Fatty liver

It is the creation of visceral fat that binds with your liver that causes a condition called NAFL, a non alcoholic fatty liver!

By getting your body to lose the excess weight by losing the visceral fat, changing to a low carb diet can and has done this! Reduce your carbs, reduce your plate size and increase your exercise if you can.

This is a layman's description, your GP would give you a better description.

It depends if being overweight caused the fatty liver, damage to pancreas and common bile duct can cause fatty liver, it can become cirrhosisic. Liver dumps are not a good thing either, it means you are having a hypo and your body will not have any back up if you don't get out of hypo.
Blood sugar raising to 6/7 doesn't sound like a liver dump in my experience, lots of people would be happy waking up to that reading

satkins said:

I'm type 2 and have a fatty liver. I quite often suffer from a morning sugar dump which raises my sugars in to the mid 6's to mid 7's. Its been a few months now on metformin and trying to be as low carb as possible. That doesn't always work and I've fallen off the wagon a few times. What I'm wondering is if that liver dump is bad or good. I think it isn't all bad as that should be getting rid of all that stored up sugar and make my liver not so fatty. Right?

Stephen

Click to expand...

Type 2 diabetes is bascially uncontrolled release of glucose from the liver. So this is just bascially a signal that you have more healing to do, in other words weightloss.

Read this article by an nephrologist specialising in treating type 2 diabetes. It is one of the most illuminating articles I have read concerning the topic.

https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/dawn-phenomenon-t2d-8/

If you were to do a 4 day fast like Michael Mosley did in this documentary , you would see your sugars getting better for each sucsessive days, as your liver was depleted of glycogen. Since diabetics are advised to eat breakfast, this morning dump is usually concealed, but if you fast you would notice it. 4 days of fasting however, removes the glucose from everywhere and you get results like Michael Mosley did at 31.24 in this video . His sugars got from diabetic to non-diabetic in 4 days of fasting!

@satkins - Hi. I too have NAFLD, have had a Fibroscan, got results a few days ago when I saw a Liver Specialist, but waiting to have an Ultrasound Scan - May have to have a Liver Biopsy yet?

Hi. Note that it is normal for the liver to dump glycogen (glucose) in the early hours to prepare you for the day. This is higher than the normal background glycogen output and different from a hypo recovery dump. A low-carb diet will help the body stop storing carbs as fat and if low enough will force the body to burn fat (ketosis). Metformin helps with this.

satkins said:

Thanks for the links and videos. I have gone to a mostly LCHF diet but need to work on the fats a little. My a1c levels have dropped from 7.4 to 5.5 in three months and dropped almost 2 stones of weight so it is working. I was just curious about by having a fatty liver and letting it dump lots of it's stored up sugar is a good thing in that it wouldn't be so fatty. The mid 6's to 7's isn't bad by any means and I think my slip of diet over a couple of weeks (eating fast food) has not helped my numbers. Just boggles the mind how much a big mac will raise your BG. From a low 5 to 11 or 12.

Click to expand...

Hi @satkins, I've been pondering the same question for a while, (as in the bold text), and would be interested to know if anyone can throw any light on this. I've looked around the main DCUK site, and others, but can only find comment about reducing or stopping the "dump", e.g. by having a small snack late at night. Does anyone know how else the liver (and pancreas, I guess) gets rid of any fat stores, without having to do a four-day, or 5:2 fasting?

Hi @Daibell, sorry, forgot to mention. I understand about the morning dump to prepare for the day, but I'm thinking about the excess fat that some people (me) have around the liver and/or pancreas. Is it just a matter of time doing the low carb diet, coz I've been lower carb for some ten weeks or so now, and still seem to have high-ish stores (according to my analyser scales). Many thanks for your info above, by the way.

Salvia said:

Hi @satkins, I've been pondering the same question for a while, (as in the bold text), and would be interested to know if anyone can throw any light on this. I've looked around the main DCUK site, and others, but can only find comment about reducing or stopping the "dump", e.g. by having a small snack late at night. Does anyone know how else the liver (and pancreas, I guess) gets rid of any fat stores, without having to do a four-day, or 5:2 fasting?

Hi @Daibell, sorry, forgot to mention. I understand about the morning dump to prepare for the day, but I'm thinking about the excess fat that some people (me) have around the liver and/or pancreas. Is it just a matter of time doing the low carb diet, coz I've been lower carb for some ten weeks or so now, and still seem to have high-ish stores (according to my analyser scales). Many thanks for your info above, by the way.

Click to expand...

Good Questions here. Our bodies have two basic mechanisms for energy storage. The primary one is the storage of blood glucose into body cells under control of insulin and adrenalin. This storage stores glucose and water in most body cells apart from brain cells and nerve tissue, so it occurs all over our body. if you use an LC type diet, then reducing carbs dirctly reduces this storage and hence loses weight (in theory at least).

The second method of storage uses fat which gets stored in the adipose tissue that is situated around our tummy area (and liver), and it is this fat that i think you are talking about. This fat is not so easy to shift. I have reduced my own girth from 38" to less than 32" using the LCHF diet, and this uses ketosis (fat burning mode) to burn off this type of fat. As ketosis depletes fat stores, and liver dumps also deplete these stores, then the body starts burning fat directly rather than storing it, so reducing the liver dumps. (in theory again) However, the liver dump is a protection mechanism against hypo's, so it is not advisable to reduce too much, so liver dumps should continue.

The better way to deal with Liver Dump is to intervene before it gets triggered. The liver dump happens when the body detects a prolonged period with low glucose levels and thinks starvation is about to happen. So people take bedtime carb snacks, eat protein at night, or try to reduce the time between the last meal of the day, and breakfast. Also breakfast could have some carb content to raise the bgl slightly so as to avert the trigger. its all about fooling the body into believing that food is on the way. A glass of milk may be all that is required.

Thanks so much @Oldvatr for this very clear and full explanation. Following LCHF I've reduced by about 20lbs so far, but then have come to a full stop (apparently) for the past 2-3 weeks. I had wondered whether this was because my numbers are just not low enough. Also, I'd been thinking that I should be working towards a diet combo that would stop dumps from happening, but clearly that's wrong. I shall stop worrying about the morning "dumps" and just keep doing what I'm doing, and work towards better numbers in time (and perhaps lose another 7-10lbs.)

Cheers,
Sal

Salvia said:

Thanks so much @Oldvatr for this very clear and full explanation. Following LCHF I've reduced by about 20lbs so far, but then have come to a full stop (apparently) for the past 2-3 weeks. I had wondered whether this was because my numbers are just not low enough. Also, I'd been thinking that I should be working towards a diet combo that would stop dumps from happening, but clearly that's wrong. I shall stop worrying about the morning "dumps" and just keep doing what I'm doing, and work towards better numbers in time (and perhaps lose another 7-10lbs.)

Cheers,
Sal

Click to expand...

Hi, Sal. You are using LCHF, but your carb intake may still be too high. It is an individual thing, but I find that if i have 50 g of carbs then i do not get into ketosis, but I do when I drop to 30g, Otheres report needing to drop to 20g or below to get the full effect of the diet. I have posted a graph of my own Personal Journey in the Success Stories section (search for posts under Oldvatr) and this shows the dramatic drop in weight I had when I actually managed to go keto after I too started to plateau. For me I did not want to drop too much, so I took steps to raise it back up.

I found that because of my meds, i was getting low bgl to the point of having minor hypo's. Not a major problem, but i was having to eat extra carbs to compensate, and this was bouncing me around. I reduced one of my meds, and then it settled one day, and now I have quite stable and lowish readings

Thanks again, @Oldvatr; on reflection, I suspect that maybe my carbs might be too high - not from food necessarily, but from milk in my tea and coffee. I worked my food out to be around 20-25g carbs, but don't keep track of how much milk I'm having. I use skimmed milk, though I tried going back to full cream milk but I find it is too 'sweet'-tasting, so I'm sticking with the skimmed. Guess I shall have to learn to love black tea, or green, or something similar. I put on a load of weight - mainly coz I followed the advice from my GP about wholemeal bread, brown rice, and lots of beans/legumes - so I'm anxious to get that excess off again. I'll go take a look at your success story and see what I can learn from that, hopefully to get the weight loss moving again

Hi Satkins

After I transioned off the Newcastle diet my 'morning phenomenon' returned with a vengeance. It took till lunchtime to get my BGL's to settle.
To make a long story short, I switched to Metformin ER 500mg at night, ate relatively few carbs for dinner and had a small snack (cheese or nuts) before bed. I also eat a low carb/high protein bread for breakfast. This helped to get things to acceptable levels. Not sure of the whats and whys, but suspect that as the ER takes 3-4 hours to peak and has a much longer half-life it has more of an effect in the morning.
Don't be discouraged if you have the occasional trip with your eating (I'm 68 and an expert lifetime practitioner of binge eating) you do improve with practice - I have found mindfulness to be very helpful.
Best of luck, you can be proud of yourself as you have some really impressive runs on the board.