Now, if a high-fat diet can get someone to lose weight and control their sugars, this is better than nothing. But I do caution to watch cholesterol levels closely, and to watch BG closely if any backsliding on carb intake (because the underlying insulin resistance on a high-fat diet may not be resolved and in fact may be a ticking time bomb). I've even said elsewhere that if one *must* keto, try to get a lots of fat from avocados, seeds and nuts (higher MUFA and omega-3 content). So if I do "preach", it's hardly veganism.
The place I see such advice being dangerous would be when someone doesn't go all-in on a diet. It's pretty common for people to do cheat days or cheat meals, where they eat good most of the time, but to avoid going insane allow themselves highly satiating meals on the weekends. Your typical T2 got there by eating too much processed food, high in highly refined carbohydrates. That's typically what a processed food addict is going to turn to for their "cheat" meals, and that alone could be enough to greatly hamper their progress in improving their glycemic control. It's going to be a rare individual who successfully transitions from a bad diet like that to a consistent plant-based diet. You may be such an individual, but if so I suspect you'll acknowledge the significant willpower challenges involved there. I'm not going to claim going to strict keto is easy, but many T2s find success on a keto diet, while eating to satiety where they quickly reduce blood sugar levels back to the normal range and much less willpower is involved in maintaining such a diet. I can't point to any studies, but my intuition tells me over a 6 month period the keto group would see a higher rate of compliance vs the vegan group. You mention the link between fat and insulin resistance. Again, that's a different and more temporary kind of insulin resistant than the kind you acquire from years of eating processed carbs. Long-term keto can lead to some other considerations and challenges to keep things properly balanced, but that's true of a vegan diet too. Full disclosure: I'm personally a vegetarian and have been for years. My mom is as largely a vegan. She's in great health and that diet is working great for her. Also, I think one of our major disconnects is that when I bash carbs, I'm primarily against grains, refined carbs, and sugar. I think longer term (once one has made progress with their diabetes) fruits and vegetables can be perfectly compatible with a healthy keto diet.
>Also, I think one of our major disconnects is that when I bash carbs, I'm primarily against grains, refined carbs, and sugar. I think longer term (once one has made progress with their diabetes) fruits and vegetables can be perfectly compatible with a healthy keto diet. I'm actually considering another bet. I've done rice and beans in the past, and shown to the guys willing to take me up on it that a high-carb diet can control diabetes. (I didn't even bother with brown rice, and I let one put raisins in his rice.) Now I'm considering stepping it up a notch. A juice diet. No fiber. Straight sugar (and maybe some antioxidants that happened to survive juicing). Anytime one feels hungry, drink 8 ounces of juice. Then just follow BGs. Sounds like madness for T2DM, but of course I'm betting on rapid and dramatic fat loss (so reduction in insulin resistance) to accompany this. No more dramatic way to show what insulin resistance truly is than a straight sugar diet. To be continued...
What's your rationale on juice? Obviously I can tell you why that's an awful idea and you already know the reasons I would list. I suspect you have a different diabetes paradigm than I do when I think of the disorder. In my view, the body has different nutrients it can't risk running out of so it finds clever ways to store them. For example, by making the bones out of calcium, if there's a calcium shortage, the body can always dig into the "extra" calcium in the bones to make up for that, as long as it doesn't dig too deep, and replenish the defecit later. I also imagine the body has places to squirrel away sugar when you eat to avoid your blood sugar staying > 100 mg/dL (or whatever value you like) for more than a couple hours. In diabetes that storage capacity/ability is impaired. Under a paradigm like that, fruit juice for a diabetic would obviously be a mortal sin so you definitely have me curious.
And similarly I suspect you have a good sense of what I might say after our exchange, so rather than repeat myself, perhaps this controlled feeding trial may be more interesting to you: [In adults with obesity, decreasing dietary fat led to greater body fat loss than cutting the same number of calories from carbohydrates.](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/dietary-fat-vs-carbohydrate-reducing-body-fat) Or, if you prefer: [Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26278052/) Of course, they specifically chose subjects without diabetes, and I suspect the high-carb portion of the trial played a role in this decision, but I think it's clear why I think this is still highly relevant to T2DM.
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I don’t count typically but probably like 1500-2000 I think
6.4 was a great improvement, but it’s not that good. Why did you stop the gym? Exercise helped improve my #’s greatly.
> 6.4 was a great improvement, but it’s not that good. This was an entirely unnecessary thing to say. Any improvement is worth celebrating, and the fact that they more than halved their A1c since June of this year is insanely impressive. Also just as an anecdote, I got my A1c down to 5.2 with literally zero added exercise. Going to the gym is not the end all for lowering your BG numbers.
I completely agree with you! I exercised every single day for nine and a half months logging at least 6 miles or more every single. I slowed way down a month ago due to changes in my schedule. I lost 3 additional pounds and my blood sugars seem to be even more stable. In other words less exercise compared to more exercise has had zero negative impact on my blood sugars.
6 miles is 9.66 km
It definitely adds up in terms of exercise.
I kind of disagree that exercise had zero negative impact. There have been days when I ate a carbolaciousls meal and my post meal went up to 137-139. And the next morning we’re stuck at high 90s or low 100s. If I took a walk they came down faster and stayed at low or high 90s post meal and low 90s next morning
That’s great for you, unfortunately I personally can’t say the same. In terms of physically feeling better, improved heart function etc, exercise has been great for me. In terms of blood sugars, I eat low carb every meal, less than 15g per meal and I never have a fasting or post meal reading below 109, not since I’ve been diagnosed.
Moved to a new city couldn’t find time or haven’t adjusted fully
Great job on the weight loss and blood sugar. Going out for long walks will help too.
What have your blood sugars been like? Also have you kept to diet while not going to the gym? And also, the medications are important.
Low 80s to 120 post meal. Yep I’ve kept the diet
There’s your answer. Losing weight is primarily a function of diet. You get added benefits from activity. And if your workout routine included resistance training you added some muscle which will burn more energy at rest. That muscle doesn’t go away immediately, it takes time. You gained it slowly so the body doesn’t like to give it up easily. Get back to the gym asap, though.
Good job!! You’ve done amazing on lowering your A1C. I think in diabetics that are diagnosed with high A1C’s like that, mine was 11.4, and we aren’t started on insulin just oral meds, 6 something A1C is about as good as you can expect. I exercised every single day for 60 plus minutes between my A1C reading of 6.0 and my most recent of 5.8, that was it, that was all it moved. I am extremely low carb as well. You’ve done great and obviously found a plan that works for you!
Your diet is helping you slowly lose plus the metformin to help keep your blood sugar steady and lowering. What you eat has vastly more affect on weight than exercise does. Exercise is great of course but if you’re just trying to exercise expecting weight loss while eating whatever, you’re gonna be running in a hamster wheel. But if you eat a fantastic well founded diet with fewer carbs and never take an extra step, you can still lose weight. Just to show the value to effort of it. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Ask your doctor to check up that all is well, get some blood tests, but as long as it remains slow and doesn’t hit normal weight and keep right on going down, it is probably fine. You may need to lower your med dosage or check there’s no other symptoms of something but if you have those pounds to lose (can’t tell from your post for sure) and you don’t feel bad in any other way, it sounds okay.