Sugar flu?

[JBradley]

I’ve been doing keto since June 2018. I’ve taken off about 30 lbs, but am still overweight. However, my blood panel is probably the best it’s been in 30 years. Good cholesterol up, bad cholesterol down, triglycerides way down and my HA1C is around 5.8 after having got off Invokana entirely and reduced Metformin by over half. I’ve also been more active and going to CrossFit 3 times a week.

I’ve also been watching some of the many keto YouTube videos out there. One of the videos was done by a guy who is also a bodybuilder. He was talking about using small amounts of fast acting sugars before a workout that can be burned off during the workout and not throw your body out of ketosis. I’ve heard this same idea discussed by others as well and I decided to try it just prior to one of my CrossFit classes. I took a tsp of honey before my workout and within just a few minutes I felt sick. This feeling stayed with me for 2-3 hours. I checked my blood sugar and that had remained within range. That first experience was about 5 months ago . Subsequently, I tried again with a small amount of orange juice and the same thing happened, with the addition of adding a lot of phlegm and aggravating my asthma.

Apparently, not being one who learns from my mistakes, I took a glucose tablet. This not only made me feel sick, I started getting irregular heart palpitations and had to go to ER. Arrhythmia is not a new thing for me and I take medication to regulate it, but the timing of it was suspect due to the ingestion of the glucose.

I wondering if anyone else has had adverse reactions to ingesting sugars after being on the ketogenic diet for a longer period of time. The feeling that I had was not unlike the feeling I’ve keto flu when first becoming fat adapted.

[amwassil]

You’re a poster child for the folks who advocate eating carbs to insure ‘metabolic flexibility’. I think they’re wrong, but you can judge for yourself.

Metabolic Flexibility - Get Real

Several frequent posters to this forum continually talk about consuming carbohydrates to gain and/or maintain so-called ‘metabolic flexibility’. A few others bring it up occasionally. All these posters talk about ‘metabolic flexibility’ as something desirable and healthy. So what exactly are these people talking about? From what I can determine from their posts, to all these folks ‘metabolic flexibility’ means eating carbohydrates for the purpose of - eating carbohydrates. In other words, they …

[David_Stilley]

Hi John…That’s a crazy bad reaction from those amounts. I hope you stay away from it, what that trainer says works for some people but there’s lots that make great progress even fasting when ketones are high. Not everyone believes in the urgency to eat right afterwards either. The effective window is the question. I’m not a bodybuilder I just thought your story was interesting. At first I thought you were posting about KETO Flu from your title.

[FrankoBear]

Apparently, not being one who learns from my mistakes, I took a glucose tablet. This not only made me feel sick, I started getting irregular heart palpitations and had to go to ER. Arrhythmia is not a new thing for me and I take medication to regulate it, but the timing of it was suspect due to the ingestion of the glucose.

I wondering if anyone else has had adverse reactions to ingesting sugars after being on the ketogenic diet for a longer period of time. The feeling that I had was not unlike the feeling I’ve keto flu when first becoming fat adapted.

This is an interesting observation with the glucose tablet. I may have experienced similar with sugar in carbohydrate foods. The heart palpitations were extra pre ventricular contractions (PVCs) which flipped into atrial fibrillation (AF). A nutrient calcium channel blocker, a magnesium salt at higher doses usually switches it off.

But your observation with a direct glucose oral dose is very interesting and I wonder what the mechanism is?

[Fangs]

Yea I feel ya cause I get it also.
Carnivore I drop all sugar from any foods so the times I have a little of this or that on a dirty carnivore day…I get worried cause I am afraid if I push any sugar I will end up in the darn ER I can feel so bad.

Last time, a while now tho, I had some 90% dark chocolate, 3 squares only 9g…I had 6 toward evening at 18g and while I felt a bit off…in the morning I felt it. Woke up with a tummy ache. A tummy ache? haven’t had one of those in like 3 years LOL I knew instantly the chocolate monkeyed with me. It was a crampy icky tummy ache that felt like more than just I ate some ick food, it was a deep type tummy ache I can’t quite describe. Now if I do chocolate, and I might still, I will never go over the 3 squares, and at this point I haven’t had it in a while, I might just walk away from it forever now.

I don’t push it ever now. I don’t like the feeling, what it can do to me and feeling crappy. Sugar land is gone for me now. I literally put it in the super evil category of things in life out there to get me HAHA

[Shinita]

Your reactions are quite serious compared to the normal ketoer but it’s understandable to me to some extent, your body is in ketosis, doing its business and you shock it with pure sugar (there are articles explaining what happens in the body in such times, theoretically and maybe even practically but some people feels nothing even if they suddenly have a carby day). My body hates that too and I was never as faithful to keto as you, I was quite fine on simple low-carb most of the time. But I do that since several years. I can handle some sugar but when in ketosis, I am careful. Half of a small apple or a whole teaspoon of honey is problematic, it’s not about the total amount of carbs, it seems. It’s subtle for me, I notice but it never lasts long and I don’t actually get unwell if the amount is tiny. But it’s subject to change, it’s changing since the beginning of low-carb and it’s not always the same reaction for eating the same thing.

If I wanted carbs before a workout (I need being very well fasted then so nope but my workouts aren’t serious anyway, I am just a lazy woman who has some weights and modest dreams about muscles), that would be something else, not pure sugar.
People do CKD too and I would simply die then or would wish I did. Some things work for one and not for the other or not in the same way. You seem to be some rare type where incompatibility with the approach is very high.

I can be wrong, of course, it’s just my guess. My own body surely hates pure sugar now and I always loved honey, it’s the tastiest sweetener, looks nice and I ate lots of it in my high-carb times. I just can’t eat a whole teaspoon of it alone without slightly negative consequences when I am in ketosis. Fine with me. I don’t need carbs (and surely never pure sugar), the less the better, usually.

[Sue777]

The last time I did Keto (yes, I’m back again after a hiatus) I was strict low carb for a solid 9 months. On my wedding anniversary we went out to dinner and I figured, “Think I’ll celebrate with a sweet dessert, it’s been such a long time since I had one” so I did. I got so dizzy and sick to my stomach that it was a very miserable ride home and I vowed I either needed to slowly add some carbs back in so I wouldn’t react so violently in the future, or I needed to make sure I never had sugar again. Shortly after, I ended up slowly adding carbs back in and, well, you know how that goes, you quickly end up being a carbaholic again.

I will remind myself of that experience if I ever feel like having a sickeningly sweet treat again.
Sue