Hi, previously I posted that my husband has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He told the doctor he wanted to see if he could control it with diet before taking medication which the doctor thought was a good idea. My husband has done extremely well. We saw a diabetes educator who said he should be having 105 every day, at each meal and 15 snack. The levels did go down as it was a lot less carbs than he had been having.
The diabetes Australia forum had some good information from members, mainly that they were doing their own diet i.e. cutting right down on carbs, also posted some interesting videos about very low carb high fat eating. After some research (mainly to show my husband these people knew what they were talking about) my husband has cut his carbs right down and has nowhere near the amount first advised. Consequently his levels are steady and between 4.9 before food and 6.2 after.
So, I decided at first to do the same so we eat the same meals most of the time. I didn’t lose weight or inches. I wasn’t happy about that so I decided to get a Dr Atkins book (again) and start from the beginning. To my disappointment no inches or weight lost. It has only been one week following to the letter though so I should have patience, but previous times I have lost up to 2.5kgs in one week.
Am I eating enough fat? My macros yesterday were 3% carbs 71% fat 26% protein.
Breakfast: Streaky bacon eggs and mushrooms
Lunch: 60 grams Brie cheese with almond bread
Dinner: 170 g steak and salad with 60 g Brie cheese, olive oil
About 2 litres water, tea one coffee and about 600ml no sugar, no calorie, no carb dry ginger ale.
My weight last Sunday was 68.9 and it’s the same today although it has fluctuated through the week but hasn’t gone lower than 68.9.
I know it’s a long post but I was hoping someone could give me some advice. Please.
Dr. Atkins
Maybe this will help:
So I may be eating too much fat and not enough protein? Yet some say too much protein can hinder weight loss. At the moment all I want to do is lose weight/fat
Why don’t you read the linked post? Read the entire topic while you’re there - lots of suggestions how to deal with various situations.
Sounds like you are doing fine. You didn’t mention how long have you been eating this way. There are many approaches here, but I feel it’s always good to start with a simple plan (under 20 grams of carbs daily), and to give it time to work. Consider avoiding the scale for a month or so. The fit of your clothes and the way you feel are better indicators. Be patient. Weight loss/fat loss can be fast for some and slower for others. Good luck, stay in touch, You got this!
A ketogenic diet is low in carbohydrate, because carbohydrate stimulates insulin secretion, and insulin is the primary hormone that causes tissues to store fat. It does a lot of other things as well, but if your goal is to shed excess stored fat, then you need to lower your insulin.
But just because you get your insulin down doesn’t mean you will automatically shed excess fat. If you put your body into famine mode by giving it too little food, it will still hang on to its resources as much as possible. Instead, it will try to cut the gap between the calories you are eating and the calories you are burning by shutting down non-essential functions (hair growth, nail growth, reproductive system, etc.) and slowing your basic metabolic rate.
The key, then, is to eat enough food to satisfy your hunger, while keeping carbohydrate intake low. We recommend a limit of 20 g/day, and if you are more than usually insulin-resistant, you might need to eat even less carbohydrate than that. With your lower insulin level, your appetite hormones should start functioning properly again, and you should find your appetite setting itself at a level that keeps your body out of famine mode and allows it to metabolise both the fat you are eating and some of that excess stored fat that you want to shed.
Women who being a ketogenic diet often find that there is a period of hormonal re-regulation before fat loss gets underway. There are plenty of women on these forums who can attest to that. People who are used to diets that involve starving themselves often don’t eat enough to get out of famine mode, and a number of forum members have posted that their fat loss didn’t begin until they started eating more, not less.
Instead of eating more fat, you probably need more protein. Your dinner is 170 g of steak, which is about 42.5 g of protein. Unless you weigh less than 54.5 kg / 120 lbs., that is not enough protein. So it is perhaps not more fat that you need, but rather more protein, with enough fat to satisfy your hunger. Our recommendation for protein is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.0-1.5 g protein / kg lean body mass / day, possibly as high as 2.0 g /kg.
Patience. Your body is healing in ways you cannot see. Trust the process, focus on health, and fat loss will follow. Forget the scale, use a tape measure.
If you are really committed to fat loss:
- Drop the mushrooms and almond bread, halve the brie, remove the ginger ale
- Add more bacon and eggs and steak
- Make sure the salad is really small. Salad is not a free pass
- Only eat breakfast if you are really hungry. If not, skip it, and add the food to lunch. But if you are hungry, you need to eat
The goal in these recommendations is to minimise the possible insulin response. This is the key to letting your body eat its fat stores.
Also, don’t forget that an important part of this is becoming fat adapted ie getting your body to feel fine running on fat (both ingested and from fat stores). This can take anything from 6 weeks to 6 months. Be patient Grasshopper!
Cheers
Alec
Old Atkins book from 1972? or following the New Atkins lifestyle which kinda is diff. than what the original Atkins is all about.
Did you do Induction Phase? Induction phase is 0 carbs for 2 weeks. It allows all meat/seafood fish and fowl you love to eat…then it is only 1 cup of salad with limited list of veg to use only…or you can substitute that little cup of salad for a pickle. Now that is how Atkins should start 
Then you add in 5g of carbs per week.
After Induction you add, say, a 1/2 cup of raspberries. See how you do for a week. If great, feeling fine etc and still losing some lbs then the next week you add in another 5g of carbs. Say, mushrooms with meat kinda thing. See how you do.
You can’t think not losing lbs is a stall, sometimes it takes a week for the body to lose nothing ya know and it is normal to fluctuate but if you overall trend over time adding in a few carbs each week is a downward trend then you are ok…if you hit, say, 20g of carbs and you haven’t lost any lbs then you might have reached your ‘critical carb limit’ but this is ALL explained in the Atkins book.
So the 1972 version of Atkins is out there still and that is the book I started with and I lost lbs very easily. Hope some of this info might help
2.5kg fat-loss in a week is plain impossible for most of us under normal circumstances, it’s not realistic. I simply never had a big enough body to be able to do that even theoretically (but I was very happy with my 300g on low-carb).
But doing keto doesn’t mean we will lose any fat, it’s not magic… We need to eat properly, it’s only/mostly calories in my case, apparently but many items may interfere according to many people’s experience (my problem items interfere with my macros and well-being even if they alone can’t stop fat-loss so I avoid many things myself). Some tweaking may be needed. But maybe patience is needed, your body may focus on more important things than fat-loss. With your weight fat-loss can’t be particularly important health wise and many people has problems losing when our weight is already this low (even if it’s still a bit high for us).
So, I would wait first.
How much do you eat in macros? Exact percentages usually don’t really matter, I only keep that in a smaller range because of my taste most of the time and because a too high fat intake would result in either too little protein or overeating. Some people are more sensitive to that and therapeutic keto often has its specific percentages but one can do keto and lose fat with 60% and 80% fat alike. Or less or more but I hardly could pull off that without messing with my protein or calorie intake. But it may work for someone else. (Surely some people go over 90% fat as they need A TON of calories and there is a thing as too much protein. But it’s an extreme case.)
Don’t worry about protein, most of us can’t go too high. I always stop at 220-230g (my need is hardly above 100g but I need more for satiation) but I am a short woman without much muscle mass or activity. Some people in this forum regularly eat way more without problems.
Makes exactly zero sense to me but people are interesting, maybe it’s true for someone, directly or indirectly… Too much protein is unhealthy though but it’s a huge amount, first we have unnecessarily high territory, I live my life there. 2 times my need in average (my vague guess but definitely not much less than that) but I feel fine and have no idea how to go even lower… My body likes it, it’s just not strictly needed.
How close are you to your goal weight? If you are not very overweight/obese, the fat loss may be slower and you may need to be more patient.
Some people say calories don’t matter when you eat low carb. I am not one of those people. If I overeat fat and/or eat above my maintenance calories, I do not lose weight. Or worse - I gain weight. You are eating calorie dense foods like bacon, cheese, olive oil etc. Try tracking your calories for a week to make sure you are not consuming too much calories.
I see no issues with upping your salads, mushroom etc if it helps with feeling full. Adding other animal protein sources should be fine too.
Technically, almond flour bread and diet ginger ale are allowed on keto. However, some people find that this stalls their weight loss. You may want to cut these out for now to see if it helps.
You have not had time to fat adapt yet. It can take up to a month or even longer according to Dr. Phinney.
Those big drops before are probably all water weight anyway.
Pay attention to other things besides the scales, how do your clothes fit, how is your mental clarity, mood, etc. The scales are not the be all and end all.
Are you following the Atkins 20, it is a get starter plan. If not link is in this post:
Goodonya for supporting your husband. I do that as well, he controls his T2D with diet and exercise very successfully and it helps me to maintain as well. We have even progressed to higher levels of carbs than 20, most days it is about 50, but can go up to 100 for special occasions. We both like this WOE.
You have some good suggestions in other posts here. Be patient.
While I like your other recommendations, mushrooms are probably immaterial. It’s hard to eat too many mushrooms.
Personally, I’d take it slowly. And I’m not a fan of “macros” at all. Don’t like them. Don’t need them. Don’t find them useful. Been doing this 9 years, and have never once figured out what my “macros” are.
Just eat low carb, aiming fairly low at first. I personally find I do better with lower fat, higher protein. So, I tend to avoid a lot of cheese and dairy. I still eat it, I just don’t eat a lot of it.
Personally, bacon = overeating for me, so I avoid that too.
Keep eating low carb, and if things turn out not to meet your goals, try different things. Try not eating dairy for a while. No difference? Reintroduce it. Try replacing fattier foods with higher protein, lower fat foods. Say, ham/lean pork instead of bacon; lean beef instead of fattier foods. No difference? It probably wasn’t the fat.
Right.Up.Front, I’d like to state unequivocally that I am the last person to ever advocate ‘one size fits all’ or that ‘what works for me will necessarily work for you’. We can, however, learn from each other’s experiences, tribulations and mistakes. That’s really what this forum is all about.
I’ve been eating keto for 5 years and a month. For 4 1/2 of those 5 years I have weighed 145 pounds with BF of 14-15%. Those numbers match my weight and BF during the peak of my youth when I was a middle-distance runner during ages 17 - 23. I am now 76 years old and I will take it! 
Yes, I have definitely been the beneficiary of benevolent genes. I ate bog standard SAD all the years of my life until I started keto at the age of 71. I drank a lot of beer and ate pretty much the equivalent of a loaf of bread daily. What I was not was a sugar-holic - I was never much interested in ‘sweet’. During the decade of my 60s I gained about 30 - 35 pounds of excess mass. All of it came off within the first 6 months of keto with no difficulty. In fact, I never felt the slightest bit of hunger even when I was eating a 1000 calorie per day deficit during the first 3 months of keto.
I’ve been a member of this forum for 3+ years and one common comment is that many folks say they could not continue keto if they had to track and measure their food every day. OK, I accept that for some folks it would be an onerous task. Yet, at the same time, most reports of lack of success - either weight loss or maintenance, dealing with illness - come from these same folks. My first and prime suspicion is they’re overeating carbs.
20 grams of carbs is a very small amount. If you think you can guestimate it you’re just fooling yourself. In many cases, due to metabolic dysfunction and/or insulin resistance and/or specific food issues, you will have to consume even less carbs per day and your chance of guessing correctly is non-existent.
Of course, some folks might experience other issues than simply overeating carbs - food allergies and/or reactions, PUFA overconsumption, for examples. But to sustain ketosis the carbs are the most significant thing over which you have 100% control.
If you have no problems remaining consistently in ketosis and sustaining overall metabolic health - then I salute you, carry on! But if you experience any of multiple problems and don’t weigh and measure - carbs if nothing else - it seems to me your solution is very simple.
Just my opinions.
If you are going to have breakfast, avoiding carbs is most important at this meal because the longer we go with as low insulin as possible the better. Nothing against mushrooms per se (except that they are carbs), it was more the timing of those carbs that I think could be better for weight loss.
Again, it depends on the person. My husband does much better with more carbs at breakfast then say dinner time. Lunch is ok, but he still does better with them at breakfast.
I usually skip and don’t track my BS except occasionally, so not sure how I would react. But he has tried many variations and breakfast is his carb time.
Sorry, but I fail to follow. You say your husband ‘does much better’ eating more carbs at breakfast. Presuming he is T2D, does his overnight BS continue to get lower after eating his ‘more carbs’ at breakfast? Does his BS rise if he does not eat carbs at breakfast - over and above what he could normally expect from the ‘dawn effect’?
Since eating glucose - the real name of carbs - is unnecessary for good health and elevates insulin, I fail to understand just how eating it enables one to do ‘much better’ in the case of diabetes and related dysfunction.
Is you husband eating keto? Or just ‘lower’ carbs?
Lower carbs and he walks 2x a day and does yoga or dances with me each day. He checks his bs after the walks and other exercise. He doesn’t eat sugary stuff, only some grain and potatoes, those are the main carbs, he also doesn’t eat a lot of them. If he has a grain bun in the evening, it doesn’t work out well. If he has one at lunch he is fine. For breakfast his carby thing is gravy and some days he will have a few hash browns with the eggs and meat. He has done a lot of experimenting and he gets his best result doing it this way. He has a hard time keeping weight on, when he stops grain and potatoes completely, he goes too low. At 6’ and 140 lbs, he has no strength, so he struggles to get up to 150 and stay there or a bit over. He would love to get back to 160, but I don’t think that will be happening anytime soon.