Six common beliefs addressed, Part 52

1. Knowing the insulin to carb ratio is very important.

This is something that is commonly used by Type I diabetics, for dosing exogenous insulin. But, aside from being a simpler way for dosing medication, everyone has an internal insulin to carb ratio based on the effects to blood glucose.

For example, a healthy person will have less blood glucose disruption to a certain number of carbohydrates, than a person with metabolic disease would. This would produce less effects on insulin. But, all of this is impossible to know, since endogenous insulin production varies per person and per meal. That's probably why they haven't come out with a real time insulin/glucose meter.

All of this is irrelevant when you are on carbohydrate restriction.

2. Can low carbohydrates diets slow down thyroid function?

A decrease in thyroid function is inseparable from losing body fat. This is a result of, amongst other things, a decrease in insulin/leptin, alongside increased cortisol (stress response). This is the normal function of body fat loss, which is the direct result of energy imbalance at the fat cell. The body always sees this as a stressor. Always. The body does not like losing body fat. Forget about what your trainer says on how healthy it is to lose body fat. Yes, it's healthy in the long term, but the body rejects challenges to body fat, regardless of long term health benefits, since the body only sees the short term.

Low carb diets usually get the blame for this "slow thyroid", because it's the only diet, which can result in chronic loss of body fat, without needing a starvation level of caloric restriction to achieve it. But, as I described above, the real culprit of this thyroid slow down is a chronic energy imbalance at the level of the fat cell, which is always the result of losing body fat. To the body, loss of body fat is loss of body fat, period. It doesn't care how it's occurring. Someone who is eating a low calorie, high carb diet, will have the same "hypothyroid" symptoms, as someone who is eating a high calorie, low carb diet. This is because it's not the diet, it's the loss of body fat.

Being overweight/obese has the opposite effect. The metabolism of an obese person, with hyperinsulinemia, is chronically set at a higher rate, along with a high sympathetic nervous system, resulting in "hyperthyroid". If you have a normal thyroid, to begin with, growing fatter ramps up the thyroid, due to endocrine changes needed for fat growth.

Keep in mind, that you can have both hypo/hyperthyroid function, without having the clinical markers of hypo/hyperthyroidism. In other words, your thyroid hormone levels may be completely normal, according to your doctor, but you can be symptomatic nonetheless. A hypo/hyperthyroid does not necessarily mean thyroid malfunction or disease, which is what your doctor is looking for. It's just indicative of a state of thyroid function resulting from specific metabolic inputs, such as body fat loss or gain, nutrient availability and insulin/leptin levels. This is why most thyroid tests will come out normal, even though the person is experiencing certain symptoms.

So, unfortunately, if you want to lose body fat, you will slow down your thyroid by default.

3. Doctors advise for a diabetics HbA1C to be 6 or 7, because they are trying to kill them.

Yes. Every doctor's ultimate goal is to kill their patients. Come on now.....

An HbA1C, that is that high, is obviously not normal, but doctors advise their diabetic patients to keep their HbA1C in this range, because they are on glucose lowering medications. If a glucose lowering medication suddenly drops your blood glucose, but you have an overall high HbA1C, it can prevent death, as the sudden blood glucose drop wouldn't go too low. But, if your HbA1C runs low, you don't have much leeway for a sudden dip in blood glucose, caused by medications, which can be fatal. 

So, it’s not that your doctor believes a high HbA1C is “normal”, it’s that he’s ranging it for medication, especially if you inject insulin. It’s not some conspiracy. It’s a precaution, because of the unpredictable effect of medications on already unpredictable blood glucose. Even without medications, diabetics and people with metabolic syndrome already have constant significant ups and downs in blood glucose.

4. Will extended fasting improve metabolic markers?

Not unless you are stabilizing blood glucose so you can normalize insulin and start losing body fat. 

This is an unfortunate belief I come across more often than not, but these believers soon get a rude awakening. People who have followed ridiculous protocols, online, suddenly come to the realization that they are actually worse now, than when they started. This is not surprising. It's the same thing that occurs with the people who have followed caloric restriction for years. What has occurred is that they have simply grown fatter.

All starvation protocols adapt metabolism to be better at growing fat. While these believers practice their extended fasting, they are actually growing more body fat, without even being aware of it. The obese have a pathological response to any practice that helps preserve and enhance body fat, like extended fasting. These practices cause the obese person's metabolism to double down on its energy conservation.

Because they have been unable to stabilize blood glucose enough to make a significant different, they have simply acquired more body fat, than when they first started extended fasting. This makes their metabolic markers worse than they were before. High blood glucose, high insulin, high C-Peptide, etc., are all indicative of poor blood glucose regulation. During their fasts, they may have thought they were getting better, because of the lower blood glucose seen during the times their body was not metabolizing anything (fasting). This gave them a false sense of security that things are headed in the right direction but they weren't. They were doing nothing to improve their blood glucose regulation. In fact, it was getting worse. They soon see the reality of their very damaged metabolism, when it actually has to do work and metabolize (eating). 

Eating is the stress test for metabolism. Just like a cardiologist does not know if your heart is healthy by watching you sit there, and must put you through a stress test, you also can't tell if your metabolism is healthy if it's just sitting there. You must put it through a stress test as well.

5. Diet is not a factor for developing diabetes.

Many diabetics have been misinformed, by their health care providers and dietitians, into thinking of their condition as an insufficiency problem, rather than an excess problem. They believe their condition is a result of insufficient insulin, as is the case for a Type I diabetic, when in reality their condition is excess insulin caused by an overflow of intracellular glucose. The patient is left thinking that diabetes is something that happened to them, not something that was caused by them.

But, on this blog, I emphasize the root cause of diabetes - poor blood glucose regulation. Many factors affect blood glucose homeostasis and diet is absolutely one of them. 

6. Can changing a fasting protocol help with weight plateaus?

Only in the sense that any change to nutrient availability temporarily effects leptin signaling, knocking you out of a plateau. But, knocking yourself in and out of plateaus is not how you lose body fat or sustain long term weight management. That only allows the creation of new posts on Facebook fasting groups.