How to gain weight?

Hi @Mal1978

I've moved your post to its own thread so it doesn't get missed.

I lost a lot of weight before diagnosis (it was the weight loss which made me realise something wasnt right). It took me a while to get back to a normal weight, but I did see an improvement after a couple of weeks. I ate plenty of carbs. Luckily I was taught carb-counting on diagnosis and had the help of a dietician to plan my diet and insulin doses to start with.

Do you count carbs? Have you been shown how to adjust your insulin according to the carbs in your meals, or are you on set doses of carbs?

For me, eating extra carbs and making sure I maximise each meal and snack (that is, concentrate on eating well) helped me put back the weight and maintain it.

I'm going to tag @TorqPenderloin for you as he knows more about the gym, etc

Mal1978 said:

@azure I've been told how to inject and tests bloods that's it, I'm eager to find out about carb counting and adjusting my insulin asap, my nurse told mento just eat if I'm feeling hungry and we will adjust the insulin next she sees me if we need to.

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This is a pet peeve of mine so I'd better not rant too much : D But carb counting is key to control of Type 1. I don't know if the reason they don't teach it on diagnosis now is because of cost or for another reason. It's not hard to learn. The basic idea is that we each need a certain amount of insulin to cover a certain amount of carbs, so if you know how many carbs you're about to eat, you can calculate a suitable insulin dose. That gives better control and more flexibility with eating.

There are online carb counting courses, eg

http://www.bdec-e-learning.com

just to give you a taste of it. You could try pushing your nurse for more information, or ask to see a dietician maybe.

In the meantime, recording exactly what you eat and your blood sugars before and two hours after will give the nurse information, and be useful to you too as you go along.

I know nothing about the weight gainer or what it contains, but if it was high in carbs it could put your blood sugar up. Again, best to check with your nurse. Maybe you could use your gym regime as leverage to,push for more education about carbs and insulin ratios?

@Mal1978, the weight will return now you've been diagnosed and on insulin, most people who are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes will lose weight up to their diagnosis.

The picture I attached is what happened to me last year. Unfortunately, I lost about 35-40lbs until I was diagnosed. As you can see it didn't take long to gain most of the weight back, but it still has taken a lot of hard work.

In the first month following my diagnosis, I documented everything: when I woke up, went to sleep, what my blood sugar was, what I ate, what I was doing in the gym, etc. Note: I am very fortunate to have a Dexcom glucose monitor which takes blood sugar readings every five minutes. Sadly, it's incredibly difficult to get funding for them in the UK (I'm in the USA) and most are forced to pay out of pocket.

You will find that your body behaves very similar to other other people in some ways, but completely different in many other ways.

The best advice I have ever received and what I'll share with you is "Be consistent." It's not as easy as it sounds, but after a while you start to figure out how your body responds to specific events (types of exercise, types of food, sleep, stress, etc). That takes out a lot of the guesswork and makes it less frustrating.

I could write a novel on this and I know exactly what you're going through, but I'll stop there and let you ask questions and we can all do our best to answer.

Yes, that's high carb. Best to avoid that for now, I'd think. Is the nurse you're seeing one attached to your hospital or one at your GP surgery? They can vary in their levels of knowledge, if it's a GP one, I've found personally.

If your blood sugar is too high then you can't 'use' the food you eat, similar to pre-diagnosis when you were probably eating plenty but still lost weight. So as your diabetes control improves, your weight may do too.

We can't give medical advice because none of us are medical professionals, so if you're finding your nurse unhelpful, maybe tell him or her and say you want specific help as you can't function in your daily life and job without that? If you still get nowhere, ask to speak to someone else.

Regarding the food, @TorqPenderloin is right that routine and consistency makes things easier. So if you keep records, you can see what meals 'work' for you eg if a certain breakfast gives you a blood sugar of 7 two hours later, but another breakfast gives you a blood sugar of 17, then choose the first breakfast (until you have the tools you need to adjust your insulin). Same goes for other meals. If you're having pasta, weigh the cooked pasta portion you're having. Then test two hours after. If your blood sugar is ok, then next time you have pasta have that same cooked weight again. Keeping records of foods and test results will give you the knowledge you need to eventually take more control

I'm not a fan of weight gainer at all and especially not for people with diabetes. It's absolutely horrible for maintaining blood sugar levels and I've never been a fan of "Dirty bulking" or eating massive amounts of calories to gain weight as fast as possible.

I had no trouble gaining back the weight I lost eating about 3000 calories a day which equated to about 250-300g of carbs, 200-250g of protein, and about 100g of fat. Of note: I currently weigh about 210lbs with about 12% body fat.

Eventually, I switched to a low carb diet and now eat less than 50g of carbs/day. My diet is loosely based on the Dave Palumbo Keto diet which is basically a low carb, high protein, moderate-high fat diet.

Mal1978 said:

I only started using the weight gainer as I'm naturally pretty slim, about 70-78lbs which is what I am now so I turned to weight gainer, at one point I weighed about 210lbs, I'd like to get back upto about 198lbs. I guess it's just going to be trial and error for the next few weeks.

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Is that a typo or do you weigh 70-78lbs? That's not slim, that's dangerously underweight. I really hope that was an error.

TorqPenderloin said:

Is that a typo or do you weigh 70-78lbs? That's not slim, that's dangerously underweight. I really hope that was an error.

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Maybe @Mal1978 missed off the 1 in front of that? I'm slim but weigh more than that.

Mal1978 said:

Does anyone know of any sites that have nutrition plans that are relatively high in calorie low in carbs I know you mentioned one @TorqPenderloin do you know of any more

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You'll have to sift through a ton of cr*p, but BodyBuilding dot com has a ton a great info and more plans than you could ever try in a lifetime. The drawback is that there aren't many on there with type 1 (although I have seen a few).

However, my suggestion is to build one for yourself and ask for (constructive) criticism. What works for some people won't necessarily work for you.

Tracking your weight does help. Generally speaking, your goal should be to gain about .5-1lbs a week. Any more than that and you'll just be adding unnecessary fat.

TorqPenderloin said:

My diet is loosely based on the Dave Palumbo Keto diet which is basically a low carb, high protein, moderate-high fat diet.

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Do you find that high protein when on a LCHF diet affects your blood sugar? There seems to be a split in the community, in that some believe lchf is not a high protein diet (less than 0.8g/lb of bw), as gluconeogenesis from excess protein can take you out of ketosis. Any experience with this?

Like TorqPenderloin said avoid weight gainers as they contain tons of carbs. When i bulk i eat nuts, they're higher in kcals and lower in carbs. Aldi (in Belgium at least) has a nut mix of about 300 grams for 3.50 euros. It's about 650 kcals/100 grams and 15 grams of carbs. In general pine nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts and macadamia nuts are the highest in kcals and lowest in carbs. Since you're about the same weight as me about 150 grams a day aside from your regular meals will probably make you gain weight and not mess with your BG too much, though off course as it is with most bulking diets you will still need more insulin.

MichaelWM said:

Do you find that high protein when on a LCHF diet affects your blood sugar? There seems to be a split in the community, in that some believe lchf is not a high protein diet (less than 0.8g/lb of bw), as gluconeogenesis from excess protein can take you out of ketosis. Any experience with this?

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Excess protein does take me out of ketosis and it has a very profound effect on my morning blood sugar spike (dawn phenomenon), but I do not have issues with spikes throughout the rest of the day (at least not yet).

When fat loss is my goal, I scale back my protein consumption pretty significantly.

The process of converting protein into glucose (as you mentioned) is very complicated and still not completely understood. There are theories that the process occurs much slower (perhaps over a 24 hr period) and/or what is converted into glucose doesn't necessarily enter your blood stream immediately. In practice, protein seems to do a good job of replenishing my glycogen stores (which my liver then releases each morning) but it has minimal effects on my short-term blood glucose levels.