Keto, Carb Levels & Appetite

Brunneria · Feb 16, 2018

Hi @Nick1974

Thank you for your comments and I appreciate the effort you put into your post, but much of what you say does not apply to my situation.

To answer a few of your points,
- no I am not new to ketosis. I have been Low Carbing for 30+ years and Ketoing for much of that (since long before anyone had heard of either by their current names). So I know exactly how my body reacts to it, in various different variations of ketogenic eating.
- yes, some people do have rapid responses to calorie restriction. I do, and I am not alone. In my case it stems from doing several very low calorie diets, for extended periods, as a teenager - around the same time my hormones went seriously wacky. There are other people on the forum in similar circumstances.
- and no, I don’t bother to go hell for leather at anything nowadays. Far too much effort and rarely sustainable. This is a long game, and I am only half way through it. I hope.

You asked why I eat ketogenically, suggesting that it was because I was trying hard for weight loss and T2 reversal. That is an incorrect assumption.

While some weight loss would be nice, my personal combination of health issues make other things higher priority. The main reason that I live in ketosis is because life as a glucose burner is miserable for me. I only feel well when fat adapted and reliably in ketosis.

Edited for typos.

AdamJames · Mar 4, 2018

JamesW2612 said:
I feel your pain... I tried keto for a while but i found trying to keep track of my macros was too difficult for me. Especially when you consider there are carbs in veg as well, so you have to keep an eye on how much veg you have with your meat. I have to say, on keto i did well with long periods of not eating, but i still always got cravings for the carbs... I am addicted and i tried to make teh carb monster happy with sweetners and so on. But in the end, i would fall off the wagon.
I now follow a zero carb diet (its only been about 5 or 6 weeks) but its been easier for me than keto... Zero carb is basically just meat and water. I only eat from the animal kingdom and drink water (well coffee too!)

Its helped me massively but we are all different.

Good luck

I am tempted to go hardcore on eliminating the carbs. I did a little test by skipping the addition of English mustard to the belly pork and veg meal. I think it did help, if only because it made it taste *less nice* so I was less inclined to have more!

I've had enough very low carb meals since my original post to now be absolutely certain: it takes a huge amount of any type of food to make me feel full. The 'eat as much as you want but only of certain types of food' idea isn't going to work for me. I could carry on trying and waiting to see if I reach the state that other people have, but since I've now piled on the pounds and ruined a lot of the good work I'd done over the last few months, I'm going to go back to basics: I need to count calories, and consciously avoid eating too much.

Anyway I'm glad you've found something that has worked for you.

AdamJames · Mar 4, 2018

Nick1974 said:
the ketogenic diet is much harder than it seems...its not just cutting sugar (which is the easiest macronutrient to cancel)...or the carbs, its the protein..From what u have written down it looks like u not eating much lean protein. Stay away from any type of seafood ,turkey , lean beef or chicken w/o skin for 7 to ten days. It depends on the person. For those few days u have to only eat green leafy veggies in a small plate (be careful of salad dressings, most are loaded w sugar). If u feel hungry u are probably not eating enough. Remember fatty, fatty fatty, which psychologically is hard given what we have been hardwired to believe. This is only for the first week or so. By the way what meds are u taking, if insulin be extremely careful u can become hypo, u will become hypo in few days!!! I take metformin. U can not get hypo from that. Do u exercise, pounds are harder to get rid of if u are a couch potato. The reason why no carbs for the next 3 to 5 days and little protein is u need to deplete glycogen storages in your liver which depending on person takes 3-5 days When u blood sugar runs to low your body takes protein that is not being used(which u have eaten) and makes glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis and stores it in the liver to be used whenever the body needs. This is ok for a normal person, but type 2 diabetics it is not because your body does not know u are a type 2 diabetic and releases to much stored sugar in your liver (which is called glycogen) and your body does not react as fast as a normal person so u will have a slight sugar spike which will take u out of ketosis. So first week little to no carbs and little protein. U will need ketone urine test strips to test if and how much u in ketosis and blood glucose monitor to get a feel for how different foods effect your body. Everyone is slightly different..Then after those days of strict eating u will feel it...The keto flu..U have probably heard some bad stories bout this but only because of lack of preparation and education. U will feel like u have the flu, headaches, cramps fatigue and lethargy while your body becomes accustom to a different fuel(fat instead of sugar)..U need a multivitamin especially one in electrolytes, potassium, sodium, chloride(sodium chloride is salt) calcium magnesium and phosphate..Depleating carbs and sugar from the body is a natural diuretic so u are going to need to drink more water than usual. I made an 8 ounce glass of broth which covers the sodium chloride plus ingesting the water .I don't know your routine but if u work out or exercise vigorously this will take a hit for a few weeks Remember this lifestyle is not to melt of the pounds, it is to get your body less resistant to insulin because type 2 diabetes is chronic, it only gets worse with age..A few weeks ago I ate 2 scoops of strawberry ice cream with no cone and my blood sugar was 127..Normally it would be more than twice that..Good luck it is worth the slight hassle in the beginning....this is my first time on this site and first reply. I hope I help someone because I was helped by someone.

People do seem to have very different ideas about protein quantities. I started a thread about that a while ago!

I do a fair bit of exercise. I'm very lucky in that my main hobby at the moment is hill walking. I can go on for hours and it doesn't feel like exercise, but it does wonders for my blood sugars and is a great way to help lose weight, so long as I combine it with making sure I don't overdo the calories! I have found it surprisingly okay doing some of the bigger walks, including Snowdon last weekend, on minimal carbs. I've swapped my backpacking food from common stuff like noodles, flapjacks, porridge, chocolate etc to things like Peperami, cheese, nuts and had no problem doing 17 hours of walking a couple of weekends ago. There is of course a difference between walking up hills and other forms of exercise however!

AdamJames · Mar 4, 2018

Brunneria said:
@AdamJames

Only just seen this thread or I would have chipped in much earlier.

Please don't fall for the thinking that keto=weightloss.
That is an assumption that many people make, usually because keto=weightloss for them.

I'm always amazed to hear of people who go VLC/keto and then lose weight while eating low carb baking, regular berries, cream on everything, and unlimited meat intake. I envy them, but it certainly doesn't work that way for me.

And there is a surprisingly large number of us who don't experience that auto-keto-weightloss even when we cut out all the indulgences (like cream and occasional berries, and dark choc) that are usually permissible on a keto diet.

The longer I hang around the forum, the more I read here, and elsewhere, the more I realise that there is a sub-group of us with sufficiently deranged metabolisms and wacky hormones for whom the normal keto needs to be combined with calorie restriction too. Or even greater carb restriction. Or cutting dairy. Or restricting protein intake. Or eliminating all sweeteners. Or eliminating all carbs. Or fat fasting occasionally. Or any number of other measures which will depend on the unique 'derangement' involved.

In addition, those of us with these 'derangements' are often the ones most likely to have hair trigger metabolisms that react astonishingly quickly to reduced calories by slowing the metabolism down to reduce calorie expenditure. Someone with a 'normal' metabolism can usually count on weeks of weight loss on a calorie restricted diet before the body slows the metabolism to fit the new calorie intake. My body makes the change in less than 5 days. And I have seen numerous posts by people on this forum whose weightloss is agonisingly slow on severe calorie restriction, and who then regain rapidly afterwards.

In my case, I did 5 weeks of one meal a day Mon-Fri and 2 meals at the weekends, calories around half my usual amount, and I lost 2 pounds in 5 weeks. I don't call that sustainable. It was boring, inconvenient, tiresome, frustrating, and would mean a constant starvation diet for years. When I went back to my usual 2 meals a day, I regained those 2 pounds within a couple of days. Like a cork in a bucket my weight just bobbed back up and stayed there on double the calories. Sigh.

I now try to vary my number of meals and calorie intake daily, so that my metabolism never gets any settled pattern that it can fix on and reduce basal metabolic rate.

Great post and I totally agree.

I've realised I need to take my own advice on this. We are all different. Other people's input is extremely helpful as it lets me know what has worked for others and therefore what *might* work for me.

But I'm stopping the experiment of not calorie counting. Maybe if I kept up the keto-and-not-counting-calories thing for another month something amazing would change, but right now, the evidence I see before me is that I've been piling on the pounds. Since we all agree weight loss is a good idea for overweight people, that's not right. I've put on about 5kg quickly and my stomach is making it's presence horribly felt when I sit down! I'm not going to risk carrying on in this direction. Keto, I suspect, I can stick with, but not ignoring calories. I have a huge appetite, I love food, and I'm going to have to consciously monitor calories.

I also agree with varying meals and calorie intake. This is what I had effectively been doing for a few months (through lack of discipline rather than it being a plan!) and it worked a treat. My general focus for months had been calorie restriction and modest exercise (often just a small local walk in the evenings) and it was working a treat. In spite of some days of over-eating, and too many carbs, I'd always switch back to monitoring calories. I'd eat to maintain, or to restrict modestly, or to restrict hugely, and generally never stuck to anything for more than a week, which probably helped my metabolism to stay high. The weight fell off, independent of carb content.

I don't think there is going to be a magic bullet for me. Anyway it's not a big deal, calorie counting isn't exactly hard. For a lot of people, even without Type 2, it's normal. I think we all have bodies that are designed to live in a world where calories are hard to come by, but most of us these days are surrounded by an excess of food. The battle has changed curiously from a physical one of procuring food, to a mental one of avoiding too much of it!

Livefree · Mar 4, 2018

AdamJames said:
Great post and I totally agree.

I've realised I need to take my own advice on this. We are all different. Other people's input is extremely helpful as it lets me know what has worked for others and therefore what *might* work for me.

But I'm stopping the experiment of not calorie counting. Maybe if I kept up the keto-and-not-counting-calories thing for another month something amazing would change, but right now, the evidence I see before me is that I've been piling on the pounds. Since we all agree weight loss is a good idea for overweight people, that's not right. I've put on about 5kg quickly and my stomach is making it's presence horribly felt when I sit down! I'm not going to risk carrying on in this direction. Keto, I suspect, I can stick with, but not ignoring calories. I have a huge appetite, I love food, and I'm going to have to consciously monitor calories.

I also agree with varying meals and calorie intake. This is what I had effectively been doing for a few months (through lack of discipline rather than it being a plan!) and it worked a treat. My general focus for months had been calorie restriction and modest exercise (often just a small local walk in the evenings) and it was working a treat. In spite of some days of over-eating, and too many carbs, I'd always switch back to monitoring calories. I'd eat to maintain, or to restrict modestly, or to restrict hugely, and generally never stuck to anything for more than a week, which probably helped my metabolism to stay high. The weight fell off, independent of carb content.

I don't think there is going to be a magic bullet for me. Anyway it's not a big deal, calorie counting isn't exactly hard. For a lot of people, even without Type 2, it's normal. I think we all have bodies that are designed to live in a world where calories are hard to come by, but most of us these days are surrounded by an excess of food. The battle has changed curiously from a physical one of procuring food, to a mental one of avoiding too much of it!

Hey i am sure you must have heard of only meat and water diet. Since you are experimenting. Why dont you research and give it a try

AdamJames · Mar 4, 2018

Livefree said:
Hey i am sure you must have heard of only meat and water diet. Since you are experimenting. Why dont you research and give it a try

Yes, @JamesW2612 mentioned that a few posts ago, it seems to have worked well for him.

All such suggestions go on my mental list of things to try! Right now I am very keen to lose the weight I've recently gained, so I'm tempted to just go back to doing what I had been doing over the last few months, but this time to ensure I stay in ketosis.

Something radical may have changed internally to cause the weight gain, but the only obvious difference recently has been that I haven't limited calories, so it seems sensible for that to be the thing I focus on.

Keto, Carb Levels & Appetite

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