Sorry to derail your thread Mary but maybe you’ll find my questions to Paul interesting/relevant.
Does lower BG equal fat burning?
Countdown2020
(Mary)
#27
I absolutely am finding the whole discussion interesting. I’m a bit low energy myself so any info is helpful.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#28
Sorry, I meant to write “fasting insulin.” So much for keto clarity, huh? 
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#29
Which many ppl on keto and carni will fail if they don’t eat some carbs for a day or 2 before the test, according to Bikman. I’ll bug him for a fasting insulin when I see him again.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#30
I thought his explanation was interesting. When we eat a lot of carbohydrate, the pancreas stores insulin for ready release as a first-phase response to elevated glucose. When we go keto, that store eventually gets dumped, as being unnecessary, so the initial response to a fresh glucose load looks odd to doctors who don’t know about keto. He says that the store of insulin gets built up again quite quickly, once we subject ourselves to a high carb load again.
Janie
(Jane)
#31
From your user name I take it you don’t live in t he US? My doc never ordered fasting insulin or A1C either because my fasting glucose was always below 100, so I ordered and paid for it myself out of curiosity. But that may not be an option for you.
edited to add: I was going over my annual bloddwork a while back and discovered my a1c was pre-diabetic back in 2007 and my doc never mentioned it!
By the time I paid to have it tested it was in the normal range but I had been keto for 9 months.
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#32
The late Dr. Joseph Kraft maintained that diabetes is a disease of insulin-resistance, not poor glucose control. Unfortunately, for historical reasons, the diagnostic is the point at which glucose control starts to falter, not the long period where insulin is rising, and rising.
Dr. Kraft maintained it was possible to predict, from the insulin response to a high glucose load, that the patient would be diagnosed as a diabetic a couple of decades in advance.
ctviggen
(Bob M)
#33
I never had an A1C or fasting insulin, until I finally got a keto-knowledgeable doctor. Unfortunately, she left but recommended another doctor. I used the second doctor for a while, but she also left. Ugh. Now, I’m having a hard time finding a keto-knowledgeable doctor.
I can pay for this stuff myself, but it can get expensive fairly quickly. And honestly, fasting insulin and blood sugar and HbA1c should ALWAYS be tested by every doctor. At least yearly, anyway.