Want a NO carb diet.

If you read Taubes "The Diet Deception", you will find out that there are No dangers on a NO carb diet. It's been done in the medium term with no ill effects. What you need to eat is Fatty meat ONLY. Veggies contain carbs, in small amounts, but on the scale you want to try, it's significant. Try Atkins Induction. that's pretty much it. Whatever your nurse says, you'll come to no harm. If you don't need to lose weight, keep the calories high with loads of cheese. Are you cutting out the insulin?
Good luck!!
Hana
Ps dietary Ketosis, will result, but it's not dangerous. You won't get DKA, which is different.

Personally I think you need to see the diabetes team including the dietitian - yes you are right for a few days no carbs wont harm you but long term is a complete no no. You need the diabetic team right now.

The SLIMMING WORLD diet is based on an extremely low carb approach to weight loss if you focus on RED day recipes. They would recommend that you have some carb each day but for this purpose, their magazines, website & books offer a HUGE amount of carb free tasty recipes.

slimmong worls isnt a low carb approach - it a confused carb approach - they have red days where you can eat as much protein as you like and green days where you eat carbs as much as you like. What I have found is people stick to one or the other and eat excessive amounts of protein - we are talking whole chickens , crates of muller lite and cans of corned beef. I have found many clients have lost alot of wt but pile it back on plus more.

I amnot convinced you can survive without carbs! maybe short term but long term no!

it sounds like you are having a tough time - have u talked to the team dietitian recently. Also some teams have a psycologist - they can be really helpful -ask them . Take each day at a time .

Try keeping a food diary for a few days - it sometimes helps people focus .

For Ally5555
No carb has been tried for a whole year. Read Taubes. I know you're a bit anti Taubes, but all he's done is to collate ALL the published material on diet. He comments on the negative stuff as well as the positive and gives the references to the original published papers, which you as a HCP can access.

It is possible to live on a diet that has only trace carbohydrates and remain apparently healthy for long periods of time. In the early days of nutritional research, before many preconceptions about diet were set in stone, there was some interest in this sort of thing. This was inspired by a knowledge of traditional Inuit diets (which are 100% meat, and those people don't suffer any obvious ill effects), and the fact that several explorers reported living with these people for years at a time on a pretty much zero carb diet. In 1928 a study was done where two volunteers lived on an exclusively meat diet for a year, whilst having their physiology very closely monitored. They remained healthy (and didn't get scurvy - as was widely predicted). The only problem that was observed was that their glucose tolerance was reduced at the end of this year - although that was quickly reversed once they went back onto a normal diet. The theory is that the carbohydrate metabolism got "out of practice" with lack of use. A follow-up study done seven years later, found no signs that they had, in any way been damaged by this experiment.

This was a very small study, and it hasn't been followed up or repeated more recently, because it went against the orthodox "fat is damaging" theory that came along shortly afterwards. The natural experiment of observing the Inuit people has dissapeared, because modern Inuit live on much the same diet of Junk food as the rest of us - the traditional diet has effectively gone.

However, despite being old, this is very interesting stuff. It isn't something that I would necessarily recommend, and it certainly isn't something that I would like to try myself (I'm not overly keen on the idea of an entirely meat diet), but it would probably be a very effective way of controlling diabetes. Thanks to the wonders of Internet archiving, you can read about these studies online. The key papers that I know of are:

Heinbecker, P. (1928). Studies on the metabolism of eskimos. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 80(2) 461-475. Full paper.

Tolstoi, E. (1929). The effect of an exclusive meat diet lasting one year on the carbohydrate tolerance of two normal men. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 83(3) 747-752. Full paper.

Tolstoi, E. (1929). The effect of an exclusive meat diet on the chemical constituents of the blood. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 83(3) 753-758. Full paper.

Another interesting article is an account, written for Harpers Monthly, by an American explorer who spent eleven years living "as an Eskimo among Eskimos" - including several years on a completely meat diet.

Stefansson, V. (1938). Adventures in Diet. Harpers Monthly Magazine, November 1938. Full paper.

mm - would live very dull just eating meat - I havent read those studies but is there a mention of their teeth and where are they getting calcium from?

I once had a pt as a student who only ate 12 eggs and 4 pounds of roast beef a day - she was in the metabolic unit of a london hopsital . Her chol level was the equivalent of 30 and her teeth had fallen out - the diagnosis was scurvy . I promise you this is true because believed she ate like this and she was my case study so i had to watch her eat this at every meal. She has stayed in my mind ever since - and i have seen a number of cases of scurvy and other deficiency diseases over my career.

She probably did have scurvy eating that..Ewww.but the Inuit eat more fish based things so that's why they probably don't develop some of the deficient illnesses we see here.

ally5555 said:

mm - would live very dull just eating meat

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I don't fancy it myself - but Stefansson (who was one of the volunteers) got to like it. He spent most of the rest of his life living on an ultra low carbohydrate diet consisting of mostly meat and fish (he lived to be 83 - quite healthily). He wrote a book on diet called "Not by Bread Alone" - I would like to read it, although it has been out of print for many years and I have yet to track down a copy.

ally5555 said:

is there a mention of their teeth and where are they getting calcium from?

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That is a very good question, and one that occurred to Stefansson. They followed the Inuit habit of eating fish bones and chewing rib ends, but even so, he wrote:

Toward the latter part of the test it became startlingly clear, on paper that we were not getting enough calcium for health. But we were healthy.

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All that I can think is that the conventional wisdom of mineral requirements, as in so many areas of nutrition, is simplistic and not that well understood by science. Not only is there an enormous variation between individuals metabolisms, but there are also often a lot of complex interactions between different biological systems. Take, for example, what is probably the best known story in all of nutritional science - that of scurvy.

Everyone with a bit of secondary school biology knows that scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency. It was the great scourge of the seventeenth century sailors, but it was totally prevented by the inclusion of various vitamin C rich food (lime juice, sauerkraut etc.) in rations from the mid eighteenth century onwards. This is a neat story - unfortunately it isn't true. This illustrates one of the most common mistakes in science - confusing correlation with causality. Just because vitamin C can be shown to cure scurvy and prevent scurvy, doesn't mean that a lack of vitamin C causes scurvy. Inuit, living on a traditional diet that has virtually no vitamin C were never been known to get scurvy. Neither did Stefansson and his colleague. There is now quite good evidence that vitamin C metabolism is regulated by glucose metabolism, and dietary carbohydrates cause it to be excreted by the kidneys. That isn't a problem, so long as it is replenished but if it isn't then the victim will come down with scurvy. If the diet is low enough in carbohydrates, then vitamin C isn't excreted - and it is possible to live on the tiny traces that are found in animal flesh.

ally5555 said:

I once had a pt as a student who only ate 12 eggs and 4 pounds of roast beef a day - she was in the metabolic unit of a london hopsital . Her chol level was the equivalent of 30 and her teeth had fallen out - the diagnosis was scurvy.

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This is a horrible story, but a very interesting one. If the carbohydrate/vitamin C theory is correct - why did she get scurvy? 12 eggs are quite a lot - maybe there is enough carbohydrate in them to trigger the excretion of vitamin C. Alternatively, this is an extremely restrictive diet. In the Stefansson trial the volunteers ate a very wide range of meat and fish (as do Inuit), but no milk and no eggs. A beef and eggs only diet is much more limited - maybe there was some other compounding deficiency?

I guess that the moral of all this is that although really extreme diets aren't necessarily dangerous they might be - and if anyone feels a burning desire to try one then they should do so extremely cautiously and under close medical supervision. Mind you, I would like to know what effect the traditional Inuit diet would have on a diabetes - my guess is that it could be spectacular. Sadly, we will probably never know. Modern Inuit buy their food from supermarkets and go to McDonalds, and they are suffering an explosion of type 2 diabetes - just like the rest of the world.

There was a prog on TV a few weeks ago about survival in Arctic conditions and looked at, for example, the benefits from structures like snow holes and igloos rather than more modern/western temporary shelters. It covered diet and it was clear that the Inuit traditionally collected and consumed plants and berries during the short summer months - so it was not all meat/fat/fish.

Buachaille said:

It covered diet and it was clear that the Inuit traditionally collected and consumed plants and berries during the short summer months - so it was not all meat/fat/fish.

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No, but very close. They ate very small quantities of blueberry and kelp, to make food more interesting - rather as we might use spices. Bear in mind that this diet - along with many aspects of the Inuit culture - has completely disappeared now, this is what the modern Inuit's great grandparents ate. Our best source of information is from the writings of people who studied it first hand - in particular that of August Krogh. I don't have any references to his work, because it is mostly in Danish, however it is cited by the papers I pointed at earlier as the definitive work on Eskimo diet. Krogh was a Danish physiologist who travelled extensively in Greenland in the early years of the 20th century (he was about as respected a physiologist as you can get - later going on to win a Nobel prize for medicine). Although diabetes wasn't his main area, he was interested in it (in part because his wife had type 2), and he studied the Eskimo diet because it went against a lot of nutritional orthodoxy. Krogh considered the non-meat component of this diet to be completely insignificant. Not only were the fruit and kelp seasonal, but also it was only ever a tiny proportion of the overall diet. The experimental diet described by Tolstoi had no vegetable material whatsoever and no meat or eggs. This was designed to test the traditional Inuit diet under controlled conditions.

You do not have to read very deeply to find out that Inuits, depending on location, collected and stored a wide variety of various lichens, fungi, tubers, root, stems, grasses and berries(mountain cranberries, crowberries, snowberries, blueberries) and the leaves from a number of trees. Some were eaten alone, some mixed with fat/oils and others mixed with fish and meats as a stew. It seems also that the ate the vegetable contents of animal stomachs, bird crops etc. A large variety of Edible seaweed also formed part of the diet.

More to it simply using these items as 'spices' methinks. And clearly more to the diets that just meat and fish.

I'm not an anthropological historian - you may well be right. Mind you, the term Inuit covers a wide range of different people, living over a colossal area of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. There are major linguistic, cultural and quite possibly dietary differences between these various groups. The point that I was making was that reliable academics who lived amongst these people for years at a time (particularly Stefansson, who was a Harvard anthropologist, and Krogh, who was a Nobel prize winning physiologist) described the diets of the groups that they were living with as almost 100% meat and fish, and certainly extremely low on carbohydrate. They were very interested by this because it ran against the nutritional orthodoxy of the day (in fact it still does). The Tolstoi experiment then did show that, whatever the mechanism might be, it is possible to live healthily for very long periods of time on an extremely low carbohydrate diet.