Stalling Despite Low Insulin

#1

Hello everyone,

I need a bit of problem solving help. My mother has lost a lot of weight (mostly on a non-keto diet), but she’s stalling, and I can’t figure out why. She is around 5’2" and 170, and she’s been doing a keto diet for a few months now – she was about 175 when she started with keto. She eats to satiety, but she definitely isn’t overeating, and she’s really careful with the carbs. She’s struggled with her weight forever, and this is the smallest she’s been in a long time, but she would really love to get down to ~150. She just had blood work done. Her fasted insulin results: 3.6 uIU/mL = 25 pmol/L, which I think is quite low.

I was surprised – I figured that she wasn’t losing because her insulin was just too high. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. According to @richard’s chart at Restrict plate fat when trying to lose body fat - discussion, she’s actually on the low end of the blue range. What to try next?

She doesn’t do planned intermittent fasting (and I think it’s not really an option because of very strong psychological barriers), but she actually ends up doing it naturally fairly regularly (eating only between 11am and 8pm, for example).

Any ideas? She’s a little frustrated, but also pretty happy with her overall progress. I just wish I had an explanation, and the insulin level doesn’t seem to be it!

(Richard Morris) #2

Insulin is the 800 lb gorilla for many people dealing with weight, it’s not the only deranging factor tho but with my own problems it is the one I have focused a lot of my self-education on.

Your mothers fasting insulin is almost ideal. It means when she doesn’t eat she has unrestricted access to her stored energy. She could still be insulin resistant - fasted insulin is like checking the performance of an engine when it’s up on blocks going nowhere. The gold standard is a Kraft test to see how her insulin responds to a glucose challenge - that’s like testing your engine as you drive a quarter mile. But if she’s keto already it’s a pain to do that test (you have to unketo-adapt yourself first). So let’s assume she is quite insulin sensitive and doesn’t need to make a lot of insulin even under load.

So most of us with insulin resistance are trying to use regular fasting to encourage a chronic effect, namely to reduce our exposure and gradually lower our resistance.

In your mothers case intermittent fasting could have an acute effect, namely when she doesn’t eat from 8pm to 11am … that’s 15 hours of the day where she is using stored energy, and 9 hours where she is topping up her tanks. With such low insulin dynamics she could probably fast in between those times without too much trouble - so I would suggest as a strategy try having that late breakfast at 11am and then trying to go without snacking until dinner at 8pm.

Even tho her fasted insulin is low, as soon as she eats anything it goes up and turns off the spigot of energy coming from body fat. So every snack keeps that insulin beachball in the air. It’s better to eat more calories for Lunch and Dinner, than eating them continuously through the period from 11am to 8pm.

Good luck with the experiment

(Liz ) #3

I’ve been full Keto since March. I’m female, 48, 5’8" and I’ve lost 30 pounds with 20 or 30 left to go. My weightloss ebbs and flows. I just spent three weeks bouncing around the same number then finally dropped a pound. But I could see in the meantime I looked smaller and my clothes fit better. I think as we lose weight things need to shift around inside and the body takes a break from scale obvious weightloss to rearrange and adjust. This way of eating takes a lot of patience if you are on a weightloss journey, but as always, keep calm and keto on :smile:

(Deb) #4

@alphabet, what kind of foods does she usually eat, and any exercise? Any medical conditions?