I told myself I was cutting back on the blood tests, Oh well. I prefer to trust absolute results rather than apps and maybe dodgy nutrition panels that guess what the results could be.
I’d have to get a bit more serious in my tests, but I think that anything even close to 20g of carbs for me will show up as raised BG into the follow day. I need to do more carnivore tests.
The type of carbs and what they are eaten with may make a big difference, and maybe how carb depleted I am. The graph I’m about to post here was after 21-23 hour IF and my BG was slowly dropping so there should have been plenty of empty carb parking spaces available
I remember reading that and my inner nerd would probably like one. As much as I like numbers and measurable results, though, I think that if measuring and keeping records becomes a chore it could put people (me) off. Maybe part of the reason why cal restricted diets nearly always fail. This time around I didn’t even note a start date or plotted weight loss. I just know that I’ve lost around 40kg over the last ~9 months, have pages of NSV’s and feel 20 years younger.
You never know until you give it a go.
At great personal sacrifice, I just forced myself to eat a pan (100g) of bacon followed by another pan of bacon and 6 eggs 1 1/2 hours later. The things I do for science and my own peace of mind. Mine claims to be 3% carbs. Seems like a lot. The last lot I finished a couple of days ago was 1.5%
anyway today’s test shows that, for me, bacon and eggs are ok in moderation.
I ate the bacon around 21-23 hours fasted (since dinner yesterday)
The first spike was 2 hours after the bacon.
I forgot to wash my hands on the bigger spike, but in the overall scheme of things, even that spike is fairly tame. I’m very happy with my BG level all day today as well.
Full disclosure. The top pics are the actual first batch of bacon, but the eggs in the 3rd photo were today’s, but the second batch in the 4th pic used eggs that were up to 3 or 4 days old.
I’ll try iffy stuff if it’s something I really want to eat and test afterwards to see how it went. Then incorporate it into future meals or stay away from it in the future, like I did with those sausages from earlier.
That’s enough testing for me. Any more finger pricks and I might not be pickin a banjer or me nose for a while.
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#23
I believe it works like this: amounts under 0.5 g/serving can be listed as 0 g, amounts under 1.0 g/serving can be listed as “less than 1 g.” This gives the manufacturer an incentive to choose a serving size that permits them to do this.
My coping strategy is to assume that 0 g means 0.499999999 g, and “less than 1” means 0.99999999 g. That makes sure I stay on the safe side of tracking my carb intake. (Strictly speaking, I don’t track, but I do keep an eye on things.)
European/British/everywhere-else-in-the-world-but-North-American law provides that in addition to whatever amounts are listed per serving, the nutrition label must also show the amounts per 100 grams of the product. So that kind of eliminates that particular species of trickery.
Sorry to say that alas, turns out this is not evidence. I’ve used the USDA database online almost religiously for a decade. It will tell you, for example, that an entire cup of, say, Montreal Seasoning, has 0 everything. Although salt does not have anything really (it’s a mineral), black pepper does, red pepper flakes do, caraway seed does, onion does, garlic does, paprika does, and I promise an entire cup of the stuff certainly does. Same for say, granulated garlic.
There are quite a lot of these things that USDA says zero on even for mass amounts. I usually go to USDA if a label has a tiny serving size that allows them to say zero and I know it’s not – but sometimes, the USDA is not helpful in that regard. It’s almost like they take the label, which itself is legit according to labeling laws, and then mathematically scale it. Which of course, is not accurate, when the serving size has allowed those numbers to be zero. Sometimes it has seemingly real numbers… sometimes not.
Edited to add: although really, even on my best bacon days (Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!) eating up to 10 slices (the most I can bake just-above-oven-bottom on my nonstick ceramic oversized sheet, oh how I love that thing) is incredibly hard for me, and I have almost no satiating limit for the stuff. And even that much, with <1 carb per 2 slices, is just not going to be much – and is likely to be very slow to digest given bacon is more fat than protein.
When I was new to lowcarb I was tediously picking tiny carrot shreds out of my salad mix. I got a micro-gram scale so I could weigh tiny amounts of produce like hot peppers more precisely, for the USDA value to the second decimal. I may have been a tad over-obsessive. (Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing! Yeah!) I see that in other people who are new, though – that sometimes they are probably more concerned than needed over the little things.
The best strategy for the inexactitude of labels and weights is just to eat a little below your target ECC.
(After a few weeks, it might help new people to know that ketogenic low carb is not necessarily the same as atkins ‘induction’ or internet-popularized-‘keto’ of <=20ecc, but whatever your body can stay ketogenic with, which for the majority of people I’ve encountered is more like 30-35 (sometimes more for very large people) too. And yes, yes, the 20 number is required for a few people, and “is low enough to be sure to work for everyone to get them to keto,” but that does not mean it’s the best number for everyone. I know a lot of people who feel crappy on constant 20, but feel much better on about 30-32 or so – particularly older women).
When in doubt about something’s carbs, undereat from your total that day (e.g. if your total is 20, eat around 14). Then if you’re wrong about something being 0, the difference probably isn’t going to hurt.
