Does lower BG equal fat burning?

(Mary) #1

I’m 60, hopelessly IR, and weight loss is ridiculously slow. Some things have improved (no more headaches!) but let’s be honest - I’d really like to see lower numbers on the scale. Or clothes getting bigger. Something. Anything. I’ve been carnivore for 5 weeks and for the past couple of weeks have been checking my BG (Accu-Chek Guide) before my first meal. It’s come down from 5.9 to 5.3 this morning. So, since high BG equals high insulin and high insulin restricts fat burning, is the reverse true? As my BG comes down, will my body get the memo about accessing fat for energy?
I’m sorry to sound like a whiney toddler but I’d really like to see some progress.
Thanks for any insights,
Mary

(Mary) #3

Hi Gaz,
Lots of questions here - I believe my IR is high as when I started keto in Jan '18, it took me 8 months to lose a pound. I don’t know how I stuck with it, to be honest, as I’m very much an instant gratification type. Eventually, I fell off the wagon and have been messing around with IF and dropping one thing after another out of my diet ever since. Artificial sweeteners bit the dust about 18 months ago.

My diet now consists of bacon and eggs (usually) for my first meal, which I try to put off as late as possible. Occasionally, coffee with hwc. Second meal is fatty pork chop(s) or pork belly. Sometimes chicken but it’s so lean it’s not really worth it. I dislike beef and it’s very expensive in the country where I live. Fortunately, junk food isn’t really a thing here, either (or, at least, not my favourites) which makes staying on the wagon easier. I add salt to meat and my “treat” is roasted pumpkin seeds (in the shell) for the magnesium.

Starting weight in 2018 was 225 (I’m 5’7"). I was 210 in mid-Aug and recently saw 200. Sadly, the scale bounced back up to 203 and is resisting going lower. I would like to see 150 but frankly, would be delighted with anything (below 200).

I agree that I should be seeing significant weight loss and am reasonably sure elevated insulin levels are the problem.

Any advice gratefully accepted.

#5

another carnivore here.
list your food in a day please.
NOW remember WE never are ALL the same truly so it is YOU doing you on healing and hormone re-balance and metabolism leveling back out and what toxins are dumping from your body AS YOU adapt.

It can be extremely normal to lose squat ‘off that scale’ as we go into zc. Many do drop the 10 lbs water weight and all that and SO MANY never do SO YOU ARE not in a bad place here at all :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

this is easier said then done…drop OLD dieting baggage of lose lbs on scale, or I need to eat less, or I need to ‘check all macros and blood sugars and all that crap’ as you come into this carni lifestyle cause we truly can ‘get in our own way’ as we heal/repair and go thru adaption that our bodies must do personally for each of us as individuals. Key again…mindset change must also be a work in progress to drop the old ‘useless indicators’ that can control us and drive us batty as we need zc to change us as we live and progress on the lifestyle long term. :100:

list food. on prescip meds? came into carnivore from very low carb Keto type plan before and lost some lbs or ‘jump straight’ into zc from other menu?

we got ya :slight_smile: we can help you handle your carnivore walk easily! we can support and answer alot of questions you might have but KEY TO IT all is what are ya eating and ‘who are you’ coming into this plan ya know. tell us more please.

(Mary) #7

B: 2 eggs, 3 oz bacon, 2 tsp blue cheese
L: 3/4 - 1 lb pork chops
If still hungry, 1 c or so of 10% fat plain Greek yogurt

I think there are plenty of cals in there, though I’m definitely not counting cals.

No Rx meds, have been keto for years but when I fall off the wagon I land straight in the sugar.

Just added everything into chronometer and it comes to 1854 cal, including the yogurt. I eat until comfortably full as I hate to be hungry.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #8

This is the key, lowering insulin. Lowering serum glucose is required for that, but if you are really insulin-resistant, it may take a while for your insulin to come down, as well as your blood sugar. What is your HOMA-IR score? Has your doctor ordered fasting insulin or HbAIC? What were the results?

Also, what were you eating before you went carnivore, and what are you eating now? The adjustment from the standard American diet (SAD) to carnivore can be quite difficult. Going from keto to carnivore is also a significant adjustment, but is a bit easier. In any case, women often need a month or so of hormonal re-adjustment before excess fat starts to be shed. The speed of loss also depends on how much you have to lose: the first 100 kilos come off much more readily than the last 10.

Lastly, another important factor is whether you are trying to limit your calories or not. We tell ketonians to eat to satiety, because the body’s hormonal response to food is more important than how much we eat. This is even more true on carnivore. Eat plenty of food at each meal, and don’t try to fast, especially not at first. Restricting calories risks putting our body into “famine” mode, and it will lower its metabolic rate to compensate. This makes it much more difficult to shed fat.

(Mary) #9

Hi Paul,
I don’t have a doctor here yet so haven’t had anything tested since I left Canada. I was eating keto before going carnivore. I have about 50 lbs/23 kg to lose.

#11

There are, in the neighborhood of 1700. Are you sedentary? Can your metabolism handle that much? Not that it’s a lot, but if you’re very sedentary it very well may be.

Problem with not tracking is you have no way to know or troubleshoot, aside from the obvious, which is what you’re doing isn’t working. Time to start, don’t want to fall into the de-facto definition of insanity!

But you can’t be, not without Insulin tests while fasted. Your fasting numbers don’t tell you much, no shortage of people have bad fasting numbers but average out fine during the day. If you don’t have an A1C, either get one done or just do an at home one, but that’ll be more useful than fasting numbers. My money is on eating over what your metabolism will let you get away with.

(Megan) #12

Hi Paul, if a person’s HbAIC is within normal range for the past 6 years, can they be insulin resistant? I asked my doc to test my insulin and he wouldn’t b/c my blood sugar and HbAIC is always normal (34-36).

(Megan) #13

Hi Mary,

Another carnivore here. Welcome to the forums. I’d go with Fangs’ advice 1st - give it more time. Imo you aren’t eating too much. One thing you can try is have a 3rd meal and split your pork chops between lunch and dinner. Add some fat to your 2 pork chop meals if splitting your pork chops isn’t enough food for you to feel satisfied. Some people need to limit the amount of protein they eat at one sitting and spread it out over the day. Doing this can decrease blood sugar levels and put you into, or increase, ketosis (if you have one of those bodies that still thinks it’s running on glucose, not fat, despite being carnivore). There’s all sorts of tweaking you can do, like choices of fat and protein sources, but I’d go with giving it more time 1st, and let your body fully adapt to eating animal foods only.

(Megan) #14

Is this low fat yoghurt? How many carbs per 100 grams. My supermarket sells 5 brands of unsweetened greek yoghurt and the carb difference between the lowest carb and highest carb is massive.

(Mary) #15

Hi Megan,
Thank you for joining the conversation. Yes, I can try splitting up the protein. I’ve watched the Kelly/Amber vid and have been wanting to give it a go. I think you’re right that my body still thinks it’s running on glucose. Despite 4 years or so of keto, I still have skin tags and the IR belly.

10% yogurt is very high fat and the lowest carb I can find - 4.5 gm per 100gm.

(Megan) #16

Yea, I watched it too and have started the protocol they describe. Azi/Linda has too. Jump on our very busy carni thread and say hi :)-

#17

Dunno, I’m not the one who said it, @Countdown2020 is.

#18

A1C is an average. My father in law gets his sugars up into the high 200’s for hours, then plummets down for hours, he does that regularly. His A1C’s are fine because of it.

#19

Carnivore and keto doesn’t guarantee fat-loss even for healthy people for plenty to lose… (Maybe if they are super heavy? Oh I am sure some people still can eat a ton.)
And this is just the amount of food, there may be so many other factors…

I can imagine the listed food may be too little. It sounds fine but we never can track accurately (especially if we eat very fatty pork. the fat intake is mysterious there, probably even with labels, my pork typically comes without), it’s just one day, maybe others are lower and we are different anyway… So it’s possible. When I was 180lbs (my highest), it was a very unusual time period where I was very inactive but I had little muscles anyway, I needed 2300 kcal (calculated from my fat-loss, my weight and metabolism is pretty stable when I don’t overeat). There are women with a higher metabolism compared to their stats, 23lbs matter too and so on. My slim, not muscular SO eats much more when losing fat at a nice pace than some hobby bodybuilders with similar stats except WAY, WAY more muscle, personal differences are that serious sometimes.
And not everyone is like me who loses more if I eat less (okay, undereating is pretty much out in my case). Some experiences more is better on keto - to some extent, of course.
(I need to eat less, whatever I do at the moment but it’s me, very prone to overeating fat. 1800 kcal is nice for me but I am 161 lbs. Not inactive anymore though but I still don’t have a high energy need. It’s always based on my own experiences, calculators are useless. So it can’t say much about someone else’s energy need even if stats and everything seems similar. And I think not everyone handles the same deficit the same anyway… One loses fat like crazy, the other may slow down their metabolism? I just guess, I never read about it but considering people’s experiences, I find it likely.)

10% yogurt is the highest-fat I ever saw, it’s quite carby from my viewpoint but I can’t imagine eating such watery light thing not in big amounts… :wink: I eat some of it after a big meaty meal and I am easily over 20g carbs… Of course it’s very different if one uses tiny amounts. But dairy may be a factor interfering with fat-loss, people say so. It doesn’t matter to me but I never experienced less carbs help with fat-loss (beyond the likely effect on my fat intake). We humans are very different.

I am afraid I couldn’t really help but it’s not clear what is the problem.

(By the way I am sure I burn fat on every woe if I eat little enough, of course I do, my body works right. We can’t have raised insulin ALL the time - I am a natural IFer too - so fat burning happens when it’s low. My experiences shows this. But it can be more complicated for others.)

(Bob M) #20

How have we gotten to the point where 1,700 calories is a lot of calories?

This is from Ancel Key’s STARVATION study:

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https://eatingdisorders.dukehealth.org/education/resources/starvation-experiment

They lost 25% of their weight while eating just below 1,700 calories. Granted, they were young men, but still…

#21

Well, 1700 kcal IS a lot of calorie for some people. It’s very individual. If I slimmed down and didn’t move a finger, 1570 kcal would be my maintenance calories and some women has it lower.

While others can eat 3000 kcal and stay slim and we normal people are in-between. It always should be looked on individually. It doesn’t matter what is normal or average, we are individuals.

And it totally matters in many cases if someone if a young man or not. My SO loses fat easily eating 2500 kcal. That would be overeating for me and I am somewhat active (he is more active though) and I am not super short and not light either (I weigh more than him), my metabolism is quicker than many other womens’ with my stats… He isn’t even tall…

1700 kcal is never starvation for most women I would think. And most women would get obese eating 3000 kcal.

But it doesn’t really matter, what matters is we should eat right according to our own needs.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #22

That’s a good question. Benjamin Bikman, a bio-energeticist who studies insulin, says that insulin resistance is always accompanied by hyperglycaemia. I’m not sure it helps you to know that, however, if your doctor refuses to order a simple blood test.

As I understand it, the best measure of insulin resistance is an oral glucose tolerance test, which is expensive and labour-intensive, so if your doctor won’t order a simple fasting glucose insulin, there is no way to get him to order an OGTT. However, if you could get one done, it would be definitive. The late Dr. Joseph Kraft came up with five insulin response patterns, four of which indicated insulin-resistance. Dr. Kraft believed that the OGTT results could predict a diabetes diagnosis up to twenty years in advance (the standard diagnostic is to wait until glucose control begins to falter). He called it diabetes in situ, or occult diabetes. By his lights, most people considered pre-diabetic were already diabetic years earlier.

In sum, however, if you are eating a low-carb, high-fat diet, and your HbA1C has been normal for that long, I’d say you have little need to worry about insulin-resistance at this point.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #23

Ten percent fat is, I believe, full-fat, for Greek yoghurt. It should say “whole milk” or “full-fat” or something like that on the package. There is a yoghurt manufacturer in the U.S. that even makes Greek yoghurt from heavy cream, but it’s almost impossible to find, since the supermarkets are all so fixated on selling us reduced-fat or fat-free dairy.

Whatever you buy, make sure it’s unflavoured. The flavoured varieties all have a lot of added sugar.

(Megan) #24

There is no problem with him ordering fasting glucose, it’s the insulin test/s he says he won’t, b/c my fasting glucose and non fasting glucose and HbA1C are always normal.

Hmmm so why the heck is my body refusing to make ketones? Never got higher than 0.2 on my blood ketone meter when I started on keto, then switched to carnivore 3-4 weeks later. Had one 0.4 reading on carni. Have recently switched to a limited protein high fat protocol (30 grams protein max per meal, 2-3 grams of fat per gram of protein). Got one reading of 0.6 yesterday, the rest of the readings this past week or so are between 0.0-0.2

The reason I’ve switched to this protocol is b/c I am literally dragging myself thru life, just so little energy. Calorie intake being too low is not the issue, I’m eating plenty. Kinda crazy I’m losing weight given how many I consume!