Ugh, Andrea, I’m so sorry to hear this. The thought of you leaving the office in tears is really upsetting
CICO always sounds nuts to me (because hormonal pathways make so much more sense, and also because the “CO” part of the equation has so many variables and so many unknowns) but my guess is that calories probably fit into the picture sometimes in some ways for some folks. However, even if you go by standard guidelines, 1000/day for an active woman of your age sounds straight-up crazy and metabolism-destroying (I wonder what this doc would make of that grim follow-up of Biggest Loser contestants?).
You’re keeping track of all of this, right? Because when you find the missing piece it will be really nice for others to know your full history.
So sorry for your frustration Andrea. Ditto on seeing a functional medicine provider, or naturopath. Have you tried reducing or eliminating cycling for a spell, just as an experiment?
Try Isopure zero carb for 10 days. I’ll be on it in 8 days myself for a change down. 1 scoop twice a day with MCT oil, and then a BPC with butter, cream and MCT
I started LCHF/keto in 2013 after seeing six different doctors because I felt like crap for months. They all did their tests and examinations and could not find anything wrong. And not a single one of them ever said anything about food. Now I know why: they know jack shit about the effects of diet and metabolic health.
A friend suggested I try LCHF because she had heard that a lot of people were doing it and feeling better, losing weight, etc. I started it, and four days later (FOUR DAYS) I felt really good. Within two weeks I felt amazing with tons of energy — eating meat, fat, butter, eggs, cheese, etc. I had just turned 51 and I felt better than I had felt in decades.
Today, at age 55, I weigh what I did in high school (165 lbs), my HDL is up, Trigs way down, CRP is perfect, 16% body fat, lifting weights 3x a week, and I feel great.
If anyone here still feels like they should always defer to the folks in the white lab coat because they are the “authorities” with framed degrees on the wall: wake up.
I didn’t know whether to open a new topic, but then I remembered this thread and I think this will fit right in. First let’s start by quoting myself from this other thread:
soooo … i went to my appoinment, he told me my cholesterol was high, I told him I didn’t really mind because my hdl was high, my trigs were low and my ratios were just fine. He tried to give me statins, I refused and tried to explain why just to be dismissed. I tried to give him good calories bad calories for him to read and he told me he didn’t have time to read it!!! I tried to give him the latest study @richard posted here and he said he was fine (meaning no thank you, I am god and I know everything already you peasant). I tried to give him some links to some lectures by Peter Attia, Ivor Cummins, Zoe Harcombe, Jeffry Gerber, etc, and he said he wasn’t interested.
This left me feeling like WTF!! How are you even a doctor!!! I do all the research and serve it to you on a silver platter and you can’t even read it? You don’t have time?!? You don’t have time to study on what you do every day? You don’t have time to read some studies and get up to date with the latest research for the good of your patients? I am so mad I can’t see straight. Mind you I only went to him in the first place because he is on a paleo doctors site (and I know paleo is not keto, but it was the closest thing I could find), but it turns out only one of his DAs is paleo, and … grrr, I’m fuming. Needless to to say I am never going to him again.
Anyway, I just wanted to vent. I am tired of being my own doctor and trying to figure out everything on my own, all I wanted to know why my hair might be falling off, he just said he didn’t know but also dismissed all my theories without even listening to me … apparently my cholesterol is all that matters.
Oh, and also, I told him my insulin was high and that was a little concerning (since I know optimal is bellow 5, or more like bellow 3) to maybe discus metformin, he just looked at the lab ranges and said it was normal, nothing to see here, move along. And the reason I was tested for insulin, a1c and crp is only because I asked for them.
Look into Fodmap. Even on zero carb I assume you do spices like garlic? Apparently what I recently learned from a podcast is that garlic is a fodmap or can be
On ZC, I just used salt. I used to use garlic all the time, but stopped using it because I thought it might have been an issue. (This, by the time, is totally sacreligious in my Middle Eastern family…)
Carina, your lab numbers are wonderful! And you completely know what you are doing, Ie. Trig and HDL!!
Congratulations and I am rocking glad to hear that you stood up and said no f’in way to taking any STATIN-SCARE. You rock!! Kcko
Maybe our great, great grandkids won’t have to fight this battle - if they live long enough from the SAD and the poor medical care hat goes with it, which is also standard.
Sorry to hear about your Doctor. I can tell you his point of view is that he is tired of patients coming in after consulting “Dr Google” and wasting his time. It’s a cognitive dissonance, and he won’t be able to help you. I reckon you have the right idea to stop wasting his time, and yours
With your fasted insulin you are within the normal range but you aren’t easily able to get access to energy in storage even when you eat nothing.
This to me means it appears if you restrict calories, you can’t replace the shortfall from body fat, so your body will reduce optional caloric use. Hair development and maintenance requires energy, but hair is not essential for survival. This is why people can see additional hair fall whenever they change diet … any diet.
Your lipids look great. If you want to drop your total cholesterol get some sun and you’ll convert some into vitamin D and your total cholesterol will go down.
Wanna know where everyone got their associations between cholesterol and heart disease from? It was a study called the Framingham study where they followed most of the people from a town in Massachusetts for decades and watched what they did and how their health progressed.
This is the critical piece. It’s a table showing men and women segmented by their total cholesterol level - less than 200, 210-244, and 255 or more. And for each group they calculated how many people they would expect by the law of averages to have heart disease, and then how many actually had heart disease.
This is associational science it’s not adequate to infer anything until you see a 2x observation. So you see Men under 210 Cholesterol they expected 69 men in 1000 would have heart disease and they saw 35.2. That’s close … but still not 2x. If they had seen 34.7 then you be able to say “Ah well low cholesterol probably causes less heart disease”.
Men in the mid range of cholesterol they expected 70 and got 63 … that’s just noise. And men over 245 they expected 72 and got 120 … again it’s not 2x so it’s not significant.
Now look at women, the numbers barely budge. This is all pure noise. It doesn’t meet the effect size threshold for the Bradford Hill standard to infer causation.
So that’s what the people who taught the people who taught your doctor got wrong.
@richard, wow, thank you for taking time to respond with so much information, I was just giving you credit for the article I took, but hey, this is way better
I can see now that reading my original post you would think I was insane, truth is I was so upset it just came out like that, I just let the emotions fly wild hahah.
Truth is that in the office I was calm, when the cholesterol and statin talk started I asked why he wanted to give me statins, listened, and then I told him that those figures are just relative risk and that is not worth the side effects. Then, and this is what I can tell bothered him and stopped listening all together, I told him total cholesterol and even calculated LDL doesn’t mean much, specially on women, and that there is a lot of information about it. When I saw him dismissing me I told him I wasn’t just believing everything on the internet, reminded him I do have a degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics (which is true) and that I did my research, and tried to give him Good Calories, Bad Calories (not my copy, bought him a new one, the other one is my precious ) telling him that this is the book that got me to start researching all of it. He just looked at me and told me he didn’t have time to read it, and then told me anyone can just write a book. I attempted to explain who Gary Taubes is to no avail. The rest, me trying to give him the article you recommended (thinking at least read this, it’s nice and short), or attempting to give him the links to the lectures all happened while he was walking out of the room, and talking back to me (more like at me) without stopping - at this point I may have started to look like a travelling salesman trying to sell you something as you shut the door on me, I understand this, but why was I in this position in the first place?. You can imagine this scenario left me feeling so upset, and helpless, that the above post happened. I understand cognitive dissonance is a thing, but i suspect it has more to do with the fact that I am a young woman with a thick accent (english not being my first language and all) not blindly following what he tells me to do, but still, a little respect would have been nice, I believe I treated him with respect and tried to explain why I was against following his advice.
About this, I had expected it to be high, but when I saw it was so much higher than 5 I was a little disappointed to say the least. Do you think trying a low dose of metformin might help me lower it? (I know you are not a doctor, but since you do take it for this purpose) I wanted to ask him about that, but because it is in the “normal range”, he just told me that there is nothing wrong with it in the first place, that it shouldn’t be affecting my weight loss at all.
I didn’t get the results until I got there, so, I didn’t have a lot of time to process them beforehand, but you are right. I hadn’t really associated it because it started about 7 months after starting keto, but thinking about it, it started close to when I started dabbling into prolonged fasts. I didn’t think much of it because I didn’t get any of the other symptoms of my metabolism slowing down, like cold or lethargy, but maybe the reason I didn’t was because my body decided to cut out other things, like hair. This is sad, because I enjoy fasting, but I guess I will have to stop for a while. Maybe keep a 24hr fast a week with a proper fast the day before won’t be as bad. I was also considering hormonal reasons, because I changed birth control, but thinking about time frames, yours makes more sense.
I love this advice, and I think I took it to heart way before you even gave it to me, getting heat exhaustion 2 times this summer, but what can I say, I love me the outdoors. If anything I thing I am vitamin D-ed out
That’s what I was taught too when I was pre-med and I just accepted it at the time, but I don’t think that is an excuse. I followed that advice for years, and I even explained it to other people (now I feel so bad about it). But along the lines I never stopped reading on things, although that might be because I went into basic science instead after that (not any more though, the way the science field worked where I am from wasn’t for me, so I moved on to computers instead, but I will always be a scientist at heart), and science is an ever changing field, so we know things evolve and accept change a little easier.
One last thing, that contributed to my anger and the crazy post, don’t read this if you are bored already, it’s not related to the original. My husband had an appointment too, right after mine, he wanted to ask about his gastritis and fatty liver. About the gastritis, he has had it for years, and has been controlling it with medication, so we decided that now that we moved, maybe here they know something different that can help him. We asked him about it, more specifically, we asked if there was a way to determine the root cause of the pain, so he wouldn’t have to take medication all the time. The doctor’s opinion was, if the medication works keep taking it and problem solved, there is no possible way to know the source but hey, if you really want to not have any pain then death is an answer. Yes, he said that, death. Then I asked if we could have an order for liver enzimes panel (I wanted to check the fatty liver progress since he started keto). His fatty liver was found my chance on an ultrasound looking for other things (not by this doctor btw) , and it wasn’t that bad, but still a cause for concern. To this the doctor gave us the order, but also said, hey you are not a kid anymore (he is 33), you will have a little fat in your liver. It was just a long crappy day in the medical world for me.
Showing that Diabetics have a little more leeway because in their deranges state their fat cells become less insulin sensitive. Note those of us who were Diabetes, went keto and then lost massive amounts of weight for 5-6 months and then plateaued … have become insulin sensitive in our fat cells and are more like the non-diabetics.
Note that that chart is absolute (in units of 100 μMole) not relative as in the simplified chart I usually show.
Your fasted insulin in pmol is around 72, and you can see for yourself that you have very little access to energy from body fat. I would ask your next physician to treat your high fasted insulin. That treatment will likely be metformin. But I’m not a doctor
BTW Both Jules and I experienced increased hair shed from the point when we started the diet.
Normally we go through 3 stages of hair growth, Anagen for several years which is the growth of hair, Catagen for a few weeks where the hair is cut off from it’s blood supply, Telogen for around 3 months where it chills, and then it eventually falls out to start a new cycle. During times of energy stress we shed up to 70% of the chilling telogen stage follicles - it’s called telogen effluvium. Extended energy stress can shorten the Anagen stage.
What it means is hair loss is usually just a trailing indicator of a dietary change, and transitory. You can supplement with biotin to give the follicles a chance to be a little more robust.
Thanks everyone. Richard, I am switching doctors of course, I decided that the second I left his office. About the shedding, I also lost some extra hair when I started keto, but not like now, now it’s falling out in clumps, like a crazy amounts (the dogs and I are now share the blame for all the lose hair around the house), but after getting the insulin results and looking at your chart, I am positive I overdid it with the extended fasts, guess I will refrain from those until I can lower my fasting insulin, for now imma KCKO
@jilliangordona, A synthetic hormone is the standard course of action for Hashimoto’s. As an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s disease is characterized by the immune system attacking the the thyroid and reducing its function over time. There are generally two courses of action that can be taken:
(A) Reduce the autoimmune response
(B) Correct for the hormonal imbalance resulting from decreased thyroid function
Most doctors will only choose option (B), which means the disease is almost always degenerative and the synthetic hormone levels the patient takes will increase over time. Some doctors advocate for option (A), but this course of option is patient dependent. That is, what works for option (A) will be different for each patient. For many, going gluten free, low carb/ketogenic, or dairy free may work to varying degrees. There are so many things that can reduce the autoimmune response. At some point, however, it is likely that a patient employing option (A) successfully will reach a point where no improvements can be made. In these cases, the progression of the disease is significantly reduced, halted, or even reversed! However, I don’t personally know of any that have reversed completely such that all lost thyroid function was regained. It is entirely reasonable that virtually all hashimoto’s patients will require some level of synthetic hormonal replacement.
Also, note that thyroid hormones are CRITICAL TO SURVIVAL. If you have diminished thyroid function and are not supplementing with a synthetic hormone, you are probably putting yourself at serious health risk, which could even result in death.
Thank you for the insight! However there are too many negatives to synthetic hormone. If I take anything it will be Armour Thyroid, not a synthetic hormone.
