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Day 1 on low carb no sugar - amazing results!

S

swttbsy5

Well-Known Member
Messages
48
Location
Australia
Type of diabetes
Reactive hypoglycemia
Treatment type
Diet only
This is my first post. Very happy to be here! I've had RH for 20+ years as far as I know. I am just trying the low carb diet as of today and the results are instant. The preceeding few days were swings from high 6's and 7's to low 3's with really bad hypo symptoms and today, I've stuck strictly (for the first time) to almost no carbs and I've been at 4.8 pretty much all day with no noticeable symptoms. I don't have diabetes btw. It's shocking how well this is working for me. When I did a GTT a few years back I got down to 2.1 after 2 hours. I've tried to follow the standard advice of many meals per day with complex carbs etc. and it just didn't work . I've been misdiagnosed for many years with all sorts of various conditions and disorders and have been lots of drugs that have not done anything but cause terrible side effects or at best, nothing.

I am in the process of booking in with a dietician to work out how to safely change my diet. I seriously can't believe how well this has worked for me today. I didn't expect it at all.

I'm interested in the fasting idea but don't know much about it. The idea of 2 or 3 meals per day also sounds great to me compared with the alternatives which haven't worked for me anyway. I'm afraid to eat anything right now as today has been so good and I don't want to cause a hypo.

I've been reading the threads on here all day and I relate to a lot of what I'm reading. Thanks for sharing everyone.
 

oh, WELL DONE!!!

i totally agree - when the results are so positive, and so quickly achieved, it is incredibly liberating - and motivating.

No idea what your preferred eating style is? But you may well find the www.dietdoctor.com website very helpful.
Huge numbers of very low carb recipes to choose from, and even if you don’t cook yourself, the menus and recipes give a fantastic glimpse into the interesting and nutritious variety of food available when living very low carb.

I second the caution re the dietician. Some are fab. Some are still fixated on ‘healthy carbs’ and ‘we need carbs for energy’, so just remember where 20 years of eating carbs endlessly got you...
 
Hi, and welcome to our forum.
I'll add my wariness to a dieticians advice, having been advised for over ten years that I needed to eat a balanced low GI diet. This was never going to work but I didn't know it till I found this website.
It is a great feeling when realisation dawns and you at last have found something that you actually works for us!
In fact, sometimes not eating is even better, if you can.

If you have read the threads in our forum, you don't need me to repeat that doing certain things will help through the initial stages of going low carb and the pitfalls that are that, including everything you have been told all your life about so called healthy eating! We are different and we need a different approach to what is happening when we eat carbs.
I take it you have a glucometer, so the next step is a food diary and planning how to make sure, you don't eat food that may have hidden carbs. And plan your next few days, and getting the testing right.
You will find a food diary so helpful and will surprise you,!

Best of luck. If you are unsure of how to proceed, keep asking, knowledge is key.

Best wishes
 
Thanks for the replies. Yes I have a glocometer and I'm using an app for a food diary. Planning to do today the same thing today that I did yesterday. My blood glucose level never dropped below 4.5 all day and never went above 5.1. I had no hypo symptoms yesterday at all. It was a very good day! We'll see what the dietician says. It's going to be hard to ignore the graph from my glucometer.
 
Day 2 breakfast I added lettuce, cucumber and grape tomatoes to what I had yesterday (fried egg and cheese slice). Made me crash but may have also been the fibre suplement - Metamucil. So depressing I thought it would be ok. My level only went down to 4.3 but I feel absolutely terrible with all the usual symptoms. This was after a 13 hour fast overnight. Also my finger tips are getting destroyed from all the testing.
 
I ate some small tomatoes recently not realizing how high in sugar they are. They pushed my BG level quite high. Tomatoes are botanically fruit, and the small ones have been bred to be high in sugar. I can eat a normal salad one, but these little ones were going off so I sloshed on some vinegar and ate them all - not a good idea.
 
Re your fingers, use the sides not the middle of the pad and certainly not the very tips. Make sure your hands are warm. Windmill your arms around a bit first or massage the sacrificial finger from palm to tip a few times. All these things also mean if you make sure your lancet is set to the lowest depth that will get a drop of blood out of that finger (mine vary a lot) you’ll do less damage. Rotate through the sites you use too so they get chance to heal. Some people avoid certain fingers that are just too tender.

Ps. I’ve only ever used a fastclix device as the single stab type ones look way too fiddly to fit and it’s easy to adjust.
 

Your new to this, good days and bad days, so don't beat yourself up too much, have a look on the leaflet for the fibre supplement, this could be hidden carbs or manufacturing sugars. It could be portion size. Sometimes low carb is too much, maybe, it might be what you are drinking, what is in your tea or coffee!
Until you test them separately. But, again, it might just be an off day, were no matter what you do, you don't feel right, it's only a couple of days in.
Just thought, I've remembered that some of us do get what is known as carb flu. This is when your body is still adapting to low carb and your brain is missing the amount of carbs you usually have and the symptoms are the same as a hypo or false hypo.
Your brain is craving more glucose from carbs. You have to ride it out! Be strong, you have come too far to go back to what didn't work!
When I was finger pricing lots and lots, I used my left hand alternative fingers, alternative sides, you can use your arm, it doesn't have to be your finger tips.

Keep battling, keep asking. Keep safe.

Best wishes
 
Thanks. I managed to get through the rest of the day without another hypo. After more research, yeah the fibre supplement is bad and combined with a few carbs in the cucumber and grape tomatoes it must have been too much. Lesson learned and try again today. I'm attempting the 16:8 intermittent fasting routine today but easing into it with just a delayed breakfast. Also will try plain psyllium husk as a fibre supplement which is apparently keto friendly. Expanding finger prick sites to the other hand and other sides is working too. Thanks again for the encouragement!
 
No worries, learning is so important!
Keep safe
 
The dietician can see the BGL results and is surprised but still wants me to try testing low gi carbs. I've tested a few things and I spiked and crashed. When I stay very low carb the BGL does not move around much and I feel better. I'm adapting to the change in diet although there's been a few ups and downs. I'm going back to the endo. It's been 2 years since I was diagnosed with idiopathic reactive hypoglycemia. Seems like for the first time it's getting under control. I used to treat a hypo with jelly beans, a lot. Now I realise that even a glass of milk causes a rapid spike and crash.
 

They just don't get it!
Maybe if what you had, was called 'carbohydrate intolerance syndrome' the medical dietary advice would be completely different!
Glad you have discovered that being in or near normal blood levels is so beneficial to you and your health.
I had the keep trying complex low GI carbs, it doesn't matter, it's just not worth it!

Are you finding anything surprising about food you can tolerate or what you have to avoid?


Keep safe
 
Yes! I can eat plain Greek yogurt with a few raspberries or blackberries with no change to BGL but if I eat 1 single strawberry there's a spike and then a crash. Also the reaction in the morning is different to later in the day. Strangely I am extremely sensitive in the morning to any carbs. Later in the day I can tolerate yoghurt with a few berries or a handful of cashews just fine but in the morning that same combination will produce a spike. A single egg with 1 piece of full fat cheese and 1/4 avocado in the morning and there's no issue. I'm slowly figuring it out. I can't have any milk. Although a small glass of milk does seem a good treatment for a hypo. Much better than jelly beans anyway!
Also, the cycle of spikes and crashes seems to build up slowly. The first spike after a few days of stability does not produce a massive crash but then it seems to set up a process where the lows creep down lower and lower until I eventually start to feel really bad. I also get symptoms sometimes when the BGL isn't even very low. When it hovers around 4.7 - 4.9 I'm fine but lower down towards 4.2 I'm starting to feel bad. In the morning it easily will go down to 3.1 and that's when the symptoms are really bad. When I did a glucose tolerance test it went down to 2.1, then I walked home. That was the worst hypo ever. Usually a morning hypo is much worse than later in the day but a morning hypo sets up a day of cycling up and down and feeling terrible.
 

many of your discoveries match my experiences - almost exactly. the milk
The escalation of instability after a period of stability.
How are you with gluten?

my bgs reach their most stable after 2-3 weeks of an utterly gluten free existence, then deteriorate again with even the slightest glutening.
 
You are so lucky to have taken such a health-wise decision. Yet, I think you need to proceed gradually to allow your body time to re-adapt to the diet change. Depending on your diet (carnivore, vegetarian, Keto or LCHF) you need to be alert on your electrolyte balance, sufficient amount of vitamins, protein, dietary fiber, and fats. We have all gone through a process of trial and error, so you'll need to experiment with your menus to see what works well for you; our bodies react differently to macro-nutrients. Good luck.
 
I don't know about gluten. Not sure if I'm eating any or not at this point.
 
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