I feel your pain. Just had my recent labs back and basically my numbers have gotten ‘worse’ again. I’m now 8 months into my keto diet, have dropped a lot of weight but my cholesterol refuses to move in the right direction. Over three or four tests in the last 8 months, my LDL is usually around 200, HDL between 40 and 50, trigs 130-200. In fact, my numbers are exactly the same as when I was eating a whole load of carbage, apart from the fact that my LDL is now even higher.
On the plus side, my Hba1c was 5.2 before keto when I was 50lbs heavier (topped out at about 240 lbs)…and is still 5.2 after 8 months of keto (what to conclude from that I’m not sure). I also have some pretty big guys in my family (aged in their 50s and 60s) and none of them are diabetic or even pre-diabetic, despite basically eating a standard western diet.
As an experiment, for the last couple of months I’ve started doing a lot more exercise, have been doing resistance training and gaining muscle, I’ve done two 5 day fasts as well as multiple 24 hour and IF most days…and it’s had absolutely no impact on the numbers.
The high trigs and complete lack of HDL improvement since I started keto are both confusing to me too, given what we know about quality fat intake etc.
A couple of possible factors at play for me is that I am heterozygous for ApoE4 (alzheimer’s gene) and homozygous for MTHFR C677T which messes with my bodies methylation cycle and is fairly famous on ‘the internet’. Both of these may somehow influence the way the body uses cholesterol so I’ve just this week started a supplementation experiment that I’ll stick to for a few months to see what, if any difference, it makes to my general wellbeing/lab numbers. For anyone interested I’ll be taking
- A fancy multivitamin
- Creatine
- Glycine
- Choline (Sunflower Lecithin)
- Curcumin
- Magnesium/Potassium (which I was taking anyway)
Running out of ideas after that…I am still losing weight so perhaps that’s all it is…maybe I need to wait until I reach a stable, healthy body fat for 6 months or so then run the numbers.