• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Keto, Carb Levels & Appetite

A

AdamJames

Well-Known Member
Messages
1,338
Location
UK
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Diet only
I've been going very low carb and high fat for about a week, hoping that I'd experience the phenomenon that I can eat what I want and lose weight, due to the idea that one doesn't crave fatty foods as much as carby foods, and one feels more satisfied after eating fatty foods.

My experience so far is that I've been eating an awful lot of fatty food and am gaining weight.

Things I really love and can easily eat too much of:

* Belly pork with veg e.g. green breans, broccoli, asparagus.

* Mixed nuts with blueberries / raspberries / blackberries & double cream.

* Nut butters. Could eat a whole jar of e.g. peanut butter.

But when I think about it, could it be that I'm not trying hard enough to eliminate carbs? Because:

* With the belly pork meals, I'm having a small bit of English mustard (e.g. a level teaspoon)

* With the Mixed nuts & double cream & berries, I've often added 3g of raisins (=2g carbs) for a bit of sweetness, especially if the berries are bitter.

* Peanut butter is still 8% carbs, so who am I kidding?

Do people find that just the smallest amounts of carby additions such as English mustard ruin the 'satiety' effect of a very high fat meal?

I've been getting a bit disillusioned with the idea of keto and even had some dark chocolate today, so I'm looking for advice for types of keto food combos which strike a really good balance of being appetising, healthy but not so nice that as soon as I've finished eating it, I make some more!
 
A few random thoughts.

How many carbs are you getting up to in a day? It could be overall consumption of them rather than a small amount of something reducing satiety.

A week is not a very long trial of a new way of eating and your body may still be adjusting so worth persevering.

For me blood sugar control was the main priority when I started out and although I reduced carbs right down straightaway, weight loss was initially slow as I snacked and didn’t look at portion size. However, I didn’t allow desserts or anything resembling sweet stuff until I’d adapted to eating keto and weight loss was speeding up. Helped to remove cravings.

Gradually my appetite got smaller and I naturally started eating less and was able to introduce intermittent fasting, which really sped things up.

Now I am at a ‘normal’ weight (but still trying to shed a bit more) things are complicated again - the moral is you need to keep adjusting, but don’t change too much at once (so you know what is impacting on what) and give changes time to take effect.
 
It took me about 6-8 weeks to get the balance right. I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning, though, going too low carb but not compensating with enough fats which for the first month saw hunger and carb craving making me question the whole idea. I am glad I persisted. One week really isn't long enough to judge if LCHF is the right choice for you, how have your bg levels been? I did see an almost immediate reduction in the first few days.
 

I've made very sure I never go above 40g, and try to get down to 20g. I've haven't been meticulous in logging recently, but I did get down to 18g on one day.

One thing I've been finding is that I'm surprised at how little of certain types of 'nutritious' (to my mind, but I'm very new to this, and I could be misguided!) foods such as vegetables I can have.

I have the berries with the nuts as that seems to be the done thing for nutrition reasons, but the berries, plus the green veg with the main meals, quickly eats through the carb allowance!

I'm definitely going to stick with it for a while. One option is just that I have to be a lot more disciplined and stop after a certain amount of calories each day. Another is that I buy VLCHF food that I can tolerate but don't particularly like, so I'm less tempted to keep eating it!

Are you saying that your appetite for the same low carb / high fat foods reduced over time? That would be nice.
 
AdamJames said:
Are you saying that your appetite for the same low carb / high fat foods reduced over time? That would be nice.
Click to expand...

Yes. But also as @Guzzler says it’s about getting the balance between fat and carbs right. When I started out I wasn’t logging foods, just cut out all starchy carbs. I found it hard not to eat between meals but that gradually changed - took a good few weeks. Consciously had to add more fat (butter) to veggies. Getting enough fat really is key.


Veg can be difficult to ‘budget’ for. Much easier on one meal a day! I really vary in how much veg I eat and will quite happily have days when I eat none. Berries are a rare treat - and only ever eat raspberries and no more than 50g at a time, washed down with extra thick double cream.
 

There is always the possibility that you satiety (full) response is delayed or dysfunctional.
In that case you won't get the appetite suppression most people get by eating high fat meals.

If you are scarfing things down and just wanting more then this may be a factor.

It might be an idea to limit the nuts and nut butters for a while because they can really pile the pounds on.

Hopefully after a week or so your body will adjust.

In my case a morning coffee with butter and cream keeps me feeling full until the afternoon.
 

It's good to hear other people questioning the whole idea but 'getting there in the end'! That's very much where I'm at at the moment. I intend to stick this one through, if for no other reason than I have my next blood test at the end of March. I still have a fear of fat, so if I can get through a blood test after two months of eating a lot of fat, that should get rid of my fear.

My fasting bg levels have risen steadily, now back up to nearly 7 in the morning. That's something I've found consistent since monitoring things in the last few months - if the tide switches to very definite weight gain, regardless of carb levels, I get that kind of number in the mornings.

I've found that I can get instant reduction of morning fbgs by restricting calories, again regardless of carbs, so I'm tempted to do ~1000 calories of vlchf for 2-3 days then build up again. Or maybe another fast - that worked really well for me recently. Actually that could be just the ticket for fbg purposes.

I guess it's all a question of trying to get my own personal balance right, while not breaking out of ketosis?
 
One thing I noticed that surprised me and did me a favour was what I came to call the 'chew factor'. This was bite size chunks of celery spread with peanut butter. The peanut butter keeps it interesting but it takes so long to chew the celery that after 3-4 bits I had had enough and I felt sated. This was while I was still snacking which is a hard habit to break.
 

Yes, it is a bancing act and for me it still is as I try to maintain my weight. I am hoping that I have stalled IR if not reversed it a little, only time (and testing) will tell.
 
Ive never bought into the idea that lchf allows you to eat whatever amount of calories you want / need in order to feel full.
It doesnt make logical sense to me but more imporantly I put weight on unless I pay attention to fat and cals as well as carbs,
I alo think fibre is a v overlooked factor - for me if I keep fibre high ( over 30g) my sugars are very well behaved and I dont have hunger issues. Its possible to keep fibre high without increasing carbs by incorporating chia seeds and konjac noodles into the diet. For example yesterday I had 39g fibre and 36g carbs which is fairly typical
Im reading jenny ruhls book “ diet 101: the truth about low carb diets” which has some interesting info re weight loss and weight loss stalls on lchf
 

I think getting rid of the nut butters is definitely as step forward. I actually threw out a jar of peanut butter this morning!

I think I just need to be pragmatic and keep a list of the things I've over-indulged in, and avoid having them in the house, at least while I'm 'getting established'.

I've found that a 30g serving of mixed nuts with a cup of tea, for example, meets the sort of 'ideal' that I have in mind, where I find it tolerable, but don't crave more immediately. However if I add double cream and a tiny amount of raisins to those nuts, I've got 500 calories in front of me, the volume is tiny, and I can easily eat another two helpings in a row - in fact I'd say I 'crave' more! And a jar of peanut butter is just too easy to keep eating.

Top of my list to 'not have in the house' right now, I think, would be double cream and peanut butter! It's just made me realise that raisins are probably not the problem after all. I can add 3g of raisins to a 30g serving of mixed nuts and not immediately crave more. It's adding the double cream to that combo which makes me crave more. Interesting!

I'm hopeful of the idea of my body adjusting and the cravings reducing. It would be nice to have things I really enjoy, like the nuts, berries, raisins and cream, and not find them addictive.
 
Have you checked the carbs in: green beans, broccoli, asparagus, nuts, blueberries, blackberries, double cream, nut butters, peanut butter, raisins? Sadly, they do all contain carbs, and that all adds up. The only truly carb-free foods are fish, flesh, fowl and fat. And some listings even record carbs in sardines!!! I am struggling to keep down to 20g carbs daily despite the fact that I don't eat berries, nut butters, peanut butters or raisins (let alone grains, flours, tubers, bulbs, anything with added sugar.) In addition I just ditched most of the nuts I was eating, because my readings were still too high. And yes, I agree, I too am shocked to find myself eating a diet where even green leafy vegetables are rationed. It can't be good, but IMO high bgs are worse.
 

That's been my experience so far, i.e. calories are the biggest predictor of whether I'll gain weight, and what my morning fbgs are going to be, not carb levels.

In some ways maybe that's a good sign that I don't have crazy insulin resistance, I don't know? Anyway I've pretty much stopped trying to analyse things now, I just want to find a way that works!

I need to improve consistency - I may have lost a fair bit of weight over the last few months, but my fbgs have been all over the place, so it would be nice to find a way of eating which I can stick to, and allows me to eat food I like, and do the hobbies I like, and gets consistently good fbgs.

I don't know whether keto is the answer for me, but by all accounts it seems to take a long time to find out, so I'll stick with it while tweaking the parameters.

I know I can't keep doing what I've been doing over the last week. I feel unwell, so that alone will make me take action, e.g. throwing the peanut butter out, and I've already been shopping since running out of double cream, and tempting though it was to get some more for taste purposes, I didn't. I'm also going to go back to keeping an accurate food log and counting calories as well as carbs and making sure I don't go over 2,200.

I like Jenny Ruhl's writing, I really like her website but I haven't bought one of her books, perhaps I should!
 

Yep, I was pretty surprised at what '20g of carbs a day' actually looks like!

It doesn't 'feel right' to have so few green vegetables. That was one thing I've always been lucky with in the past - I quite like a lot of veg with meals, so it feels almost as if I'm cutting down on the one healthy thing which I'm happy to eat a lot of!

But at least they are still there. And a steak with a few lengths of asparagus has to be better than a cheeseburger with a couple of tiny bits of gherkin on and fries, and frankly a year ago I could eat nothing but the latter and not whine on about nutrition, so I'll stick with this!
 
If you swap the blueberries for a lower carb berry you can have almost twice as much - blueberries are high sugar, like most American fruits.
If you do not have sweeter things for a little while then you should begin to find that things such as peas and beetroot are actually sweet - our tastes today are overwhelmed by the amount of sweetness considered normal - many of the recipes for various baked items or desserts are sweetened to normal tastes and are far too sweet for me now - I have been sticking to no sweetener for about a year now.If you can work to your blood glucose levels - if you have a meter, you might find that as time passes you can eat more and keep your BG levels normal - I can eat up to 60 gm of carbs a day, but tend to stay lower so as to promote weightloss. I dropped a lot of weight without really trying, or noticing at first.
 

I have to say I think I'm already at the stage where I taste a lot of sweetness in things where I didn't used to, e.g. double cream almost feels like a perfect balance between sugar and fat, even though the sugar amount is tiny compared to the fat. And peanut butter tastes positively sweet.

Maybe it's no coincidence that those are the two things I've outlawed from my house at the moment! Maybe we all have certain foods that are just very moreish for our own tastebuds, and some of those are loaded with calories so we need to avoid them, unless we have rock star discipline / self control!
 
Boo1979 said:
[QUOTE="AdamJames, post: 1687587, member: 459333].
I like Jenny Ruhl's writing, I really like her website but I haven't bought one of her books, perhaps I should!
Click to expand...


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Diet-101-Truth-About-Diets-ebook/dp/B0080JVKMK/ref=la_B004ZDYKS6_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517603116&sr=1-3&refinements=p_82:B004ZDYKS6,p_n_binding_browse-bin:368165031[/QUOTE]
I first got JR's "Your Diabetes Questions Answered" from the library and thought it the best diabetes book I could find by far, until I bought Dr Bernstein's "Diabetes Solution" which I also value highly. However I find JR more realistic about living with T2 today, and about human frailty! (Obviously Dr B is extremely relevant to T1s.) I then bought JR's "Diet 101" (as I already have "Your Diabetes Questions..." on semi-permanent loan) but was a bit disappointed in that it is a sort of hybrid book aimed at people dieting for weight loss as well as for those dieting to lower their blood sugars. As I am under- rather than over-weight this was a bad match for me. It is still a worthwhile read for me, but "Your Diabetes Questions...." was published more recently and if I had to choose I'd prefer that. However for anyone embroiled in the struggle to lose weight and keep it off, "Diet 101" could be very helpful. I like having so many articles I can consult for free on JR's website, but I somehow find it more comfortable and comforting to have her book around the house and grab it whenever I have a query. I have read some sections over and over. Perhaps it's my age, and others might feel more comfortable reading on a screen. Of course, all her books are also available in electronic format.
 

Re the Diabetes Solution, would you recommend someone with T2 reads is? I got it quite recently, about 2 weeks ago. A very quick glance at it made me think that it's sufficiently slanted towards T1 that there are probably better things for me as a Type 2 to be reading. I have to choose my reading very carefully as I'm very slow at it! I can't help but suspect that reading this forum is pretty much optimal in terms of use of time for a slow reader, but there could be some gems of info in the Diabetes Solution?
 
I found Dr B's book very worthwhile. I did skip all the stuff about insulin, as I'm not on that at present, nor likely to be given it for a long while at least (barring a sharp deterioration in my condition). However I note that Jenny Ruhl recommends Dr B as THE expert on insulin bar none, so those chapters would be good to have in stock if/when the time comes. He is also of course expert on very low carb, having invented it as a treatment for diabetes! You could also skip the recipes and the advice on how to exercise, though the advice TO exercise, given with passion by an elderly man who has been T1 almost all his life and still does vigorous workouts at age 83, is inspiring.

Jenny Ruhl's "Your Diabetes Questions Answered" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Diabetes-Questions-Answered-Practical-ebook/dp/B071YW7LVW/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517592088&sr=1-5&refinements=p_27:jenny+ruhl might suit you better. It is a much slimmer volume and entirely oriented to T2. It is in a question and answer format which you might like, as you can identify and skip any questions that don't interest you. JR comes across as much more human than Dr B. She admits to burnout, to struggling with her weight. She advises adopting a diet you can live with rather than one that will give you perfect bgs.

No, much as I value the Forum, IMO one should take everything read here with a big pinch of salt. We are not experts, we have not done the huge amount of research over decades that these two writers have done. I would urge anyone to get hold of and read both of these books, but probably starting with JR as Dr B is a bit alarming for beginners. Then you will have a good foundation on which to stand when evaluating the often conflicting views you are reading here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn More.…