Maintenance - Adding some carbs back

I have been on <50g a day for 9 months now combined with regular running and resistance training. My weight has been steady for about 6 months although in the last six months I still lost a bit of fat and put on some muscle (overall weight is unchanged). I don’t really have much fat left to lose at this stage. I seem to be able to fuel myself quite well off fat and feel great (all markers are good too) but I suspect I am experiencing physiological insulin resistance. My BG with a libre is pretty much a straight line except for exercise and food. I just want to lower that line a bit more.

What I found with food has me rethinking my strategy. When I ate something like 20g of carbs my BG would go up slowly a few points where it would sit for a bit then finally drop (often quickly). It seemed to go up more than I thought it should with what I ate.

When I ate something with more carbs like half a pizza or beer and chips (~50g) my BG went up faster but not as much (only 2 points) and then it dropped quite quickly. It was well within normal non diabetic levels.

Each time I had more carbs than normal my BG levels were lower for the next 12 hours or so.

So, my new experiment is going to be bumping up my carbs to around 100ish a day to see what happens. I'm going to do this mostly thorough pulses as they do almost nothing to my BG. My hope is that this actually lowers my overall BG levels a bit, I’m still upper 30s but want to make it to the lower 30s.

Does this sound sensible?

Guzzler said:

I have read from @Bluetit1802 that in the case of physiological insulin resistance a raise in carbs for a very short period can provoke an improvement but she can explain it much better than I can.

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I read about the short increase. I

Bluetit1802 said:

I'm not sure why you think you have physiological insulin resistance. This normally only happens on very low carb diets when the body reacts to low glucose levels and instructs the muscle cells to reject it so it can be saved for the brain and some red blood cells. It normally only affects base levels, not post meal levels. Obviously the post meal levels are higher, but only because you start higher. The actual rise from before to after is normally the same as you would expect. Is this what you experience?

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Yes.

I could be wrong about PIR but I suspect it is happening. My overall my BG levels are quite flat during the day on a libre but I am still getting HBA1Cs in the upper 30s. To get to the low 30s I will have to drop that overall flat line a bit, it is not a case of managing the spikes as all I have are small bumps.

When I said less than 50g the reality is less than 30g 9 days out of 10 and then maybe closer to 50g on day 10. I exercise intensively, around 25k of hilly trail running each week along with resistance and a lot of walking. I went into keto initially at around 70g of carbs a day and normally burn around 3-3.5k calories a day so 100g for me is about 12% of my calories so not all that high. My issue is I probably got 70-80% of my calories from carbs for most of my life as I thought fat was bad and didn’t eat a lot of meat.

Reading some other resources, general LCHF not diabetic focused ones, I have repeatedly come across the idea of bumping up carbs once you are quite lean and particularly if you exercise a lot. That seems to apply to me so I thought I would give it a try.

I will report back on how things work out.

There is no Spoon said:

Hi CL-inNZ,
I did a little reading up on PIR a while back and the conclusion the research lead to was the body is primed to run of sugar or fat when it's not burning fat PIR is in place to not over tax the short supply of sugar in bg to keep the brain running smoothly.

You switch in and out of it effortlessly through out the day it's not a constant state.
IF you exercise the body quite happily switch of PIR due to extra sugar that is available, from fat stores released from the liver.
IF you are in ketosis the PIR stays on and your muscles burn fatty acids released by the liver.

So basically it shouldn't be having a effect on your bg numbers, that would be down to meals.
It's not a cause for increasing bg as IR does and PIR should only real kick in when bg levels are low, but that's a good thing you jump in and out of PIR as the body needs to it's not a prolonged state.


Sorry I don't use blood meter but I assume straight line means always at the same level. Does this just mean your body has found the level it likes to run of? I take it that's mmols and if so anywhere in the 30s is good right.

We all have different metabolic rates and if this seems to be where your body works best
why are you trying to get it lower?

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I guess I am experimenting a bit here and following up on the observation of my BG dropping for a while after eating carbs to try and get it lower still. While I know I am at a perfectly fine level my primary motivation comes from how I manage this long term. I am 48 now and this isn’t going away so I want to give myself as much of a cushion as possible to work with as I get older. If it doesn’t work and doesn’t get lower or even worse goes higher, I will have at least learned something. Plus I like beans and hummus so would be happy to add those to my general diet.