1. Diabetics are recommended snacks which they don't need.
This is because it helps them manage their blood glucose better when they are on diabetes medications.
Diabetes medications lower blood glucose levels but they continue to do this, even while the person is fasting, and their blood glucose is already lowering naturally. This can cause for blood glucose to drop too low. Eating prevents this. This is why snacking is encouraged. Not because it helps treat the diabetes. It just helps prevent the medications side effects.
2. I have been eating less than 10 grams of carbs a day and stopped taking my insulin. I also recently started fasting for 48 hours at a time. My blood glucose has not stabilized! In fact, it's worse than before. I can't get a single reading below 140 mg/dL, even after all that fasting.
Sir, mam, you are a diabetic. I have no idea why you are eating less than 10 grams of carbs a day or why you stopped your insulin. I am really hoping, praying actually, that your doctor was the one who stopped your insulin, but I highly doubt that if your blood glucose is so out of control. I don't know what you are doing or who told you to do this. I get people from many groups and pages sending me weird questions like this. I have no doubt that someday, any day now, someone will drop dead. I see it coming. It's inevitable.
Stop the shenanigans. The way this should have been addressed is by you starting on a classic low carb diet of no more than 100 grams of carbs a day. You would have first discussed this with your doctor so that your blood glucose could be monitored, and your medications lowered or eliminated as needed. Then, with time, as you gauged your results, you would have modified your diet to meet your goals. Did you do this? Absolutely not.
Instead, you decided to go online and begin on a ridiculously low amount of carbs (fad diet) and also stop your insulin to boot. Then to make matters worse, you threw in a long fast as well. Just because. If you are on prescribed insulin, it was because you are a full-blown diabetic. You are lucky though that your blood glucose hasn't gone to 500 mg/dL. This means you didn't crap out on the gamble you took with your own health and life.
This will not improve with time. Not on the protocol you are on now. Your body will just continue making sugar on its own from the massive stress you have put it under. You will be one of those "keto" practicing diabetics, that have been able to "lower their blood glucose" while still having Dawn Phenomenon and hyperglucagonemia. You know, the ones who are always chasing symptoms and fasting longer or eating more fat to try and budge their numbers a few points down? Basically, they are striving to keep the same diabetes they started with five years ago. In about five more years, you will be back on insulin and fully diabetic once again.
Why don't you address your problem in a more sustainable, long-term way that will actually reverse your condition with time? Look at the right-hand column of this blog and choose a proper protocol under 'Recommended Diets'.
3. It is difficult to get weight loss advice.
Because there is no one way to "lose weight". When people refer to "weight loss" they are usually talking about "fat loss" specifically. Losing fat is at the sole discretion of your leptin expression which is controlled by your neuroendocrine system. This varies with each individual. Many factors play into this, including how much body fat we are actually trying to lose.
Simple weight management can always be addressed by targeting calories. Overweight/obesity can only be addressed by targeting multiple factors. That gets complicated. Very complicated. This means that unfortunately there is no simple advice that can be given to achieve this.
- Weight loss – easy to do. Weight is water, muscle and fat. Anything that temporarily affects these, will cause the scale to lower. You can simply dehydrate for two days, and you will lose weight. In fact, this is how certain athletes try to "make weight" even though it is a dangerous practice. Weight loss is best achieved with calorie restriction. The lowering of calories automatically causes water and lean muscle mass to be lost through the temporary lowering of blood glucose which lowers insulin. That's why all diets will promise you a five-pound loss in the first week, guaranteed.
- Fat loss – hard to do. Fat is fat. It is stored in your fat mass. Your fat mass is an actual organ. It is a large endocrine modulator. It's loss is determined by leptin. Leptin expression is only affected if blood glucose is properly regulated for a long enough period of time to affect insulin expression. Leptin is a slave to insulin. Only then will leptin sensitivity be restored and body fat is burned if there is no hypothalamic damage.
What is healthy fat loss? Healthy fat loss is when fat is lost at a steady, slow rate. This is because what you are actually trying to achieve is not "fat loss" per say but a fat burn and storage balance. You want the body to burn mostly fat and not store too much of it. This can only be achieved through a healthy and balanced interplay between your fat mass, metabolic hormones and brain. It is mostly out of your control as it is governed by your hypothalamus. You can only set the stage for this to be more likely to occur than not and that stage's foundation is proper blood glucose regulation.
You do this through following a lifestyle that promotes this balance. It includes diet, exercise and stress management. By stress we are specifically referring to metabolic stress which is managed through circadian rhythms to help regulate blood glucose.
This is why there is no specific advice to be given. You can only learn how your body works and what it needs in order to work properly. Anyone that says otherwise is giving you a load of BS. That's why diet programs are all BS.
4. Don’t fat people burn a lot of calories? Wouldn’t what's a surplus for thin people actually be a deficit for a fat person? If that's the case, why is everyone recommended the same number of calories?
That’s why we don’t guide ourselves by calories. Fat people burn a lot of calories from everything but body fat.
5. Can a person who is not overweight/obese maintain their weight using calorie information only? I have a friend who is slim and always reads the calorie information of everything she eats. It seems to work well for her.
Yes. Healthy people respond well to elementary nutrient information such as calories. Of course, these calorie counting people also pay attention to which macros are supplying their calories, as they know that's where the magic occurs. But overall, they can rely on calorie information alone to maintain their weight stable regardless of macros, as long as their blood glucose continues to be well regulated.
This is because healthy people aren’t overweight/obese, so their metabolism works well even with simple nutrient information. Their weight fluctuates very little and small weight fluctuations respond to calorie information, as that's what mainly causes these fluctuations. So, these people are targeting the actual cause of their weight fluctuations.
6. How are low fat diets supposed to work?
Low fat diets work through leptin, just like low carb diets work through insulin. Your coach will tell you that they work through the overall control of calories but that's not true. It's actually leptin and insulin manipulation. All weight loss and gain is mitigated through insulin. All fat loss is mitigated through leptin.
It is assumed that people who are overweight/obese are "leptin resistant", so they don't burn fat properly. This would mean that if you lower their fat intake, they will see benefits. What would be the point of intaking more dietary fat if you aren't using what you already have, right?
It's sort of like the same premise of low carb diets. If you are insulin resistant, what would be the point of adding more glucose, to the body, if you aren't burning what you already have? The assumption actually works.
Lowering the fat intake of overweight/obese people, who might be leptin resistant, does cause some weight loss. Unfortunately, they don't lose enough to not be overweight/obese. With time they also regain what they lost back again.
The problem is that you can manipulate insulin for the long term but not leptin. That's why low carb diets work better than low fat diets. Leptin is a slave to insulin so if you don't control your insulin first, you won't get much from leptin control in the long run. You control insulin through the proper regulation of blood glucose.
The best protocol then would be low fat and low carb. That's basically a protein sparing modified fast, right? Right. So, it's not surprising that's the protocol that works best. It's just that it's difficult to adhere to for the long term. It's sort of like calorie restriction. Very hard to maintain and eventually has to be changed in order to continue with results and help keep the results you already achieved.
To solve the problem, instead of making your protocol low fat, you can instead use fat as a lever. Remember, it is being assumed that overweight/obese people are leptin resistant but that's still just an assumption that can't be applied across the board. There are many overweight/obese people who are leptin resistant but there are some who aren't. The minute they control their blood glucose regulation and obtain proper insulin expression, their weight drops rapidly. This is why it's not a good idea to jump on low fat first. You jump on low carb first and then lower your dietary fat according to your results. This is because too little fat, for too long, causes what you are trying to avoid or reverse - "leptin resistance".
This is the same thing that occurs when you lower calories for too long. The body goes into "starvation mode". "Starvation mode" is simply a trendy way of saying "leptin resistance". The body is actively trying to stay fat and get fatter. It does this through chronic leptin under expression.
The good thing is that you can continue to be low carb forever and have no such negative side effects to metabolism. You can be zero carb, forever, and have zero problems because insulin just doesn't work the same way leptin does.
So, remember the diet that will most likely achieve results is low carb, adequate protein and fat as a lever (moderate). Some people can eat more fat than others and still see results. Don't sabotage your weight loss journey by making everything too low. Only one thing can go very low – carbs.
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