Hi All,
I am a drug free Type 2 Diabetic. I have been strict Keto for over eight years now and totally under control.
Daily budget:
glycemic load: 15 max per day (typically around 12)
15 grams carb per meal (typically around 10), no banking
60 g per day (typically around 40)
Fasting: 3 to 4 times a month, complete water and pink salt only for the last three years.
Problem: my gut won’t come off. It may be getting bigger. But I can keep a scar!
And tips?
Many thanks,
-T
Pretty sure folks are going to ask for a typical days foods, supplements, and exercise before “weighing in”.
And has your “gut” remained the same after 8 years of keto? How about the rest of your bod?
Would you consider dipping your toes into carnivore, just to see if it makes a difference.
Glycemic load of 15 max per day pretty much tells you what I eat: meat and plants.
Meat: eggs, cheese, beef, buffalo, pork, chicken
Vegi’s/fruit/nuts: avocados, tomatoes, green beans, cauliflower, jicama, broccoli, cabbage, asparagus, cucumbers, zucchini, macadamia nuts, walnuts, goober peas (sometimes), blueberries, choke berries , black berries, goji berries, anaheim peppers. Probably others too.
It all has to fit into that magic 15 glycemic load per day. My blood sugar is totally under control
Exercise: gardening, fly fishing, walking, weed pulling. I do not do any exercise that tricks my liver into thinking I am running for my life, as it blows the roof off my blood sugar.
Me thinks I may have got the long covid (exhaustion), but I am slowly getting over it. And my gut seems to grow during the process.
When the T2 first manifested itself, I got a YUGE gut and put on a lot of weight. After the Keto, I stabilized at 200 lbs plus minus 5 lbs fully dressed. My gut went down one several belt notches, but then refused to move. So the same gut now for about 7-1/2 years, except for the last four months, when it seems to be getting bigger.
I refer to my gut as “my lunch box”, as it serves me well when I am fasting. I actually enjoy fasting now that I am a fat burner, as I have tons of energy when fasting and a gob of extra time for accomplishing things. If I get hungry, it is a very tiny twinge that is easily ignored or treated with some pink salt.
I have no knowledge of glycemic load, but others will be along who do.
The only thing that catches my eye is the amount of fruits and veggies. They give many of us problems. Others are fine and just restrict them to fit within their program.
Hope you get some good advice here. Best of luck.
The good news, if you’ve been doing keto right for that long no way you’re a T2D anymore, and if you are… then somethings wrong. If your A1C isn’t that of a diabetic anymore… then you’re good.
Throw that stuff in the trash, while different things are more glycemic than others, the true load is dependent on your specific level of insulin resistance / sensitivity. Those load scales wrongly pretend the carbs effect us all the same way and they absolutely don’t. If you lift weights all the time an 80lb dumbbell may be really heavy, for somebody that constantly does dumbbell work it won’t be. It’s 80lbs either way, that’s a constant, but how “heavy” it is (load) is completely dependent on that individual’s strength.
The reality is, if the gut won’t come off, you’re over eating. If you were truly at a deficit for your metabolism, it’d be burning off, that’s just math. Are you really tracking your intake or just watching the carb side of things? If so, what’s your physical activity level look like and how much are you eating on the calorie side of things.
Hi Robin,
Here is glycemic load:
For example.
Beans, snap, green, frozen, all styles, microwaved
https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/10523/2
1 cup:
Glycemic load: 3
carbohydrates: 9
So I can eat a cup without issue, if i restrict other carbs at that meal to under 6 or less and keep the extra load down to around 1 or 2. If sill hungry, I eat some meat.
You misunderstand. The damage to my pancreas remains, although I do believe I have started to heal. So I remain a T2D. Keep in mind that there is addiction involved. I can not go back to the Standard American Diet (SAD) any more than an alcoholic can go back to drinking. Going back to SAD would kill me on the installment plan and I am not being dramatic. I have lost too many people in my life to T2D who ate whatever they wanted, stayed addicted, and used drugs.
I do not do the A1c for the following reasons: I refuse to pay for a test that is plus and minus 50% accurate. I am also in “discordance” with the far more accurate fructosamine test, which shows me to be perfectly fine. And I still have all my toes.
I check my blood sugar every morning when I get up.
glycemic load: 15 max per day (typically around 12)
Glycemic load is measured with instruments. It is not a guess. It is how fast sugars are absorbed. Not how fast your body copes with them. It is the real deal, not a fad or guess.
Overeating: probably, six days a week. I love Keto food, now that my sense of taste has returned. I do not watch calories.
Keep in mind that the calories in / calories out model is junk science. To put on fat, requires blood sugar and the fat hormone (insulin). Carbs are “use” or go to fat, not use or lose.
Ketones (fat) is metabolized differently. It is use or lose. They do not go to fat. You have two to four hours to burn them off or you urinate or exhale them off. You can not get fat from fat. When I eat too much fat, I sure do smell pretty (like a fruit salad)! I often smell of ketones when I am fasting too, especially my hands.
But you know, If have too many Ketones floating around, my body may be ignoring the carbs, so what little I have may be going to fat.
One thing I have noticed. My blood sugar is the exact same before going to sleep as it is waking up. And if I eat two hours before sleeping, my morning blood sugar is on the high but still safe side.
I also noticed that my blood sugar does better if I only eat two meal a day.
When I first started fasting, the breakfast I ate a lot. Now-a-days, I just eat normal as I do not seem to be all that hungry after the fast.
Maybe I should be a lot more careful about eating before bedtime. I get some really blood sugar nice reading if I do not eat four hours before bedtime.
I have started occasionally taking antihistamines (Huang Qi, Chuan Xin Lian, Ban Zhi Lian, Fang Feng) to cope with the long covid, if that is what I have/had. Histamines cause you to gain weight too.
And, yes, I am aware that my liver will convert keytones to sugar to keep me from passing out. This is why my blood sugar is slightly higher after fasting.
Apologies if I’m off piste here, but I have a friend who nearly died when an ulcer ruptured in his pancreas,.
Miraculously surviving (because the surgeons struggled to stop the bleeding), he was then rendered Type 1 diabetic, requiring insulin, to this day successfully.
I’m just saying, because you mentioned your pancreas is kaput…I would definitely be interested in the HbA1c test, no matter what it costs. Your health is worth more than wealth mate.
Do you mean the belly fat, aka spare tire? Yes, that is my struggle, when the rest of my body seems to be reducing.
My pancreas in not kaput. It is just diminished/impacted. It still works, it just can not cope with the SAD. The Historically Appropriate Human Diet (keto), it is capable of keeping up.
A1c is a bad test. You missed that part about me taking the far more accurate fructosamine test, where I come out okay. And the last thing want to do is trust a test that is as accurate as flipping a coin. And since I still have all my toes, I am on the right track.
Get your friend on Keto. It will reduce the amount of insulin he has to take and will help reduce the nasty side affects of insulin. Sucks what happened to him.
Yes, I’ll suggest that to him, Todd.
I often feel bad as we are same age but he has to carry ‘the kit’ and constantly monitor his bloods and inject,
whereas I don’t want to make him feel bad and all I have to do is eat no carbs, having reversed T2.
I actually feel guilt that I got off lucky? FFS? By getting T2, as opposed to T1.
He’s a good friend.
Going back to SAD would kill me on the installment plan and I am not being dramatic. I have lost too many people in my life to T2D who ate whatever they wanted, stayed addicted, and used drugs.
Never claimed you should go back to SAD, nobody should.
Glycemic load is measured with instruments. It is not a guess. It is how fast sugars are absorbed. Not how fast your body copes with them. It is the real deal, not a fad or guess.
Somebody that is Insulin sensitive releases far less insulin to deal with the same amount of load, therefore has lower blood sugar faster, and less damage as a whole.
I also never claimed hormones didn’t matter, CICO doesn’t account for everything, but ignoring them doesn’t work either, they’re close enough.
Absolutely incorrect, no shortage of people do keto, and gain massive amounts of weight.
Unfortunately you’re in the place I was in years ago, you’ve traded SAD Dogma for Keto Dogma. At some point though the light comes on and you realize what you’re doing isn’t working, we’re taught to completely ignore CICO to a fault, blame everything else under the sun, and ignore right what’s in front of our face. I got sick of not losing and got my RMR checked and saw it was FAR lower than I was eating. I started tracking, using my measured number as a baseline to create a deficit, and went from over a year of zero progress to losing again. In total went from 300lbs to now 230lbs, from almost 30% bodyfat to around 10% now.
Remember the definition of insanity… Good Luck.
If they are getting fat on Keto, then they are most probably doing that subtraction things with fiber and sugar alcohols. It is marketing fraud. It will make you fall out of ketosis. Virtually nothing in the super marked “keto” actually is. And the things that actually are, are not marked “keto”. Meat and vegetables, for example. Oh, and bottled water. (Thought I’d throw that in as a funny.)
A tip off that someone is not in 'ketosis" is that they complain that they are hungry all the time on Keto. It means they are still having wild blood sugar and insulin swings.
You really can not get fat from fat. To get fat requires insulin and carbs. Ketones do go in and out of your cells. Carbs go in and stay. If not burnt, they go to fat. This is what insulin does. When you eat fat, you have a limited time to use it or you lose it. But your really do smell pretty in the process!
It also keeps you alive, as well as putting nutrients into your cells, including the fat based ones. There’s never a time there’s no insulin in your bloodstream.
Well, you’ve clearly convinced yourself despite your results stating otherwise that you’re doing everything correctly, that you can’t get fat from fat, that everybody that does isn’t in ketosis, and a victim of marketing. Also not true about being hungry and not being in ketosis, at no time during 4yrs of strict keto and loosing 100lbs the first time, and probably around 50 or so after to regain (which you can’t do apparently) did my appetite every come under control. My ketone meter would definitely disagree with (not) being in ketosis.
Until the day when you take the Red pill… good luck, seriously.
I’m not sure what this line means. If your pancreas was actually damaged, then it means your glucose was out of control for quite a long time before your doctor noticed, because pancreatic damage is very late in the progression of Type II diabetes. For most people, the issue is insulin-resistance, which occurs in muscle, fat, and visceral organ cells, causing the pancreas to have to produce more insulin to get them to do the same amount of work. After a couple of years of low-carbohydrate eating, most people’s insulin response has returned to normal.
But at every stage, the key is to eat a small enough amount of carbohydrate to keep insulin below 25 μU/mL, because if you can stay under that threshold insulin and glucose will be low enough to stop doing damage. It is easy to tell if one is under the threshold, because the liver is producing ketones. Above that threshold, ketogenesis is halted, and glucose metabolism is the order of the day.
If you are producing ketones in that quantity, insulin is not causing glucose to be stored as fat. And any excess fat in your fat cells is free to leave, because insulin is too low to interfere with the action of hormone-sensitive lipase.
I believe this is slightly inaccurate. Ketones are not convertible in to sugar, so far as I understand. Certain fatty acids can be converted, but once they are metabolised into ketones, I don’t believe they can (remember that ketones are to fatty acids as charcoal is to wood, and while you can do a lot with wood, you can’t do much with charcoal except to burn it). In any case the brain uses ketones just as they are.
Bears get fat because they eat carbohydrates (mostly berries, I believe) in autumn, in preparation for their hibernation period. By spring, they are pretty thin again, and they don’t get fat from eating salmon. This makes sense, in evolutionary terms. When you want to put on weight, you want something that blocks satiety and keeps fat trapped in fat cells. In bears and human beings, that something is insulin.
So yes, the bears’ high-carb diet in autumn probably does some damage, but the trade-off is survival through the winter. And their serum glucose and insulin are low enough throughout the rest of the year for the seasonal damage to be repaired. In human beings who eat a high-carb diet all the time, they experience constant hunger and damage from glycation and excessive insulin that never gets a chance to be repaired, because there is never any time of the year when carb intake drops low enough.
There is a satiation switch in your body for consuming too much fat and protein. There is none for carbs. Thus the wild hunger swings in carb eaters. When I refereed to always hungry, I meant not the mild twinge Keto’s get. I am talking about the wild, I am gong crazy with hunger, things that carb burners experience when they get low blood sugar.
And when I refer to fat, I mean real fat, not chemistry set fat.
The only thing that is not working is the gut. I also an strict keto for over eight years. I presume that you are sticking with the calorie is a calorie is a calorie model. So I am not calorie reducing enough. Why is the the rest of me not getting fat? I obviously do not subscribe to the calorie is a calorie model.
Speaking of fat not making you fat, I researched it a lot. Tons of articles verifying it, but with dubious or no citations, mean they are opinions pieces and should be treated as such. But I did eventually find a real study:
Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/fulltext
Do you have anything specific about the gut?
I have “heard” that it has to do with “fatty liver”, but that eight years of keto, it should be long gone.
Yes on the having insulin in your system. Your body is a “closed loop control system”. The SAD throws it off the blood sugar, insulin, insulin degrading enzyme (IDE) control loop’s step response with horrid results, including T3 diabetes (Alzheimers), heart disease, T2 diabetes, etc… (IDE also cleans out plaque from your brain, but prefers insulin first.) Too much blood sugar and your body go to extremes to throw it off: throw it to fat, dump YUGE amount of insulin, etc… If insulin takes out too much blood sugar before the IDE can catch up with it, you pass out.
The control loop for ketones bodies is a whole different system.
Here is an interesting article on IDE:
Insulin-Degrading Enzyme