Hi
@Type Alan - just switched from your other thread, so this is something of a continuation.
Just to break down your question (to start with, I totally agree with everything above in
@KennyA s reply) - what diet is good for fat burning? there are a couple of resources I could point you at if you were interested, but the central point of your question revolves around - what is it in our metabolic system that controls whether we store or burn fat? - and the answer is, of course - insulin.
If your insulin is high, you store fat - if it's low, you burn fat.
The kicker is that - as T2DM, we are already in a state where our insulin levels are too high too often - that's really what insulin resistance is.
Any exercise you do is a good thing in itself, but there is a good line of thought that cardio (being by definition an elevated heart rate) doesn't play as much of a role in burning fat as we may like to think - and that you would be better off doing resistance or high impact.. (Skeletal muscles work differently to heart muscle and actually store fat, so you want to do exercise that uses that fat - speeding up the heart doesn't do that by itself) but for me, I think that's all secondary, and all irrelevant if insulin is high.
Do whatever exercise makes you feel good doing it - we all have our preferences; but prioritise lowering insulin, because then you will be more likely to burning fat all the time.
How do you do that? live in a way that reduces the need for elevated insulin - eat foods that produce low insulin response (protein and fat together, as much as possible, reduce sugars and starches) and leave you feeling full so that you have longer periods of not eating. Get better sleep (sleep deprivation is much more important to this than is widely recognised) - and do whatever makes sense to you to reduce stress (and not to trivialise; treat it as something you just need to put your will to, like the treadmill, there are things you can do, exercise being one of them of course).
I did the "limit calories and do more cardio exercise" thing - for 3 hard years, it was a constant struggle, but I did lose 20kg over those 3 years... and was then diagnosed as diabetic.
I've removed the scale, because it's only relevant to me, but this is a long time, with some plateaus and bounce backs... and you can see the timeline. This was a grinding, consistent effort of weighing each ingredient, scanning every meal, feeling hungry all the time...
I gained it all back during a period of taking insulin, but when I was re-diagnosed as Type 2 and took everything I've just written above seriously, this happend:
This is the same scale - and the same overall loss - but it's like my body just dropped to ideal weight and stayed there.
Clearly - I just cannot say anything other than this happened to me - but the one thing I've focused on is insulin - I don't do more excercise, I don't measure anything (food based, clearly, I take measurements daily) and I eat till I'm full. The early period, I was fasting every other day, so some may consider that extreme - I considered it necessary to reverse insulin resistance.
But generally, now, I just ask - will this raise insulin?
If yes, I don't eat it.
For anyone looking at the lower graph, and thinking - yes but it looks like you are starting to creep up again - that's muscle gain. - if I plot just fat loss (again, redacting the amount):
You can see that the drop - over the same period, is even steeper and flatter after the drop. All the spikes in the graph are fasting days.
