50 grams of carbs on OMAD

keto
omad
(Ovidiu Drobotă) #1

Hello.

When I eat once a day, my body requires 30-50 grams of carbs coming from sugar or fruit. I need it so I can function adequately.

I eat a 300-gram ribeye steak with a spoonful of grass-fed butter and a cabbage salad. As a dessert, I eat two oranges :peach: or apples :apple:.

I can’t do it without consuming 30 to 50 grams of carbs when I do OMAD. My heart becomes weak, and I have shortness of breath and increased heart rate despite adding more salt to the meal or increasing electrolytes.

I was just wondering: “If it’s a small amount of carbs on OMAD, and they won’t cause me to develop insulin resistance, why is it bad to eat two oranges?”

Because it’s not possible to develop insulin resistance by eating 50 grams of carbs on OMAD. I can’t see any issue with this.

I believe that it’s safe to eat 30 to 50 grams of sugar if you’re on OMAD. In other words, it’s safe to carbs to the point of not becoming insulin resistant. Whatever goes beyond consuming that safe amount of carbs will lead to insulin resistance, so we don’t want to break this rule.

What are your thoughts on this?

#2

I don’t particularly worry about insulin resistance (and know too little about it so I let others to talk about that part) or care about ketosis myself. I know what my body likes and try to eat accordingly. It definitely wouldn’t like a lot of fruit but it’s fine, I LOVE fruit but I am fine with occasional, smallish amounts. But I function just fine with 2g carb a day too (not like I often can go that low but it’s quite possible). So of course my attitude is different.

30g carbs a day puts me into ketosis, 50g doesn’t (at least this is my experience with my usual activity level) so if I am not fat adapted but want to be, I can’t go with the latter. Many people experience benefits in ketosis (I don’t as far as I know) so it is something to consider. Do you want to do keto? Do you able to with your fruits?
50g carbs is keto for some people and 30g isn’t for others.

(KM) #3

There’s also a question of your history and age. I have a feeling you’re right, a young person with a healthy insulin response probably won’t develop insulin resistance from two oranges a day. An older, overweight or obese person with a long history of insulin resistance may not be able to repair it with that much of a glucose hit…

(Bob M) #4

Although it would probably be the fructose hit instead of the glucose hit, as fructose is worse for the liver. Someone asked me over the holiday whether if you have fatty liver, eating fruit would be bad. I don’t have an answer for that. I haven’t done the research, and actually think the research probably isn’t great anyway, since everyone believes fruit is good for you.

I think two pieces of fruit eating OMAD should be fine, especially if you’re doing any exercise.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

Robert Lustig, the anti-fructose activist (among many other things), doesn’t object to whole fruit, on the grounds that the fibre in the fruit slows the rate of absorption of the fructose to something the liver can handle without damage. The pathway that handles fructose also handles alcohol and branched-chain amino acids. If that pathway gets overwhelmed, that’s when liver fat starts to accumulate. The good news is that it is possible to reverse fatty liver pretty quickly by strictly limiting or eliminating alcohol and fructose (BCAA’s are essential, so you are always going to be consuming a small amount of them on a healthy diet). A pilot study on children with fatty liver disease showed that their livers cleared up in about ten days.

Fruit juice, on the other hand, is bad, because it overwhelms the liver with a shot of fructose all at once. The point of whole fruit versus juice is that you can’t eat enough whole fruit at once to get the equivalent amount of fructose contained in a glass of juice. The fibre in the whole fruit makes consuming it self-limiting.

Your body doesn’t require carbohydrate at all, actually. You are probably not eating enough fat, and are running low on energy as a consequence.

However, the amount of carbohydrate a person can safely eat varies from person to person, and within the same person over time. The point of a ketogenic diet is to keep insulin low enough most of the day to avoid damage. When insulin is in the proper range, the liver is making ketone bodies (ketogenesis) and glucose (gluconeogenesis) to feed the brain. (There are certain other cells that require glucose, as well.) The brain actually prefers ketones when it can get them, though it does appear to need a certain minimal amount of glucose, as well (which the liver can easily provide). People with healthy metabolisms can consume more carbohydrate and remain in ketosis, whereas people with a high degree of hyperinsulinaemia/insulin-resistance will need to limit carbohydrate intake quite strictly in order to get into and remain in ketosis.

The fructose in fruit and table sugar is a mitochondrial poison. Since the mitochondria are not only the producers of the cell’s ATP, but also serve to regulate a number of essential cell functions, it is not a good idea to make them unhealthy. It has been shown that mitochondrial damage is at the root of every cancer that has been studied. Some researchers believe, in fact, that all cancer is the result of mitochondrial damage. This is because studies have been done in which mutated nuclei from cancer cells have been transferred to cells with healthy mitochondria, and the cells remained healthy, whereas unmutated nuclei transferred into cells with damaged mitochondria quickly turned into cancer cells.

So avoiding mitochondrial damage by avoiding mitochondrial toxins in the diet makes sense, as does promoting mitochondrial health with plenty of exercise.

#6

I know I reacted to it before but I can’t resist.
Yes, you can. Well, many of us can, no challenge at all. I am particularly good at eating quite a few bananas (well was, now my body complains after just 2-3. or it did the single time I didn’t stop myself way before for other reasons) and I don’t think I had a limit for dates in my past (never had more than 500g dried dates though. that was impossible to stop. never bought that much again). Both are pretty much fructose I suppose. 1kg cherry or apple is easy too and it’s normal to eat watermelon galore, how could a small family eat a 10kg melon in days otherwise? 1 kg fruit is an easy amount.
Many people probably drink that much fructose in juice easier and quicker, sure. I probably couldn’t, I drink juice regularly (less so between January and May when I try to give longer term carnivore a chance) but a tiny bit is enough. It’s just so very rich! I usually use a lot of carbonated water with it. Fruit is WAY easier to eat though it depends on the fruit. I needed many years to be able to eat apple in moderation (like 20g at a time).

But yep, I forgot about fructose before and you two are right. I am glad even my high-carber SO doesn’t eat very much fruit. Even with fiber, that couldn’t be healthy…

It’s true for the human body and dietary carbs - but not necessarily for the individuals. Very many people have problems when their carb intake gets close to zero. They just can’t function well there. Adding some vegs, fruit, whatever and all is well. I have read that on this forum and I can imagine it was the carbs specifically. My SO needs carbs for satiation and I have heard that from others too. I couldn’t eat very low-carb, I got super unwell first too. Gradually, my body informed me it LOVES super low-carb… But not everyone is like me regarding this.
I wonder why someone would need specifically fruit too. And I had it. I had to eat fruit each and every day on keto in the beginning (or much vegs but much vegs couldn’t fit into my 40g net carbs. for some reason, a tiny fruit worked)… I can’t imagine why but I felt the urge and couldn’t do it without. And it felt physical, not like the mental need for banana to compensate me for the loss of my usual amount of vegs…
And I ate too much even to lose fat so it definitely wasn’t too low energy intake in my case, it may be for the OP, who knows? I know I lost the need after a long enough time on low-carb so maybe it’s usually a problem for beginners (even if they are doing low-carb since 6-8 years as I did… I still had to eat my little fruit. keto was way newer though)…

(Chuck) #7

I will say that my body functions best at about 100 carbs per day. My body highly complains when I go below 40 carbs per day constantly. I look back on my childhood and clearly see why it is that way. I ate that way from my earliest memories until I went into the military, in other words when living at home with my parents and grandparents. Eating the way I am now is taking my body back to my humble beginnings. And my body is happy in that fact.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #8

Every body is different. I function best on 0 g of carbs a day. So there is a lot of individual variation here.

(Chuck) #9

Definitely

#10

It seems my body loves very low net non-animal carbs :slight_smile: It doesn’t matter (I mean, I don’t feel it) if I eat much carbs as long as I am very close to carnivore… But if it’s non-animal, starches are better than simpler sugars. Animal sugars are better than starches though. And only net carbs seem to matter…
But as I read stories and experiences, we humans are all over the place… We need to figure out what works for our individual body. (Bodies? It’s tricky even in my own language and I actually know the rule there, it just sounds odd and many people use it differently… I need grammar where I can differentiate between one for each, one for all and potentially multiple for each!)

(Bob M) #11

I really wouldn’t be able to figure this out. Other than cereal for breakfast, I don’t know what else I ate when I was in my teens. In military, I ate whatever was there, which often was things like “white matter” or “red matter” for “breakfast”. And then I found the Pritikin diet and went full very low fat. Thought that was healthy.

#12

I ate eggs and way too much fat, I remember that much… Breakfast cereal wasn’t even a thing when I was a kid but I can’t imagine how anyone can consider it food anyway, it’s as appealing as sprinkled donuts, ew… I was into fatty protein. And carbs too, be it sugar or pasta, I ate so much so very fatty pasta… But fatty protein was a must, I would have starved without it. And it was tasty. Oh my childhood, it could have been worse. And it would have been so much better without all the sugar… :frowning: Poor kids, they don’t know better and get hooked on sugar :frowning: Fortunately it was super easy to stop AFTER I realized I should :frowning:

Wow. And we thought school lunches were bad… (They were. Typically. But Mom had a job where she worked a lot but she could pick her working hours, mostly so she cooked for me. Tasty stuff. Not remotely what I would choose now, though…)

(Chuck) #13

I grew up on the farm, lots of fruit, veggies, fresh dairy straight from the source, home made bread, mostly cornbread, and very little to nothing store bought. The Navy fed us way too much carbs and most of it highly processed.

(KM) #14

Bodies. Our is plural, more than one person, so more than one body. “Individual” is being used descriptively here, not as the subject. :nerd_face:

#15

Thanks! It’s not plural in Hungarian if each person has only one. It’s not always logical and people often use it wrong but using plural sounds weird sometimes too. Hence my desire for something that covers more cases…

(KM) #16

I get it. And it’s fluid. We are now stuck with the question of whether “themself” is a word, since society has embraced the pronoun “they” for an individual person who doesn’t wish to be gender identified, not just the pronoun for a group of people (after emphatically insisting that “they” is not an appropriate way to refer to one individual for several centuries.) I personally liked “ze” much better, as in “ze doesn’t eat any carbs so ze will have to fend for zizself at the buffet” but sadly I’m not queen. :rofl:

#17

I pretty much hate ze and x-whatever and the like, they are super weird to me. Thankfully I virtually never meet this!

Not like I like they and it’s ancient! Still, didn’t see it for one person until lately… We still used she/he some decades ago (some people still use that, I don’t. I like that they is simple but it’s still makes understanding harder and if used in every sentence 3 times in a fanfic, it annoys me)…
But plural for singular is pretty normal, German language does it.

I thought themself isn’t a thing, if we start with they, we should end with selves…? Now you made me uncertain!

I can handle the “original” gendered pronouns somehow but this crazy world now? Oh my. And I really wish for NO gendered pronouns. We don’t have that.
I only enjoyed them in German… You can call a female dog “er” and “sie” as well as she is a female but Hund is a male word :smiley: As German has gendered everything, cow is neutral, Backfish, a young girl is male as Fish is male… Fun to me but probably very annoying for many and quite unnecessary too. I disliked that I need to tell my own gender in Russian when I talk about myself in past tense… Thankfully it was between my two gender identity crises so it didn’t upset me too much. And anyway, I am quite fine if I am called she. Or he. Or they. Not the others, thank you very much. Even it is better than those. I don’t want to continue with sites wanting to know my gender (but why? I am a human, not like even that matters so much), that is a problem sometimes but I usually can handle it in one way or another (sometimes they have too few, sometimes they have way too many. but now I know that there is a name for people’s gender identity who just don’t care, they are a person, stop it… :smiley: I felt similarly at that moment but I still went with my old “androgyne” as the other one felt way too special snowflake-y).
Oh darn I did continue.

If I had to use special pronouns all the time, I would be so silent :smiley:

(B Creighton) #18

Not sure what rule you are talking about here. Most of the year I eat far more than 50 gr of carbs per day… just in my breakfast. This last year my usual breakfast was a home-made raw goat milk or A2 milk yogurt with some berries or tart cherries(carbs). After that I would generally eat a whole red grapefruit(carbs). I would polish off breakfast with a peanut butter, banana and raisin sandwhich on organic whole wheat bread…(uh… lots of carbs). Then I would go work. Dinner was much less carb intensive, although I would generally cap that off with a somewhat carby dessert. Toward the end of the year that dessert usually became a whole fruit.

I am telling you all this because this Dec my fasting insulin was a 5… lower than it has been over the 3 years I have been doing keto in the winter. So, I have become MORE insulin sensitive over this last year while eating a fairly decent amount of carbs. In other words you do NOT have to limit youself to 50 gr of carbs/day to prevent insulin resistance if that was what you are suggesting.

Perhaps you are confusing being in ketosis with being insulin sensitive. While ketosis - generally being under 20-50 gr/carb/day) should improve insulin sensitivity, it is not some kind of prerequisite JFYI.

If you are having the success you want eating some fruit, I say go for it. Don’t worry bout it. Enjoy. I do.

(KM) #19

How many languages do you speak? Your English is excellent.

#20

Thank you, I use it more than Hungarian now (I often think in words and even they are sometimes English, sometimes Hungarian. people allegedly swear in their own language when suddenly very upset, I could do it either way - or without any swearing, of course. I even accidentally developed a hybrid swear word and it’s cool as it’s no swear word this way but it is to me) and I have read an unhealthy amount of English texts so no wonder I picked up the language in some basic way :frowning: I still feel my style is so bad and childish, I search for certain words (and sometimes I don’t find them as it is a thing that we don’t have everything in every language) - and being poetic, I am not, just a tad in my most inspired moments.
But I know lots of expressions and slang words, that’s important :smiley:

Strictly speaking and using my very worn down but at some points still very lively perfectionism, I speak no language, maybe my own somewhat… Talking is hard, thinking goes into the way of my words, writing is better as I can take my sweet time and don’t need to focus on others at all. I never talked much in English and my pronunciation must be not good. I write okay in English and quite well in Hungarian, at least grammar wise (it’s so painful seeing huge grammar mistakes nearly everywhere). I understand German pretty well, I never use it so it would need some time to be able to use it again but my words aren’t nearly as numerous as in English after reading many novels where the word usage was Tolkien level (I am supposed to know many big words now but actually using them is trickier, I merely understand a lot). (And I watch videos about old words too… As they are so interesting! It’s only for English but I gladly pick up ancient or rare Hungarian words too. This is a small country but different parts have different words.)

I don’t know 5 words in Russian without starting to recite some sentences I had to learn by heart and it never left me. I was in a special Russian class for 7 years, we had some many lessons. We have learned a lot for 6 years and in the glorious 7th one we forgot everything… I learned an important thing then: the wonderful human mind is very good at forgetting certain not really needed knowledge forced upon it. My country just broke free from the Soviet Union (just because we didn’t belong to it, there was a very strong impact, like the mandatory Russian… I learned German and English in high school, I had 2 English lessons per week for 2 years and that’s it… I had maybe 6 Russian lessons for 7 years and I still remember some grammar rules - not many -, almost no words and I know how the alphabet works, I think but I can’t just read out cyrillic words, I am too rusty).

I don’t speak many languages, almost just the base minimum. I needed 2 for my diplom… Bachelor’s degree, apparently that is the right term. Certain terms are still problematic for me in English. But I can be lost about food stuff too. At least I have learned so many meat cuts and dishes in English here…
Of course, it’s hard to avoid a little French, Italian, even ancient Greek and Latin as they are everywhere (oh and one of my fav Hungarian writers used zillion foreign words and expressions so I picked some up there as well)… I even started to learn French and Italian, I stopped quickly but I still can enjoy French books for kids as they don’t ever use big words and the context helps a lot :smiley:
I own a Spanish textbook too but I did about nothing with it this far. Languages are interesting and if I know 2 of the same family (English and German), why not to learn more of them…? Especially the basic grammar is fun and it’s quick to learn. The hard part is mastering the hundreds of thousands of words. Okay, one hundred? :smiley: I am a tad of a perfectionist when it comes to these things… But way, WAY less is enough to express myself somewhat. But more is better.

I love languages, I am just 1. lazy 2. I don’t want to learn those too many words for a language I probably won’t use. English is very much needed and I still never will learn all the words I want to. I want to understand EVERYTHING. And to be a tad more eloquent. Like our Rawulf Psionic in Wizardry 8 who talks like this in the heat of the battle: “My supply of projectiles is exhausted!” (I think she says that.) I am more like the Gadgeteer, at least when I need to express myself quickly: “Give me more ammo!” He is somewhat asocial just like me. He may be in a group of 8, I may have a high verbose level but it doesn’t mean we are social. I am more like… Self-expressive? And a tiny bit social as very nearly every human being. I cuddle my cats often, that’s already being social, right? I even talk to them…

I have this interest when it comes to programming languages too, at least I had, it was fun to learn about several very different ones at the university… And then elsewhere… And basically making two macro languages or how my coworker called them…? They needed an interpreter, kind of, not sure if it is the right term and it was so long ago… I did some crazy things like using an assembler (for PC, in Windows using a DOS emulator) with a macro package to write code to display a Commodore-64 image on a C=64 (or C=64 emulator). My drawing program was written in Turbo Pascal but I stop as it’s shameful enough already :smiley: But my friend respected me for my craziness at the next demoscene party and it did what I wanted anyway so… :rofl:
I hope I wrote it right, I don’t feel in top brain shape (it wasn’t my day) and should go to sleep already.

But I just couldn’t help myself to go down on memory lane. The last part was quite nostalgic. I should go back to it (and rewrite my drawing program, Turbo Pascal is really not the way to do things, to put it lightly… but it still worked :D… And was nostalgic… TP was my second programming language I think, after BASIC of course :D… even my university and a programming competition I attended once used it, it was just too popular back then… I loved pc assembly, with mnemonics though, I never could read hexadecimal numbers as code anywhere near fluently… :wink: )

…
Sorry, I don’t want to delete this, maybe someone will find it interesting or something. (I know I say “or something” too often but I don’t know good alternatives and I don’t mind my style becomes a bit sloppy and childish or what. As I can’t find the RIGHT and good sounding words, again.)