Hi, I am very new to all this. After 70 years of more or less eating and drinking everything, (without exaggerating) I got a blood sugar result of 126 mg/dl, up from 111 18 months ago. This is too high.
I have been taking medication for high blood pressure, down to 120 / 80 ish. I don’t have a weight problem.
Depending on what I read, a Keto diet can raise or lower blood sugar levels, am I right to start Keto? (I started two days ago and am enjoying it up to now). I really don’t want to start on the Statins I was given.
High sugar
cooked
(David Cooke)
#1
Madeleine
#2
Keto is amazing for lowering blood sugar!
I would get an A1C if you can. It’s a pretty standard measure, and it gives a longer-term picture of your blood sugar levels and your insulin sensitivity. The A1C is basically the average of your blood sugar over 3 months, whereas one blood sugar reading is just a snapshot of that moment in time.
Many folks can get off of BP medications as well (though don’t do this without supervision).
Welcome! Head over to the “Getting Started” section and read a lot. You’ll get wonderful tips and ideas.
cooked
(David Cooke)
#3
Thanks! I am due for a second blood test in January, the one I had seemed pretty comprehensive (LDL etc). I don’t understand how one sample can show my blood sugar average over three months?
I will buy a home device for measuring my sugar level and continue with Keto for at least two weeks, I really don’t want to use statins.
Madeleine
#8
In that case, you may see an A1C on there. “Hemoglobin A1C” is the full name, and if the doctor was at all worried about your blood sugar, he/she probably would have ordered it. Below 5.4 or so is ideal.
It’s an average over 3 months because it’s a measure of the sugar accumulation on red blood cells (which have approx 3-month lifespan). It’s a standard measure when there’s any question of blood sugar regulation.
Also you can get it done independently if you want (it would be really nice to have that as a measure now at the start of keto!). Watching that number drop is very satisfying and shows you’re going in the right direction.
Ilana_Rose
(mole person)
#17
That makes sense then; and is a good, rather than a bad thing. Although people here often talk about fat adaptation taking 1-2 months, it actually takes significantly longer for muscles to fully adapt to using fat as fuel. Once they have, however, your body begins to try to conserve its glucose since it’s energetically very expensive to make via gluconeogenesis. It does this by making muscle cells more insulin resistent so that they reject more glucose leaving it for the cells that must have it. This is called physiologic insulin resistence and is different from the pathological sort that is always paired with high insulin levels.
You would not have been fully adapted at the time of the first test so your muscles were still hungrily sucking up glucose leading to a temporarily much lower reading. But your body had just not yet reached a state of complete equilibrium.
cooked
(David Cooke)
#20
Thanks everybody, I guess it’s a wait and see situation.
However I am at 126, which my doctor correctly says is border line diabetic.If my results rise even more, I certainly won’t be able to even visit a doctor, he’ll be in a “take my statins or go away” position.
I’ll get back on this after a month or two.
Thanks again.
Robert_Johnson
(Consensus is Politics)
#21
Ok. First, not trolling here. This is serious. I’ve made it very clear about two things. One… I can get very long winded (working on that). Two… I question everything. ‘Show me that data’ is my favorite mantra.
Do you have a source for that? That once fat adapted the muscles become insulin resistant preferring ketones? I ask because (first I’m assuming you mean this to be the truth, and I really want to know why’s about how this happens) because even if going keto makes your muscles insulin resistant, it doesn’t mean fat adaptation causes it. It could simply be the introduction of ketones which can happen without being fat adapted. As in exogenous ketones.
I just heard about a half dozen lights bulbs click on. I know several of you think much like I do.
Here is the gist of my questioning. If fat adaptation makes muscles insulin resistant, how long for them to switch back? And why are they switching back? Is it the loss of ketones or the raise in blood glucose?
Again, important to know the difference of the why’s here. If a person goes keto, and begins taking exogenous ketones. Likes how it feels, and goes back to old diet while keeping exogenous ketones, will that keep muscles insulin resistant because of the ketone presence? Or will the muscles switch back in a few days somewhat like it did getting into ketogenic?
I know a young lady who was trying to get into keto, but stopped doing it because some suggested exogenous ketones to her (probably at the gym). Looks to me she has gained 30 pounds in the past few months. I tried to talk to her about a ketogenic diet, but you know, kids know everything. Especially ones in their early thirties that haven’t hit the wall of knowledge yet the shows them what a crock all of their teachers were. That they just quoted books, written by people who also just quoted. One of my big irritations as a kid when someone would say only do it like this, and I’d ask why? And of course that leads to adults just ignoring the kid after a few times 
Like I said, long winded… anyway, her weight gain seems to coincide with the time frame of her asking me what I thought of ketone powders. She’s too busy to read anything I send her if it isn’t work related. And based on the things I hear her kids ask me, or how the talk to their mom (these kids have no filters. They will ask the most embarrassing things to their parents right in front of the person it applies to😂). In this case me. One of the kids asked me again for the umpteenth time, like they forgot the other forty times they asked. “Mr Bob, how much weight did you loose?” And I’d reply with, “40 pounds the first two week, and a total of 55 so far. Why?” At which point he turns to his mom, “hey mom, you should try what mr Bob is doing!” At which point the other child speaks up, “But she doesn’t want to starve herself!”
Yep, “The call me, Mr Bob” 
and their mom tells them to lose all this weight I must be starving myself. So what I try to do now is speak to the kids about keto, the how’s and why’s of it it so they understand I’m not starving myself. Of course I do thin in front of their mom, but I think she throws up her filters so she doesn’t glean anything from it. 
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#22
The chemistry behind the low-carb/ketogenic diet is that carbohydrates are basically long chains of glucose molecules. These molecules get cleaved in the digestive tract and enter the bloodstream. A high level of glucose in the blood is an emergency (and can be fatal), so the body mobilizes insulin from the pancreas to get the glucose out of the bloodstream as quickly as possible, by sending it to muscles to be burned for fuel, and to fat cells to be stored as fat.
Cutting carbohydrate, therefore, greatly lowers blood glucose levels, and hence the body’s need to manufacture insulin, which at too high a level in the blood has many other serious effects besides causing us to put on fat. Blood glucose levels fluctuate quite a bit and are affected by a number of different factors, however, so although you are likely to see your serum glucose drop quite a bit over time, you may not see as great or as fast a drop as you could wish, especially at first. Be patient, and your serum glucose will most likely normalize. It generally happens by the six-month mark.
As far as HbA1C is concerned, it is a measure of how glycated the hemoglobin in your red blood cells has become. When serum glucose is high, it tends to bond with other molecules and cause problems (for example, sticky red blood cells tend to clot more readily and also to stick better to arterial walls). Since our red corpuscles (also known as erythrocytes) live about 90 days on average, the amount of glycation of our hemoglobin functions as a sort of rolling three-month average of our serum glucose. Since it changes more slowly, it is a reasonably good indicator of our glycemic status.
Our hemoglobin is always going to be glycated to some extent, because the red blood cells have no mitochondria and therefore cannot burn fat, so they depend on the glucose in the blood for fuel (the liver makes it for them, if we stop eating carbohydrate). But normally, this level of glycation is fairly low. You can see how, if it rises, therefore, it is a good indicator that there is a problem we need to deal with.