I've been a low carb/ketogenic T2 for just over 7 years and I've reduced and kept my glucose levels for the most part between high end of normal - low end of pre-diabetic, and lost around 20 kilos. Additional benefits: no more chronic migraines, hay fever, or long term brain fog. I'm fat/keto adapted rather than continuously in ketosis, so I'm burning both short term carby fuel and long term sustainable fatty fuel from both dietary and stored fat. I don't find my diet at all restrictive, and I rarely feel hungry and skip meals if i don't want to eat.
Initially i had no real problems other than some resentment that I should no longer eat a few favourite food, but as I've always eaten normal full fat food, it was quite an easy change to make. I started off just by cutting right down first on high sugar foods, and then on high carb stuff. When I knew a bit more, I used the Atkins diet induction phase of around 20-25g carbs daily for a few weeks to ensure I was in ketosis. I aim to eat a maximum 50g carbs a day now, often less, sometimes more, but don't really count, just keep an eye on my glucose levels and tend to rely on the range I've set for myself rather than the actual number of carbs. And most of what i eat now has always been a large part of my diet: e.g. meat, fish. poultry, full fat dairy products, lower carb fruit & vegetables now, nuts.
Ketogenic diets date back to the 1790s when Royal Artilliary
surgeon John Rollo used them to treat T2 diabetics. I believe he
also recognised T2 as a separate health issue. Though
apparently one ingredient of
his keto diet that i don't think we'll
being eating was rancid pork!!
An obese William Banting in the 1800s used a low carb diet (as
advised by physician Dr William Harvey) to lose weight. Banting
wrote a famous booklet called
Letter on Corpulence, Addressed
to the Public recording it's success, which is still available online. Harvey had actually learned of this type of diet in the context of diabetes management from attending lectures in Paris by Claude Bernard , a French professor of physiology whose study on the glycogenic function of the liver threw light on the causation of diabetes mellitus,
As
@ziggy_w already mentioned ketogenic diets were also used
in the early 1900s for treating epilepsy. and Rebecca
Oppenheimer's low carb
Diabetic Cookery book was published in
1917, when a low carb diet was the only treatment available
before the discovery of insulin 5 years later.. Reprint is on Amazon and there's a facsimile copy to be found elsewhere
on the web.
More recently, since the 1960s, Dr Atkins and Dr Richard K Bernstein (of T1 fame) have both endorsed this style of eating, Bernstein by his own diet and by his books, and Atkins for his long term popular diet (which sadly since his death has become much more of a commericial enterprise). Volek & Phinney are also well know for their books on low carb living and exercise.
So there's a very long history of using this type of diet for to help manage diabetes.
I think there can be a big difference between the very tightly controlled therapeutic ketogenic diets for epilepsy and more lenient (diabetic) low carb/ketogenic versions, but I've come to fbelieve that a simple straightforward, dual fuel burning ketogenic state is perfectly natural, and nothing to fear long term. In it simplest form all we really need to do is reduce carbohydrates and replace them with sufficent fat to (re)set our bodies to fat burning mode. Reducing carbs will help control glucose levels and lowering fat consumption enables our bodies to burn stored fat and reduce weight. Once we are there, it's possible to eat a few more carbs, and we won't necessarily be producing ketones (a by-product of burning fat) unless we've used all the glucose from the carbs, and switched to our alternative fatty fuel.
I don't know enough about the other multitudinous restrictive variations that seem to have proliferated recently, except that it must make decisions on ketogenic diets rather confusing to say he least!
