LCHF diet to help you lose weight, not diabetes

@jack evidence level is pretty good at B. I didn't suggest supplements. Of course you can get too much of anything . Too much and your clotting time rises to dangerous levels and pruning the roses can become a dangerous occupation as the eccentric Hugo Sinclair found when he ate seal meat and fish for 100 days

@phoenix I was posting to show that normal pop. recommendations are fine for diabetics for omega 3 of 2 meals a week and no added benefit from more..
intake of fat in general is based on quality rather than quantity and it's fine to increase fats for a diabetic above the lower fats that are normally recommended for the general pop.

increasing fats showed a benefit and could be recommended for diabetics is pretty ground breaking stuff from American diabetic association

American diabetic association ( http://www.professional.diabetes.org/)
http://www.professional.diabetes.or...=DP&s_src=vanity&s_subsrc=nutritionguidelines

Evidence is inconclusive for an ideal amount of total fat intake for people with diabetes;
therefore, goals should be individualized; fat quality appears to be far more important
than quantity.

In people with type 2 diabetes, a Mediterranean-style, MUFA-rich eating pattern may benefit
glycemic control and CVD risk factors and can therefore be recommended as an effective
alternative to a lower-fat, higher-carbohydrate eating pattern.

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Sorry, just noticed how old this post was.

douglas99 said:

I think it would be worth pointing out to new members, that LCHF will decrease the bodies ability to process carbs later. It will skew any GTT, that may be a second stage in the diagnosis, and may push a possible pre diabetic into a diabetic diagnosis incorrectly, and if they later get a meter, and eat a small amount of carbs to see how they're getting on with the diabetes, they will get an artificially high reading which will be worrying.
Also, many LCHF do restrict their calorie intake, which again is worth mentioning, as we seem to have had a fair number of new posters not losing weight when they are trying to, and subsequently having the calorie restriction explained by other members.

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As my pancreas is producing acceptable levels of insulin I can say with some confidence (although I can always be wrong) that my body wasn't coping with carbs in the first place, that's why I had elevated Blood Glucose, I'm diabetic. If I were to contemplate increasing my carb intake I would have to go back to taking Gliclazide and Januvia and probably go onto insulin and worse still my total cholesterol would go up and I'd have to refuse statins, a discussion that I don't want with my GP.
You mention that "LCHF will decrease the bodies ability to process carbs later" and yet Dr. Paul Jaminet, in his book Perfect Health Diet, claims that "those on low-carb diets who add 'safe starches' such as white rice and potato back into their diet will usually improve their health and improve insulin sensitivity". So, am I right in thinking that only non diabetics would contemplate increasing their carb intake anyway? The ones you call pre-diabetic. Would you have some references for us to follow on that one, it's very interesting.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I never made a point of increasing fat although I do eat a bit more cheese and might occasionally fry an egg rather than poach. So by lowering carbs and keeping fat the same I'm obviously lowering calories, not that eating much less than my BMR means that I'm losing weight, but that's another problem all together.

From another thread on here somewhere, it was said.

'When you follow a low carb diet you can become glucose intolerant for a while.
This is because the enzymes that are needed to digest the food are created on demand and your body is out of practice at producing higher quantities of the relevant enzymes immediately. So once someone is adapted to low-carbing they don't have enough enzymes to deal with the sudden increase in glucose.
So I would expect a low carber (whether diabetic or not) to spike higher than someone who regularly eats the higher carbs.'

However it isn't a permanent effect, but it will take three days of eating a higher amount of carbs for the body to recover it's ability to process them properly.
So a GTT will be skewed, and self testing will be artificially high if you decide to test a meal as a one off.

However, I notice you say your pancreas is producing acceptable levels of insulin. My glucose intolerance was helped enormously simply by losing (a lot) of weight, and building a lot of muscle, which certainly uses the glucose.

I test regularly, and am happy with my BG. The trick is finding the lifestyle that suits you and gets your numbers where you want them, and if you read this forum, you're find it's very diverse on that journey.

Totto said:

LCHF is LCHF, then there are a lot of different varieties of low carbing.

I do LCHF, so I eat around 25 grams of carbs per day. I also eat protein but not too much. The rest of my energy I get from fat. That is high fat. I eat a lot of fat.

If you don't eat high fat you don't do LCHF.

I really don't understand why so many people find fat problematic. Is is dangerous?No. Is in nice? Yes. Does it make you fat? Most certainly not! Is it filling? Yes. Does it contain essential nutrients? Yes.

LCHF is one way. It seems to me there are only a few on here that actually do LCHF while a lot are low carbing in a gentler way. Noting wrong with that, but don't call it LCHF.

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Then we have to drop the LCHF and find some other way to describe the diet as many of us have just lowered carbs and eat moderate fat so we must not call that LCHF. As to why you do not understand why many people find fat problematic have you thought that it is just because they don't like it

equipoise said:

'RCIF' describes what virtually everyone in control of diabetes here actually does, and gets the right message and priorities across. The 'HF' bit of LCHF will always be controversial, and for some health conditions is inadvisable. And there is sometimes a problem that people grasp the HF bit but not the LC bit, which is disastrous if they're trying to lose weight. Just my opinion. On a purely pragmatic level, if 'LCHF' is preventing a sensible discussion of the value of reduced carbs and the acceptability of moderate increase in fats on this forum, then why not adjust the terminology, if it helps avoid knee-jerk reactions?

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I usually point that out in my posts. It should be higher fat perhaps but I say sufficient fat.

The term LCHF will stay whether we like it or not, so maybe some additional clarification is appropriate (which is already done in many cases).

I'm off to the NICE site now to suggest they change the 'E' bit.

AnnieC said:

Then we have to drop the LCHF and find some other way to describe the diet as many of us have just lowered carbs and eat moderate fat so we must not call that LCHF. As to why you do not understand why many people find fat problematic have you thought that it is just because they don't like it

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I can see no problem with Low Carb as a description of a diet that is low carb.

I am sure the ridiculous low fat recommendations soon will be changed. There are voices in the research community talking about 40% carbs and 40% fat as suitable levels for diabetics as more and more data shows no health benefits from low fat, quite the contrary. To me that still seems a lot of carbs but at least it a slightly more reasonable level.

And yes of course AnnieC, there may be people who doesn't like fat. I do however believe that a lot of them are more or less brain washed. Who in their right taste buds would prefer the frankenfood low fat spreads over butter for example?

I was lead to believe fat was bad and make you fat. That has been the message for decades so of course we believe it. But they were wrong and more and more research is published now that shows not even saturated fat is bad and that dairy fat actually protects us from heart disease and obesity.

As to don't like fat, last autumn we had a neighbour over one night when we had saddle of mutton, a lovely, juicy, fat young sheep and our neighbour cut away all the nice fat! I told her to try it, but she was scared to do so. Eventually she did have some of the fat and once she had tried it also had to admit it was lovely.

I think its great that people jump in and offer their opinions. When I came to this site I was fed up and depressed about the whole diabetes situation and thought there was no help for me anywhere but after reading all the different posts, the advice and the experiences others had had, I was able to make an informed decision on how I wanted to move forward.

Like most people I've been brought up to think that low fat is the way to go, but now I find that carbs are now the enemy for me. I have followed the NHS advice for a long time and go nowhere with controlling my diabetes. Now I am starting to take control.

One of the things that I hear most on this site is 'that everyone is different' - and that is true but its also one of the things that makes this site so brilliant - if LCHF is not for you... someone will come along and offer you another alternative... there is lots of advice about every aspect of the diabetes and whilst we all may not agree with everything any one person says, you can post your own opinions as a counter balance and have your say regardless which means that I and people like me, get to choose what we take on board.

So well done to all of you

Kezzer4321 said:

I think its great that people jump in and offer their opinions. When I came to this site I was fed up and depressed about the whole diabetes situation and thought there was no help for me anywhere but after reading all the different posts, the advice and the experiences others had had, I was able to make an informed decision on how I wanted to move forward.

Like most people I've been brought up to think that low fat is the way to go, but now I find that carbs are now the enemy for me. I have followed the NHS advice for a long time and go nowhere with controlling my diabetes. Now I am starting to take control.

One of the things that I hear most on this site is 'that everyone is different' - and that is true but its also one of the things that makes this site so brilliant - if LCHF is not for you... someone will come along and offer you another alternative... there is lots of advice about every aspect of the diabetes and whilst we all may not agree with everything any one person says, you can post your own opinions as a counter balance and have your say regardless which means that I and people like me, get to choose what we take on board.

So well done to all of you

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You are so right Kezzer. Carbs are the enemy, not only for you, but for all diabetics, it's just a matter of degrees; some can tolerate more than others. I agree there are plenty of alternatives on the site and if LCHF isn't for someone then there's plenty of other options. We need to keep LCHF as an option for those who do want it though, and a very good way of doing this would be for Daisy to mention it along with everything else in her 'welcome' to newbies. This would stop many of the heated discussions amongst us too and we could all work together to help others. LCHF is now recognised as a healthy lifestyle choice, so I feel it's important that newbies are given that message along with all the other available options, especially now the 'low-fat' alternatives are being discredited.

My own thread was a great help to me as so many people gave me so much help and advice, with lots of different viewpoints. I hope we are all allowed to continue expressing our individual points of view.

AnnieC said:

Then we have to drop the LCHF and find some other way to describe the diet as many of us have just lowered carbs and eat moderate fat so we must not call that LCHF. As to why you do not understand why many people find fat problematic have you thought that it is just because they don't like it

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It's not something I particularly enjoy,
I use the George Foreman, and this is the amount of fat squeezed out when I cooked 3 decent sausages this morning. This isn't a lot compared to others.
Now, personally, I think the remaining fat is more than enough for me.
But that's my taste, I know others on here advocate frying them in butter.

They say you should never interfere in a "domestic" since all that will happen is the family members will see you as a common enemy and all of them will turn against you. So I stayed out of this one but now I find, seeing the photo from @douglas99 that I should state my position, put my tin hat on and drink the other bottle and maybe it won't hurt.

There was a scare years ago where salt was seen as a bad thing. The actual scare was about "excessive" salt but that didn't stop people from trying to avoid salt altogether. One lad at work passed out a couple of times because his wife made sure he never had any salt. People need salt to live. This illustrated to me that people jack up any advice they get from scare tactics by the media. Also, some unscrupulous food manufacturers capitalise on fear. Low fat, no salt, no sugar, free range and on and on. It sells stuff.

So how do I interpret HF? I just forget everything the low fat culture indoctrinated me with. I have full fat milk if I want. I have butter on my new potatoes. I don't get anal about cutting fat off of lamb. Anything in the supermarket that has low fat printed on the package is put back on the shelf since the manufacturer has probably replaced the fat with sugar. I remember that fat can cut the GI of some foods and have managed the odd dumpling as a result.

There never was any suggestion that I had to stuff blocks of fat into my mouth. Just don't be frightened of fat since there has never been a causal link between fat and heart disease according to Dr. Kendrick.

Low carb (LC). I was issued with my meter six months before I joined this forum. I became aware that if I ate anything with flour or sugar in it then I couldn't acquit my orders which required that I control my blood sugars. I cut back severely on such foods and got low BS numbers. This was entirely logical to me and I was at a loss to understand why it was not general knowledge.

I found this forum which had made similar discoveries and I stayed. There were the proactive members who dealt with lowering their carbs with scales and ate a stated or lesser amount of carbs every day. There were the reactive members who read their BS after eating and adjusted future meals accordingly. Both were doing the same thing by different methods but they wanted to argue about which was best.

This brought to mind the old Star Trek episode where two men were at war since one was black on his left side and the other was black on his right side.

There are other diets but I haven't tried them and they have their advocates and providing those advocates do not knock on my door and try to tell me I should think like them then they are welcome to their beliefs.

A very good post.
I think it's worth re-visiting the LF concept though, as very few products have extra sugar in then, and haven't for a few years.

You're at least the second poster that has suggested people who don't HF are frightened or scared of eating fat though.
Personally, I would be of the opinion that they would have read about as many studies/reports/meta-analysis as others have, and come to there own conclusion, based on a very rational though process, as we're all fairly similar on here,
I would suggest that they are not simply acting on an irrational fear.

As I said, I press the excess fat out, mainly as I don't like it, don't like the acid reflux that normally comes with it, and don't need the empty/extra calories. I don't believe I'm scared of it though.

douglas99 said:

I think it's worth re-visiting the LF concept though, as very few products have extra sugar in then, and haven't for a few years..

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I don't intend to visit the LF concept mainly because I don't understand the argument for it.

Squire Fulwood said:

I don't intend to visit the LF concept mainly because I don't understand the argument for it.

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Which is your personal choice then, I eat it because it's still normally about as low carb nowadays, and definitely lower calorie then the HF options.
If I don't need the calories, no point in putting them in for me.

douglas99 said:

As I said, I press the excess fat out, mainly as I don't like it, don't like the acid reflux that normally comes with it, and don't need the empty/extra calories. I don't believe I'm scared of it though.

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As you know Douglas there is a lot more to fat than what what you can squeeze out and drain from a Foreman grill. Anyone coming to this page would think we have to stuff grease in our mouths.

I don't happen to like excess fat on meat or marbled steaks either, simply because of the texture. Never have done. But there's plenty of other sources.

I agree. Nuts yoghurt olive oil in dressings. Peanut butter..a small knib of butter on veggies...no one goes mad on "fats"

maybe it should be said as LCIF [lower carb, increased fats], at the end of the day it's like everything, moderation & balance.

I suggested RCIF near the beginning of this thread, and stand by it. (Reduced carbs/increased fats) Newbies don't know what low carb means --- how low is low is asked many a time, never mind all the confusion over fats..