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How many carbs per day

Carole12

Active Member
Messages
42
Hi,

My HbA1c test came back rather high at 47mmol. NHS doctor said ‘it’s stable’. I seriously would have expected some help in the form of diet and advice but nothing forthcoming. I guess they don’t consider preventative treatment? Very disappointed. My cholesterol is also up from 4.9 to 5.5.
I’m not really surprised as I’ve put on 3kg in the last few weeks and have been consuming very wrong foods.

I have taken it upon myself therefore to cut way down on carbs, sugar, saturated fats etc. I’ve changed my eating plan completely, and am not eating any refined foods. I prefer making my own wholemeal loaf with no sugar and using olive oil as fats. However, I would like to know how many carbs per day I need to be looking at. At the moment I am sticking to around 112 carbs but I seem to be going over the top to around 128 some days. I have absolutely no idea at all how many carbs I should be having per day in order to get my HbA1c test lowered. Calories I am looking at 1200 per day. After my main meal late afternoon which consisted of lentils, sweetcorn, mushrooms, chicken breast, carrots and spinach… almost 3 hours later my glucose blood reading was 7.8 which I thought rather high considering the type of meal I’d had.

Any advice would be welcome. Thankyou.
 
It a difficult question to answer because we are all different, I very much doubt that I would be able to keep my glucose levels in the non diabetic range if I had as many carbs as you.
But obviously I'm not you, we have different metabolisms, different levels of insulin resistance, different activities, and so on.
We all have to work out how many carbs we can incorporate into our diets without them causing raised blood sugar.
The best way to do that is to use your meter,
Carole12 said:
lentils, sweetcorn, mushrooms, chicken breast, carrots and spinach… almost 3 hours later my glucose blood reading was 7.8 which I thought rather high
Click to expand...
Your meter has already shown you that maybe this meal needs looking at, lentils are somewhere around 20% carbs , sweetcorn is also around 20% carbs, carrots not quite so carby at 10% but it depends how big a portion you had.
You could try the same meal without the lentils and corn, add more chicken and mushrooms and test it again to see the difference.
When you test , you need to check your level just before you eat then again 2hrs later. It is the difference between the two tests that tells you what that meal has done to your levels.
If the 2nd test is no more than 2mmol above your pre meal results then that meal was acceptable. If on the other hand the difference is more than 2mmol it means that there were more carbs in that meal than you can deal with
If you keep a record of your results alongside a food diary it will soon become obvious what you need to cut out or have less of.
 
@Carole12. Good on you for going the lowering carb route to arrest a possible development to type two. And for coming to this Forum for support!

May I suggest, as part of your deep dive into the huge world of nutritional advice and diabetes prevention, a couple of books. 'The Diabetes Code' by Jason Fung, and Nina Teicholz's 'The Big Fat Surprise'.

The Teicholz book is excellent about opening you up to the world of the saturated fat controversy, from a practical standpoint, ie what you are eating.
 
 
Your homemade bread sounds wonderful but bread is one of the biggest culprits in causing raised blood sugar. It's right up there with pasta, rice and spuds as the main things we usually have to avoid.
I'm afraid leaving the sugar out of the recipe will make very little difference to the carb count of your loaf.
Wholemeal flour is about 70g of carbs per 100g , a spoonful of sugar is 4g of carbs, it is the flour that will raise your levels, not so much the sugar added in the baking process.
The other thing you have probably read or been told is that wholemeal/brown, bread, pasta, rice is better for your blood sugar.
Unfortunately your body can't see the colour of things, it only sees the carbs, yes the wholemeal stuff takes longer to digest, but the sugar from those carbs will eventually get into your blood and can often keep your levels elevated for longer.
 
There are things you could add into the bread to reduce the impact - I use wheat gluten rather than all flour, add in chopped seeds psyllium flour coconut and almond flour - anything to keep the bulk but lower the carbs. The dough is rather 'tender' and collapses in a bread maker, so I mix and allow to rise and then knead by hand and place in the tins to bake in the oven when it is the right volume.
Personally I do not bother about saturated fats, cholesterol, or cholesterol containing foods, as I can't find any statistics which show that there is any advantage to women my age. There is a teeny suggestion of living longer if in the highish range so I'll take that as no advantage to lowering cholesterol or even trying to.
A meter was really useful in showing how to get my blood glucose into the normal range, and it also showed that I can get more carbs from legumes than expected - almost double, so I eat small amounts of peas and beans unless still in the pods.
 
Thankyou for this info. I am hoping that by lowering the HbA1c this will lower the cholesterol as both were higher at the time time. Your bread recipe sounds good. I will take a look along with some recipes. Thankyou.
 
One of the things I wish someone had told me a long time before I was diagnosed would have been to "forget everything you think you know about healthy eating".

Don't lose sight of what this is for - you're reducing carbs to lower your BG and subsequently you may lose bodyfat. The level of carb intake you're aiming for is the level where that happens - you could go very low, but that might be unnecessary. The problem is that each of us is different, and I don't think it's really possible to predict what your reduction "should" be.


The meal you describe has quite a lot of carb in it - I say this as someone who aims for around 20g/day. For me, the lentils and sweetcorn, are off limits and I don't have carrot in any quantity. 7.8 doesn't seem that high for that sort of meal. If you are eating bread, you are eating probably way more carb than you realise. Flour is about as carby as you get and using olive oil and no sugar won't affect that at all.


I have found counting calories to be unnecessary. Reducing carb intake substantially, however, forces the body to obtain the small amount of glucose it needs from elsewhere, and what you are aiming for is the "elsewhere" to be from your bloodstream and also from metabolising bodyfat, which is where surplus glucose was stored in the first place. The body can also break down protein to produce glucose, and there is also a short term supply in the liver - this is an oversimplification but low carb doesn't really have anything to do with "calories" at all.

Most (80% or so) of the cholesterol in your body is made by your body. Cholesterol in food accounts for only a small proportion of the total. There is good evidence (see the HUNT study in 2012 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3303886/) "...that clinical and public health recommendations regarding the ‘dangers’ of cholesterol should be revised. This is especially true for women, for whom moderately elevated cholesterol (by current standards) may prove to be not only harmless but even beneficial."
 
Thankyou so much for this information. I have found all of my replies most helpful. Today I will be starting ‘afresh’ with the food intake and the carbs! Thankyou once again.

I’ve looked back in my notes from 2018 from this forum and can see that even porridge oats (even as little as 20g) spikes my blood sugar too much. I had completely forgotten that this was a no go for me. I also took note that I was told I need not go for ‘low fat’ or ‘0 fat’ dairy, as in Greek yoghurt, milk, butter, cheese etc etc and am seriously thinking that by lowering my HbA1c, my cholesterol should drop back to where it was at 4.9.
 
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