People pull these "rules", out of their behind, with no rhyme or reason to them. Why anyone would advise this is beyond me. First, you shouldn't be doing long fasts, unless your are trying to increase body fat. So, if you are traveling, for days, you should not be fasting through them. That is asinine and plain dumb. Worse still, it's so unnecessary that it's ridiculous.
Traveling, already puts the body under stress because of circadian rhythm disruption. Every traveler can attest to this. Fasting will just add more stress to the mix, making your situation worse, especially if you already have metabolic problems.
While traveling, eat your carbohydrate restricted meals, as usual, and use common sense when choosing your restaurants. You will be hard pressed to find a restaurant you can't eat at. You can find something to eat, that is carb restricted, everywhere. So, why you would need to fast is beyond me.
Do not pile stress on top of stress. Your body will only double down on its stress response.
2. I have reached goal weight and maintained it for more than year. Can I now "indulge" during "special occasions", without having issues?
The goal of this blog is not "weight loss" or "dieting". I don't offer a protocol that can be followed, until you reach "goal weight" and then add back foods that interfere with blood glucose "in moderation". That's what the diet industry promises with their thousands of "weight loss hacks". But, I don't make silly promises that can't be kept. This is especially true of someone, like me, who was once obese and now has lost the weight. I suggest you read my article, Night Of The Living Fat Cell, so you understand that your past overweight/obesity has long lasting effects that can contribute to weight regain very easily.
Understand this, very clearly, whether it's unpopular or not: you will forever be overweight/obese, regardless of what the scale says. This is because your fat mass will always respond as such. Having been overweight/obese once, is enough to put you at a very high risk of becoming overweight/obese again.
That is why the goal of this blog is to teach lifelong appropriate dietary habits to address metabolic problems, not to lose 15 pounds in time for bikini season. We focus on an anti-obesity lifestyle and "indulging" on "special occasions" is not anti-obesity behavior. It's pro-obesity behavior, so we stay clear of this type of practice. It is not conducive to metabolic health.
We don't discriminate between the obese and the lean, on this blog. The advice to eat, as if your life depended on it, is the same for everyone whether they are 100 lbs or 600 lbs. Leanness does not give you a pass for abusing your metabolism, as leanness is easily lost.
3. I cannot eat much protein, as I have a hard time digesting it and cannot metabolize it properly, because of a genetic condition.
Some people have genetic abnormalities that make the metabolizing, utilization and/or digestion of protein problematic. This is not to be confused with a diabetic's inability to do the same. Diabetics simply need to put their diabetes under remission in order to solve their protein issues and that's not done through protein restriction.
Genetic issues are handled differently and your doctor will most likely advise you to restrict protein. That's fine, as long as you don't restrict it to ridiculously low amounts and/or replace it with junk, like carbohydrate. So, if you have this type of medical condition you can better deal with your problem by keeping these things in mind:
- The minimum recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8 g/kg of current weight. But, a more appropriate value would be 1.2 g/kg of current weight, since it has been shown that the RDA recommendation is too low and can cause future health issues.
- You can divide your daily protein allotment into several meals, rather than try to eat it all at once. Three meals a day is a good way to prevent overwhelming the enzyme requirement for proper protein metabolism. Most of these genetic issues have to do with insufficient enzyme production.
- Digestive enzymes, specifically made for protein digestion, can also be supplemented.
- Have your doctor check your vitamin B6 status, as it's required for the break down and utilization of certain amino acids.
- Make sure that you have enough stomach acid to break down protein properly. Supplement with betaine hydrochloride with pepsin, as needed, if apple cider vinegar taken with meals is not suffice.
4. I have noticed that I no longer have a desire for certain foods, that I thought I couldn't live without before starting low carb. For instance, I no longer care much for coffee.
This usually occurs when you can no longer add what was driving your desire for a particular food item to begin with. Coffee without added sugar, becomes completely unappealing, for many people, and they find they can now live without it. On the other hand, many people new to low carb, find they are suddenly coffee lovers, when they never were before. This is because they dump a carton of heavy cream, into their coffee, to make up for the missing sugar. In both cases, it's not the coffee they love, it's the added energy. Take away the sugar, and the fat, and very few true coffee lovers remain.
So, it's not that you couldn't live without coffee before, you just couldn't live without the added junk in it. No junk, no coffee. The same thing will happen at restaurants and parties. Once the palate porn is removed, having that particular food, in your life, becomes unnecessary and this is a good thing because the more you eliminate, the better. You want to end up with a meat and vegetable centric diet.
5. When following low carb, if you lower your fat consumption, blood glucose will increase.
You are still a diabetic if you have to eat enormous amounts of fat to not see your blood glucose go up. You are simply masking your symptoms using a pretty simple and well established fact about metabolism: fat metabolism displaces glucose metabolism and vice versa.
Dietary fat has now replaced, and taken over, dietary sugar not allowing it to show on your blood meter. But, if there was a 'fat blood meter', instead of a 'glucose blood meter', you would be shocked at your numbers. Your body is doing the same thing with fat, as it was doing with glucose - using it to increase its fat mass. Your metabolism is still suffering under the weight of a very high energy diet. You have lowered your blood glucose, but have not reversed your metabolic dysfunction. It is unmasked the moment you lower your dietary fat intake and realize your body is still making as much glucose as it was before. A healthy metabolism regulates itself and is not dependent on abnormal dietary protocols. Consuming enormous amounts of added fat, to keep blood glucose low, is not normal. That is not seen in any ancestral diet, that has ever existed, nor any metabolically healthy person on the planet.
Since diabetes is conventionally treated, solely through the lowering of blood glucose, of course you would be off your medications, but the diabetes is still there. For that reason, on this blog, we do not give much credence to the reduction or elimination of medications or a doctor's removal of a diabetic diagnosis. High blood glucose is the end stage of diabetes. Not the beginning, but the end. This means that metabolic abnormalities existed decades before blood glucose finally becomes significantly high.
6. Blood glucose should be checked 2 hours after the first bite of food.
There is a lot of debate about this. Most diabetics will check their blood glucose two hours after their last bite, but officially, it is generally recommended that you start counting two hours from your first bite. Most of the food you consume will be digested and will raise blood glucose in one to two hours, so to capture the peak level of your blood glucose, it is best to test one to two hours after your first bite.
But, all of this is just technical mumbo-jumbo. At the end of the day, if your blood glucose is high two hours after your meal, whether measured from the first bite or the last, you are metabolically malfunctioning. In fact, the longer your blood glucose remains high, the more certain you can be of the malfunction, so if you check your blood glucose three hours after a meal and it's still high, your metabolic health is even worse. The same goes from four hours or five hours later. This is because you want the body to clear blood glucose, not keep it marinating in the bloodstream. The longer high blood glucose remains in your bloodstream, the worse your outcome as it places a high demand on insulin release and expression which will lower fasting blood glucose too low.
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