Good Sugar Bad Sugar

How many calories are you typically eating a day ?

If you have hyperinsulinemia which a high percentage of type 2's do have, then that can make it frustratingly difficult to lose weight even with low carb. The good news is that strict low carb will help bring your insulin levels down to normal. I too have a very hard time but it is coming off sloooooowly. Calories do count as well. You don't need to go super low calorie but it does have to be reasonable. You might also want to look at your protein intake as too much protein will be converted to glucose by your liver.

Is there really such a thing as "good" sugars?!?

kazzers said:

I am wondering if maybe I am eating TOO much cream, cheese etc ?

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As I'm a person who has needed to lose weight for quite some time, despite doing the lower calories and more exercise. Lowering my carbs was the way I lost weight, but when I stopped losing my GP said I needed to eat more and the quickest way was to eat more cheese and yoghurt.BIG MISTAKE! I gained 2 stone despite cutting back as soon as I saw the numbers going up.

I've seen it written that you don't have to watch calories, but I don't think that works for most people. You can use the Harris Benedict formula to calculate what you should be eating, and most diet organisations suggest taking 500 from that to allow a one or two pound weight loss per week, that's the theory, reality is slightly different for some.

Dieting is not an exact science and unfortunately we can follow the rules, not cheat, and still go nowhere, although crucial thing is not to give up. Once you give in that's when the weight returns.

The Kreb cycle, which broadly speaking (because I'm not going to pretend I know what it is in any detail) is a series of chemical reactions which converts carbs/proteins/fats to energy for muscles to use. If any of those chemical reactions isn't working properly for some reason, who knows what goes on?

The worst combination in the history of diabetes is carbs and fats together. How many carbs per day are you eating? Many people cannot really lose unless they go right down to 20 or so that all come from above ground veg. Many folks think 100 grams a day is low but if you up your fats with that many carbs you are pretty much guaranteed to gain weight.

kazzers said:

Eating the cream and cheese feels 'wrong'

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If it feels wrong, then don't eat it. Some people take a while of adjusting before they can tolerate extra fat. I mostly just stick with the fat that occurs naturally in foods, choose fattier cuts of meat, put butter/olive oil on veggies, etc. I'm not a fan of mega amounts of fat just because the diet says "high fat". The "high" fat is just as a proportion of total calories, not an exhortation to swallow buckets of the stuff

You may also be a person who doesn't tolerate large amounts of dairy. Try getting extra fat from things like olives and avocado and see how you feel. There's no set "way" to do this diet - we each have to adapt it for our personal tastes.

I eat meat, poultry, eggs, cheese, butter, creme freche (0 carb) , salad, steamed veggies (mostly cauliflower, broccoli, green beans, wax beans, bean sprouts, onions, mushrooms) nuts, low carb salad dressing, mayo (0 carb). Very occasionally some low carb baking in small quantities.
I rarely get to bed before 4 or 5 in the morning, a legacy of many years graveyard shift. I eat dinner with my family but it is usually my breakfast.

Meal 1 : Big pork chop baked with a bit of gluten free soy sauce and sprinkled with roasted garlic and red pepper spice (0-1 grams)
Steamed broccoli with generous amount of butter (5-6 grams)

meal 2 : Huge salad with one of ham, chicken, tuna, hard boiled egg, bacon, etc. Low carb full fat dressing. (5-6 grams)

before bed snack : Macadamia nuts 1/4 cup (4 grams), or gluten and sugar free pepperoni (0 grams), or a couple of eggs (1 gram)

That is a total of 17 grams for the day. I have no idea of the calories but it is not that high. If you cut the carbs down this low you just don't get as hungry.

I do not eat bread, grains, fruit, rice, potatoes, root veggies, peas, corn, or sugar. It has taken me 6 months to lose just over 30 pounds and I have a ways to go but I have lost it. My A1c has gone from 10.4 to 5.8 in the same time.

I would like to point out as well that I do not go crazy on the fat. Just some butter on my veg and full fat salad dressing.

@kazzers - you might find the following nutritional calculator useful - you tell it your age, height, current weight, your target carbs in grams (and how long you've been eating that amount), how much weight you want to lose per week, and it will give you the amount of protein and fat you need to eat to achieve the goal. I used the calculator quite a lot in the early days of doing LCHF so that I could fine tune what I was doing.

http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/DietMakeupCalc.php

I agree with chalup.

My standard carb intake is veg (usually something like salad leaves, coleslaw, green beans, courgette, broccoli, aubergine, tomatoes, cauliflower, mushrooms, peppers, mangetouts, sugarsnaps...) with meat, fish, eggs, cheese. I add cream to hot drinks if appropriate, and about twice a week I have berries and cream.

That is consistently 20g carbs or less a day, and is filling and enjoyable.

However, adding in any processed or 'modern' eating habits will scupper the carb target instantly, and halt weight loss just as fast.

I find that including any grain (even a slice of toast, or a tablespoon of rice) will cause problems.

I also need to drink a lot of water, and take steady exercise (dog walking daily) or my weight won't shift.

It is, I believe, down to the insulin resistance. We each of us have different amounts of insulin resistance, and our bodies respond to the insulin resistance in different ways. For me, and I think for many people who find it very difficult to lose weight, if we have enough carbohydrate in our diet (and for me that is more than 20 g carb a day), then our insulin resistance increases. So we have to produce more insulin to overcome that insulin resistance. Our bodies have to work very hard to do this, and have to produce far more insulin that a normal person would, even a 'normal' T2 diabetic.

So then we have all this insulin floating around. And one of the functions of insulin is to grab every bit of blood glucose that it can, and tuck it away as fat in the cells.

Consequently, even though people may low carb at 40-150g carbs a day, they are still using masses of insulin, and their body is still fighting to use that insulin to put the glucose away as fat.

You can test to see if this theory applies to you by Fasting or doing a 3 day Fat Fast.

OR alternatively dropping your carb intake to 10-20 g a day for a couple of weeks, and seeing what happens. You do need to do it for long enough to use up any glycogen reserves (several days) BEFORE you start seeing the weight loss benefits though.

There is an interesting section in the Voleck and Phinney 'Art of Low Carb Living' book where they discuss this, and state very clearly that for some people (usually but not always women, often middle aged, and often with additional health issues and hormone issues) can only lose weight on regimes of 20g or less carbs a day. And the unfortunate detail that made me very miserable to read, was that the more diets people have been on, and the more 'broken' their metabolism has been by those diets, the more likely it is that these people will have to stay on the 20g regime for a long time. Possibly indefinitely. In order to see the same benefits that other people get from 80-130g carbs a day. Even then, weight loss can be very slow.

Some of us even need to practice intermittent fasting to get the carbs low enough.

I seem to be one of these select few, and it isn't a club that I particularly enjoy being in. But my experiences seem to back up everything that V&P have said.

However - and this is a definite benefit from this 'club membership' - IF you get your carb intake low enough, then your insulin resistance drops, and your glycogen stores are used up, and you are not 'messed up' by insulin resistance, then yes, YOU CAN eat additional fat, and not gain weight.

I have tested this repeatedly, and can eat huge amounts of fat and not gain weight, provided my carbs are low enough.

kazzers said:

I agree about the information I read about NOT needing to count calories on low carb and to eat more fat :-( I have been trying that but I have almost seen the fat going on . This is why I am despairing now. As I said the blood sugar readings are down but the weight is going nowhere. It's good to hear someone say that eating more fat is NOT the answer. Thanks for everyone's comments , it looks as If I can't get away without calorie counting , I'll read the book and then decide what I need to do next . Thanks again

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I hope you are successful, but please bare in mind that dieting is much more complicated than eat less and exercise more. I've actually gone to the trouble of having my Resting Metabolic Rate measured in a BodPod at the University of Westminster in London and it agrees with the Harris Benedict formula. I eat nowhere near the 2300 cals per day it suggests and I have months and months of food diary which show my daily calorie intake is about 1200 or less and carbs less than 100 gms. So my HbA1c s are good, just the weight not shifting.

All the best.

DavidGrahamJones said:

I hope you are successful, but please bare in mind that dieting is much more complicated than eat less and exercise more. I've actually gone to the trouble of having my Resting Metabolic Rate measured in a BodPod at the University of Westminster in London and it agrees with the Harris Benedict formula. I eat nowhere near the 2300 cals per day it suggests and I have months and months of food diary which show my daily calorie intake is about 1200 or less and carbs less than 100 gms. So my HbA1c s are good, just the weight not shifting.

All the best.

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I know that you say that when you eat fat you gain weight but 100g of carbs a day is still quite a lot. Check out what @Brunneria has written above . I think I am in a similar position to her even though male and find that a v low carb diet and regular fasting has helped me to loose a whole lot of weight in the past year since diagnosis. I follow DR Fung who claims that calorie restriction doesn't work and works to slow your metabolism to work on the calories you do take in. Thus after a while even restricting calories stop working. This seems to me to make huge amount of sense and explains why I ave always regained all the weight and more after stopping the diet. LCHF tfor me has led to the longest period of weight loss I have ever experienced I am still loosing after 12 months of this way of eating and I still have a couple of stone to go before I become simply "overweight" rather than "obese".

bulkbiker said:

I know that you say that when you eat fat you gain weight but 100g of carbs a day is still quite a lot.

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It might be too much for some but it's at that level that my BG levels are good. That's about 400 calories.
The problem for me is this constant juggling to see what works and no real success. Obviously increasing my fat intake was completely stupid because I just gained weight. I've had a c-pep test done that shows I produce low end of normal amounts of insulin. Only trouble is that that was at one point in time, not easy to see what's happening all the time.
One question I have though, how do people calculate their carb intake. I weigh everything I eat, bung it into my "weight by date" software and out comes how many carbs, much closer to 80gms a day but I was being generous and rounding up. That's by eating peppers, onions, tomatoes, courgettes, broccoli, cauliflower, aubergine, mushrooms, mangetout, sugarsnaps, with meat or fish. Eggs a treat on Saturday, bacon on Sunday. So not that different to Brunneria.
I've also had blood and urine tests to show that my body is in a state of ketosis and that I don't metabolise fats very well. I also have a CoQ10 deficiency as well as B12.
Never straight forward is it? I'm just confused!