Low carb? Totally confused

[Pip16]

Hi was diagnosed as type 2 about a month ago now. Lost almost a stone in weight through cutting out the obvious, although I would like to lose another stone to bring me back to pre children if I can.
Ive been considering the lchf diet and printed off some recipes yet to try. I spend hours in the shops reading labels trying to see what I can and can't eat. I always go for low fat low saturate options and if the carbs have a high sugar content I do not buy. Such a nerd I am cos just realised that I am doing the low carb already. Although I do have some multi seeded bread as this doesn't seem to have much of effect on my bg. Also I do have a couple of new potatoes or a small/1/2 jkt spud. I'm just confused as to the fats/saturates. I guess it's hard as always had it drummed into us that's fats/saturates especially are bad. My bg readings are going down, mornings on waking they are always in the 6's (5.6 this morning) and pre meals mostly in the 5's, post meals are mostly always in the 7's or below. I have had a couple of 4's pre meals. I'm just confused as to the fats, carbs/sugar and what I should be buying from the labels. My last hb1c on diagnosis was 51 and my cholesterol was high so I really want to bring both down and think I'm getting myself in state as im so confused.

 

[Andy12345]

Hi

your doing very well, so congratulations for the changes you've made

i do lchf, this is my choice and whatever i say is open to contradiction so please just take what i am saying as a look into my personal experience, I'm not medically trained or a dietician

firstly the level of carbs per day you want to eat will depend on what you think you could cope with forever, diets in general are bad because we tend to think of them as finite, its far better to find a "diet" that you could see yourself adopting for life, lchf in my opinion is easily adopted as you need not be hungry, this therefore makes it sustainable, your meter will tell you what you can tolerate from a blood sugar point of view, however for weight loss you may want to tighten up on carbs and increase fats until you've reached you ideal weight, it indeed goes against everything we have ever been told about fat making you fat, this is now becoming a well known nonsense, if your not already i would highly recommend getting an app called "myfitnesspal" and recording everything you eat, i found it very surprising once i started recording what i ate, just what i was putting in there, you can forget counting calories, just worry about carbs, and when reading the labels (don't worry we all do that) don't worry about the "of which sugars" this is just to do with how fast that % of carbs breaks down, but a carb is a carb, so just look at total carbs on the labels, my cholerol was high and is now very low eating lchf, the high fat part for me meant, not worrying about the saturated fats, i would avoid trans fats as they are universally regarded as bad by the clever people, but eating healthy home cooked meals, you would have trouble finding any trans fats anyway, high fat dosent mean you have to suck of blocks of lard for snacks, it just means stop avoiding fats, fat satiates you and makes eating less almost accidental, so high fat could mean a handful of nuts for a snack, it also means avoiding anything that states its "low fat" fat tastes nice so when then remove it, they have no choice to replace it with either chemicals or sugar to make it palletable, we don't need carbs to survive, so how low you go will depend on what your comfortable with, the small potatoes are very carboy but if you feel you won't be able to give them up forever then don't bother giving them up, just reduce them as much as is reasonable for you, once you've found a level of low carb that is comfy then you just have to adjust it to suit your weight loss, this isn't immediate, take you time, by recording everything you will see patterns and if you say are stalled with the weight loss, try reducing a little further for a month and see what happens, if still you haven't lost weight, try to reduce further, theres no point taking the weight off only to go back to what you were doing after the "diet" and put it all back on, so by doing everything slowly and methodically you will ease yourself into a way of life, you may like me find that your comfortable eating very low carbs and need to up the fats or protein to maintain the weight once you've lost it (what a nice problem to have huh) it sounds like you have a handle on what the obvious carbs are to avoid, but myfitnesspal will show you where the hidden carbs lurk (well it did for me anyway) I'm babbling on now so ill shut up, please ask any specific questions you have and we can try to help, everyone on here has a different approach so take multiple opinions and see what you think looks reasonable would be my advice

keep going! your doing terrific!

 

[zand]

The only thing I would add to what Andy has said is make sure you drink plenty of water. I find I lose weight more easily if I drink more than 3 litres a day.

 

[Andy12345]

yes indeed, you can't drink enough water....


well....

he did

 

[Pip16]

Thanks Andy for replying so quickly. It was all starting to get so confusing. Low fat, high fat, carbs, sugar, calories, traffic light codes etc, it was all becoming a blur. Literally, with the blurry eyes thing I have going on. It wasn't the diabetes diagnosis that's shocked me. So many members of the family have type 2, they're not overweight so guess it's a gene thing. What shocked me was the high cholesterol. I very rarely ate anything fried or fatty. The DN didn't help when I saw her last week and she told me I'm the same risk of heart attack as someone whose already had one. She wanted to put me on statins but I refused. As I've said I've lost almost a stone now and my bg numbers are coming down.
I will download the my fitness app and go from there. Is there a starting level on the carbs that I should be aiming for? Or is it a case of totalling what I'm having now? Also how much high fat should I be having daily. I'm sorry if I'm seeming to ask stupid questions. Brains quite fuzzy today so a bit hard trying to get my head round anything.

 

[pavlosn]

Hi


firstly the level of carbs per day you want to eat will depend on what you think you could cope with forever, diets in general are bad because we tend to think of them as finite, its far better to find a "diet" that you could see yourself adopting for life, lchf in my opinion is easily adopted as you need not be hungry, this therefore makes it sustainable, your meter will tell you what you can tolerate from a blood sugar point of view, however for weight loss you may want to tighten up on carbs and increase fats until you've reached you ideal weight, it indeed goes against everything we have ever been told about fat making you fat, this is now becoming a well known nonsense, if your not already i would highly recommend getting an app called "myfitnesspal" and recording everything you eat, i found it very surprising once i started recording what i ate, just what i was putting in there, you can forget counting calories, just worry about carbs, and when reading the labels (don't worry we all do that) don't worry about the "of which sugars" this is just to do with how fast that % of carbs breaks down, but a carb is a carb, so just look at total carbs on the labels, my cholerol was high and is now very low eating lchf, the high fat part for me meant, not worrying about the saturated fats, i would avoid trans fats as they are universally regarded as bad by the clever people, but eating healthy home cooked meals, you would have trouble finding any trans fats anyway, high fat dosent mean you have to suck of blocks of lard for snacks, it just means stop avoiding fats, fat satiates you and makes eating less almost accidental, so high fat could mean a handful of nuts for a snack, it also means avoiding anything that states its "low fat" fat tastes nice so when then remove it, they have no choice to replace it with either chemicals or sugar to make it palletable, we don't need carbs to survive, so how low you go will depend on what your comfortable with, the small potatoes are very carboy but if you feel you won't be able to give them up forever then don't bother giving them up, just reduce them as much as is reasonable for you, once you've found a level of low carb that is comfy then you just have to adjust it to suit your weight loss, this isn't immediate, take you time, by recording everything you will see patterns and if you say are stalled with the weight loss, try reducing a little further for a month and see what happens, if still you haven't lost weight, try to reduce further, theres no point taking the weight off only to go back to what you were doing after the "diet" and put it all back on, so by doing everything slowly and methodically you will ease yourself into a way of life, you may like me find that your comfortable eating very low carbs and need to up the fats or protein to maintain the weight once you've lost it (what a nice problem to have huh) it sounds like you have a handle on what the obvious carbs are to avoid, but myfitnesspal will show you where the hidden carbs lurk (well it did for me anyway) I'm babbling on now so ill shut up, please ask any specific questions you have and we can try to help, everyone on here has a different approach so take multiple opinions and see what you think looks reasonable would be my advice

@Andy12345 this has to be the longest paragraph I've seen in a very long while

 

[sanguine]

Total cholesterol is a bit meaningless in some ways Pip, what's more important is the breakdown and the ratios between some of the components of it. Do you have the figures for HDL, LDL and triglycerides for example? I was 'offered' statins as well before any meaningful discussion on diabetes, and also refused them.

 

[jack412]

IMO to keep it all simple while you learn,..don't eat grain or grain product...a very little fruit and potato/starch...lots of leafy veg
you use fats to replace the lost carbs, without fats you are going to run out of energy real quick, you will probably feel cold and tired as your body metabolism slows down.

LCHF will help your cholesterol, have a google about eat fat lose weight and cholesterol myths

http://www.dietdoctor.com/lchf
http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/lowcarbliving/a/Food-Cravings.htm
http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/14045524.php
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/

 

[Andy12345]

hehe there are no stupid questions, just people that are too stupid to ask them

Personally i found the thought of eating 30g a day ridiculous and impossible so i set about reducing my carbs where i could, i used to take my highest carb value meal and look for a less carboy alternative to it, it became a sort of game, until i eventually got to 30g a day and found it very easy, if you drop too fast some people say they get a kinda flu like feeling for a while, this does pass though, you just have to fight through it, i never tried it that way so i don't know, my way would be to go down as fast as your comfortable with, go down naturally almost, as you research it, you will find alternatives, then just introduce them, i stated to do low carb baking, this was a terrific thing for me i baked low carb treats all the time, yum take a look here for an idea of what i mean http://www.diabeticgoodbaking.com, but the level of carbs is very personal to the person, some people will get good bg numbers and lose weight at 150g a day, some 100g some 25g and everything in between, unfortunately there are no rules so you have to make the rules up yourself and be prepared to change them at will

its not surprising your struggling, we all struggle to different degrees, but all feel confused, its a lot to take in at first but it all gets easier in time, knowledge is power so try to learn as much as you can but in your own time, its been said many times but this is a marathon not a sprint

cholesterol remains a mystery to me, all i can do is say that mine went down eating lots of fat, i started exercising a lot too so that may also have helped, i started taking statins but have since stopped (against medical advice) as i read such horrid things about them

 

[Pip16]

Hi sanguine No I didn't get the breakdown, I was too afraid to ask. My gp wasn't concerned with the cholesterol. When I phoned for the results of blood tests, I was told the cholesterol was high but there's no mention of doing anything about it or any advice from my gp only that he wants to see me about the blood glucose. It was a telephone consultation I had with him later and he was only concerned about the sugar. No mention at all of cholesterol. Guess I should stop being such a wuss and ask.

 

[Andy12345]

@Andy12345 this has to be the longest paragraph I've seen in a very long while

lol, I'm like a double decker bus, you either get nothing or 4 buses at once

 

[zand]

Hi sanguine No I didn't get the breakdown, I was too afraid to ask. My gp wasn't concerned with the cholesterol. When I phoned for the results of blood tests, I was told the cholesterol was high but there's no mention of doing anything about it or any advice from my gp only that he wants to see me about the blood glucose. It was a telephone consultation I had with him later and he was only concerned about the sugar. No mention at all of cholesterol. Guess I should stop being such a wuss and ask.

If you ask for a print-out of your results and there is anything you don't understand you can ask us about it

 

[annelise]

Hi Pip, - What Andy said.

– And I too had a hard time of letting go of my life-long ingrained fear of fats. On top of that also came that my lipid (cholesterol) numbers were rather high. So it was with quite some hesitation that I embraced the lchf approach. But contrarily to my expections and rather to my surprise, both HbA1C and lipids came down into normal ranges.

And a lovely way of eating this is: free use of bacon, butter, full cream, fatty pieces of meats, you name it … - My family will often look at me as someone heading directly for a heart attack when I ask to please have some more butter … (but my grandma lived until 105 and she always opted for the fatty pieces of meat the rest of us would shun, go tell …)

You are off to a good start, Pip, and nice to have you around.

annelise

 

[IanD]

I've been on a low carb diet since May 2008, & am fit & well, with no indication of heart or other health problems - at 75 y-o.

We are all told that carbs increase our blood glucose, but we need them at every meal to maintain energy, brain function, etc. I followed that advice from diagnosis (2000) until peripheral neuropathy (crippling muscle pains) & extreme tiredness were destroying my life. The advice of a low carbing T1 (Fergus) moved me to give up all the obvious carbs. In 3 months my life was transformed.

As Andy says, if we cut carbs, we need to replace them with fats. Healthy, natural fats as in nuts, dairy (including full-fat cheese, milk, yoghurt & cream), fresh meat. Use lard, butter or monounsat oils for cooking, butdon't keep re-using them, & don't buy deep fried foods - the cooking oil is likely to be re-used & denatured.

Also fats have double the calories of carbs by weight, so eat less, & they take longer to digest, so are more sustaining & you won't need between meal snacks. (But if you do, eat nuts.) I use powdered nuts & seeds in baking, along with eggs, butter, olive oil, not forgetting the baking powder. (Ground almonds, coconut flour, milled flax, a mixture I use for a low carb "porridge.")

 

[annelise]

Total cholesterol is a bit meaningless in some ways Pip, what's more important is the breakdown and the ratios between some of the components of it. Do you have the figures for HDL, LDL and triglycerides for example? I was 'offered' statins as well before any meaningful discussion on diabetes, and also refused them.

I am with you here, Sanguine. - I have learned that the important parameter here is the ratio between triglycerides and HDL, ie. the trig number divided by the HDL number (which should preferably be a number less than 1.3 if measured in mmol/l - don't know if you use other units?)

And please don't get me started in statins! After having been pushed onto them on several occasions with bad side effects, I will only take them if force-fed (and if it comes to that, I guess I will not care one way or the other ...)

annelise

 

[Pip16]

Thanks guys for all the advise. I'm going to sit down this afternoon (rare afternoon off work) and really read through everything to get my head round it all. By the time I get a chance to read anything is when I finally get to bed, then I'm just too tired for it to sink in.

Haha Thanks Andy re the silly questions. I do have a few more popping up in my head so no doubt there will be more questions later.

 

[sanskaratwo]

I do know, confusing isn't it. I have been a type one for the last 40 years. About 6 years ago I retired and had huge problems, about the same time, with my diabetic control. No one including my doctors could tell me what to do about it. I returned to Guys Hospital where I qualified and redid the Bio chemistry courses I had done 40 years before. Facts:
1. Eating fat, cannot make you fat. It provides very important calories and also fat soluble vitamins A D E and K. The calories are completely different from the calories contained in all the different carbohydrates, sugar, starches and green vegetables. Protein calories are different again. It really is high time that all the experts started differentiating the different calories.
2. In spite of what Dr Ancell Keys persuaded the world, about 50 years ago, about fat's causing heart disease It is now known that high quality, grass fed cattle produce excellent health giving Saturated fats and indeed milk. Free range chickens ducks etc excellent and very necessary eggs.

The problem is with sugar. All carbohydrates are sugar. Professor Yudkin at University Collage Hospital wrote a book at the same time as Keys did his thing, saying just that. Another thought about fat. Breast milk contains more than 50% saturated fat????

 

[1andylock]

Of course if the idea for FAT and grease is abhorrent to you then dont eat that either.
I cant abide it myself then again i never could.
By the way when they say high fat that does not mean loads of the stuff.
Lard sandwiches are a nono i am sure.
I personally would go for LCHi protein.
LCHP i invented a new diet..... hey and i am not Swedish.
Must be rubbish then.

 

[jack412]

a lot of diabetics can't do high protein, a large percent have kidney impairment on diagnosis of diabetes

 

[douglas99]

An interesting lecture from Prof Taylor, well worth watching

link in http://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/prof-taylor-lecture-on-reversing-type-2.65495/#post-649965

It's about 1/4 of the way in, he is suggesting protein and carbs are treated the same way by the body, and create glucose, which is stored by the body as fat. Rightly or wrongly to some, he also suggests excess calories from fat is stored by the body, hence the low calorie diet he advocates for the 8 week period.