Could I get some help to clarify what it is I’m aiming to do in order to lower my HbA1C please.
I know I need to be low carb. I’m back home from holiday this weekend so that’s going to be much easier as I have a supply of food from the Seriously
Low Carb Store in my freezer. I also know I need to limit how much fruit I eat and choose more carefully what fruits I eat.
What I need some help with understanding is the fat element. If I chose not to eat full fat. As in yogurt, milk etc. How would that affect things? Is it bad for your body to go low carb and not replace the carbs with fats? Would it result in weight loss?
For the last three months I’ve not been getting it right if my HbA1C is anything to go by and I’d like to rectify that if I can.
This is what works for me. No guarantees, obviously. The other point is that this is the Tour de France, not a 500 metre sprint. What happens in one stage has very little impact on the race overall. It's only when you add everything together over a much longer time that you'll see which team is leading.
I aim for around 20g carb/day. That comes mainly from veg, and sometimes pulses because I can handle those acceptably. I don't eat any of the heavy carb items - bread, fruit, pasta, rice, pastry or sugar. I don't want to be using protein for fuel, because I'm interested in keeping and building muscle, so fats are the only practical fuel option (alcohol will provide 7 calories energy per gram, but that's not a realistic plan) .
So I eat plenty of meat and veg. That goes along with cream, ghee, butter (before I found SRSLY I had difficulty finding a method to eat butter other than in cooking) and olive oil. So, for example, a lamb and spinach curry will have onions as the base and I'll use lamb with plenty of fat. Eaten on its own as my meal in OMAD and (depending on quantity) that tops out at a maximum 10g carb from the spinach and onions (I usually overestimate) . Doesn't have to be curry, you could make a stew the same way and leave out the spices. I eat only what I want - I find it impossible these days to overeat.
One of my other priorities is not to be hungry. I do really badly in that respect on "calorie-control" diets, and they never worked for me. I have not felt hungry on 20g carb as I'm taking in enough food and fats are sufficiently satiating.
I'd advise eating to your meter. It can sometimes be difficult to predict results for foods in combination and any alcohol (eg one glass of wine) will tend to suppress your post-meal reading. The issue is though that you're not diabetioc, so the official "targets" for diagnosed diabetics are different. In a sense, that doesn't matter. What you are trying to establish is whether your system can handle the glucose load you just took in.
If my (unskewed by alcohol) post-meal reading is not above 7.8 and not more than two points higher than where I was when I started, I am happy. In practice I rarely see a readinbg above 6mmol/l after food (and I usually know why). The one-off meter readings do not directly predict your eventual A1c (they measure different things in different ways) but if yiou're testing after food and first thing in the morning those are likely to be your high BG points in the day, so you should be getting a worst-case picture. If that's consistently (say) under 6, and stays like that for three months, you should be seeing an A1c improvement.
Best of luck
