Will a Low-Carb Diet Work for Me?

Will a Low-Carb Diet Work for Me?

Questions??

A low-carb diet is one of the heathiest ways to eat, but unfortunately, it takes more than diet and exercise to reach your weight-loss goals. For most people, successful weight loss also requires you to make a mental adjustment. For that reason, many people wonder, "Will a low-carb diet work for me?" The answer to that depends on your motivation, personality type, and determination to succeed.

What's at the Heart of a Low-Carb Diet?

Before I introduce you to the three personality types that are most likely to achieve success on a low-carb diet, let's briefly discuss what sits at the heart of carbohydrate restriction. Better health through correcting insulin and blood glucose imbalances, improving cholesterol markers, an adequate protein intake, lower hunger levels, and gaining better control over your cravings all make a carb-reduced diet extremely attractive to dieters. But don't forget that the basis for low carbing originally came from "observation" of patients, not strict science.

Today, research has shown that low carb isn't better at helping you shed the pounds than a low calorie diet is, but that doesn't mean that low carb doesn't work or that it won't be better for YOU. It all depends on how willing you are to stick to the program, how your body responds to carbohydrate restriction, and if you can make the mental shift required.

Low-Carb Diet Reality -- Few Succeed

If you sit back and watch all of the participants at the various low-carb forums, you'll eventually come to realize that very few dieters every accomplish their weight loss goals. Despite the low-carb benefits, most people just don't achieve success. There are hundreds of people that spend a lot of their free time socializing, supporting each other, and seeking help for their dieting issues on these boards, but hardly anyone announcing that they have reached their weight loss goal.

However, a few do go all of the way to goal, so those are the ones I zeroed in on to see just what made them different from the rest. Why did they achieve success on a low-carb diet, while so many others did not?

The 3 Personalities that a Low-Carb Diet Works For

Of those who succeed on a low-carb diet, there seems to be three types of people:

1. Those who achieve their goals with a little bit of a struggle. These people stick around the forums in order to help others, and give advice when needed. Some of these people are what are known as "Turtles." The weight comes off very slowly. Or they cheat now and then, and have to climb back into the wagon. Others believe so strongly in the low-carb theory that they don't care if they are losing weight or not. They just keep going. Those who find a low-carb diet has stopped working for them, but they decide to keep eating low carb for their health, fall into this group.
2. Those who achieved their goals by taking a few left-turns along the way, maybe with a tweak of two of their own that failed. Once they come to their senses, they end up revamping their program, but they do it more realistically this time. Part of their newly designed plan conforms exactly with some of the author's views of how they should achieve success. And part of it doesn't. These plans are usually created to fit the person's lifestyle, tastes, health problems, and also include foods the dieter feels they cannot give up. They simply find a way to make those foods work for them.
3. Those who easily achieve their goals, then disappear from the boards to live their lives never to be heard from again. We don't know how true they were to the diet, if they tweaked it to fit their own personality and health problems, or not. We simply never hear from them unless they gain back a part or all of their weight, or more, and want to start all over. There are actually a large number of people who fall into this "Welcome Back" group. For those who do decide to stick around and help others "see the light," they don't help in the same way that group 2 does. Since the weight simply fell off for them, it's more of a knock you over the head kind of thing. Do it by the book, they scream. Follow the author's advice exactly, or you are not doing "South Beach," "Atkins," or "Protein Power."

While it's fantastic that this third group has reached their goal, unfortunately, they don't have a lot of power to help others since weight loss came easy for them. Generally, this is the very first time they have ever tried to diet, so their body hasn't caught on to what they are doing yet.

Will A Low Carb Diet Work for Me or Not?

A lot depends on whether you love the foods allowed on your plan, how much weight you have to lose, and if you're okay with giving up bread, rice, potatoes, and sugary desserts. It also depends on how many diets you've gone on before. If you're coming to the table as a yo-yo dieter, your body will have always decided that a diet is a famine and will fight you every step of the way.

It doesn't matter how accurate the low-carb science is, the body is designed to sustain life and that is exactly what it will do.

If the body determines that your diet is an emergency situation, it will lower your insulin level, but also secrete Cortisol and other stress hormones. That will cause the body to go into gluconeogenesis overdrive every time you lower your calories and/or carbohydrate level. If that's where you're at, that's where Group 2 comes into play. You simply tweak your diet to fit your own personal situation.

But you won't know if you'll have to do that until after you give a traditional low-carb diet a fair chance to work for you. Low-carb diets are extremely healthy because they focus on adequate amounts of protein, lots of healthy vegetables, nuts, low-sugar fruits, healthy fats, and a small amount of low-carb condiments and flavorings. And when Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution is followed correctly, it also teaches you just how many carbohydrates are the perfect amount for you.

Where most people get into problems is either keeping their carbohydrate levels too low for an extended length of time, or they will go on-and-off of a low-carb diet, expecting it to work exactly the same every time they do that. It won't. The body will remember, and it will start a full-body war against you.

A low-carb diet will work for you, but you have to give your body a little bit of respect and sometimes coax it into complying by making it feel secure and safe. That's a much longer ballgame, but the alternative is to never reach your weight loss goals.

Can a Zero-Carb Diet Raise Your Blood Sugar? (Part 2)

Can a Zero-Carb Diet Raise Your Blood Sugar? (Part 2)

Questions?? Sugar..!!

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. If you didn't read Part 1, you can find it here. This post was originally published at my Sharing the Magic of Low-Carb Living blog. I'm moving it here because the information is important and I have other plans for that blog now.)

Once I realized that the zero-carb folks didn't understand biology, I stopped posting to that particular forum. I didn't know if I was hurting myself by being there. However, I was enjoying the thread on Frankenfoods, and I couldn't read and participate in that thread unless I was a member of the forum.

So I just kept silently reading. In addition to the forum, I read everything about biochemistry that I could find on education websites. I read everything on the Bloodsugar 101 website. And I read everything on the "Over 50s" thread at the zero-carb forum as well. That thread began to reveal a lot of things that I was going through. From the gain of belly fat, to the rise in blood sugars, I wasn't the only one having trouble with zero carbs.

Retesting My Blood Glucose Levels

During this time, I'd tried to get my hands on some more blood sugar strips, but our local Walmart was out of them. They had a crazy policy where they didn't order what they were out of. The distribution center just shipped them when they were available or whenever they wanted to. So I wasn't able to see what was going on for another 2 weeks.

When I finally got my hands on some testing strips, I'd been eating a few more carbs daily, which had helped but not stopped the heart palpitations and Neuropathy, because I was trying to get the heart palpitations under control. Plus, the Neuropathy had spread from my feet up my legs. That meant I was doing serious damage to myself by staying on a Zero-Carb Diet.

My early morning fasting Blood Sugar: a whopping 120!

I ate meat and eggs for breakfast, and meat for lunch

Just before eating dinner that day, my blood sugar was: 103

One hour after a 12-ounce steak, my blood sugar was: 155

Since damage begins when your blood sugar is over 140 at one hour or 120 at two hours after a meal, I called a PERMANENT halt to the very low-carb challenge and zero-carb way of eating. Regardless of the forum's claim that you need to stay the course for months, and sometimes years, to give your body time to adapt to that way of eating, it wasn't worth losing one or both of my legs over.

So I walked away from a zero-carb diet.

Returning to Atkins Induction

I returned to Atkins Induction but continued to read at the zero-carb forum because I wanted to keep up with the over 50's thread there. I'm glad that I continued reading because someone posted a link to a journal at the raw paleo forum. Apparently, someone was having pretty much the same problem I was. They were gaining fat around the belly, and had higher than normal blood sugars, though not anywhere near as drastic as mine were.

Finding Someone Else With the Same Problem

I read the entire journal because I wanted to figure out what was wrong with me. I wanted to learn how to help myself. What this person found out was that sometimes it's a problem about eating too much fat. Sometimes, it's a problem with eating too much protein. And sometimes, it's a problem with eating too much food in general.

Okay. I'd already played around with the low-fat thing, and if fat was the problem, I guessed I was just going to have to stay obese. I am not interested in starving the fat off of me. That isn't sustainable. As soon as your motivation dies, so does you weight loss.

Cutting Protein and Raising the Carbs

Unfortunately, just switching to Atkins Induction didn't correct my blood glucose issues. They continued to stay high. A typical blood glucose reading two hours after a standard low-carb meal of baked chicken legs, a cup of broccoli, and a small salad was 175. As the days went by, that number continued to grow. When it reached over 200 at one hour after a meal, I knew I had to do something -- and FAST.

So the next thing I tried was cutting down on my protein and drastically raising my carbohydrates. I cut my protein by 50% because I wanted to clearly see, real quick like, if excess protein really was converted into glucose as they say. I also upped my carbohydrates for the same reason. I wanted to get my blood glucose levels under control as quickly as I could.

On the day of the test, I ate a normal low-carb breakfast of a hot Italian sausage link and a couple of fried eggs. I ate about 24 starchy carbs for lunch, rather than protein. And then I had a mixed dinner of a 4-ounce hamburger patty and another 24 starchy carbs.

My bloodsugar before dinner was: 93

My bloodsugar one hour after dinner was: 103

My bloodsugar two hours after dinner was: 92

My bloodsugar three hours after dinner was: 91

Even though my basal glucose levels were what very low-carb people refer to as normal levels, the real problem I was having with Atkins was after-meal glucose readings. That is what this test improved.

I can't say from these figures alone that excess protein is converted into glucose, since I'd changed two variables in my diet: lower protein and much higher carbs. But I find it interesting that 48 starchy carbohydrates had a much lower glucose effect on me than protein did. That told me that protein takes far more insulin to metabolize than most low-carb dieters suspect.

I also woke up in the middle of the night, about 3 a.m., extremely hungry. I'm guessing that was because my total protein for the day was only 7 ounces, plus two eggs -- about 58 grams of protein. Fifty-eight grams is what a lot of people are eating today on a Nutritional Ketosis plan, but that's a lot lower than the 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass you need to protect and maintain that mass on a low-carb diet.

What Type 1 Diabetics Say About Protein

Around this time, I ran into an interesting post at Dr. Bernstein's diabetic forum by someone who has Type 1 Diabetes. She said she has to inject 8 units of insulin to cover a typical 12-ounce steak. Yet, she only has to inject 3 units of insulin to cover a meal of 45 carbs.

Now that caught my attention, because that's exactly what I've found in myself. Apparently, protein raises insulin HIGHER than carbs do!!!! Which is definitely something that the low-carb gurus and the low-carb physicians are NOT discussing. They are all saying that protein only barely raises your blood glucose, just enough to help usher the amino acids into your cells.

Now whether the game has different rules because I have pre-diabetes and am also post-menopause, or whether that is true for everyone, I simply don't know. What I do know is that for me, carbs are not the bad guy. They affect my blood sugars less than protein does.

Who Does Very-Low Carb Work For Then?

Apparently, you need a healthy insulin response in order to do a very low-carb or zero-carb diet successfully. That's why results are so varied. Most of the people that I've seen succeed on zero carb or very-low carb for any length of time are younger. If you have insulin resistance, not eating enough carbohydrates could get you into trouble. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but Dr. Atkins designed his diet to be progressive in carbs for a good reason. Most people ignore a low-carb diet's original structure.

In my case, dropping down to zero carbs caused the liver to initiate runaway gluconeogenesis, which didn't correct itself until I returned about 60 grams of carbohydrate to my diet on a daily basis. Now, I'm not saying that's how many carbs you have to eat to prevent the problem, but that is how many carbs it took for me to correct it.

Where I'm At Today

The above article was written several years ago, so research today might help to add some additional light to what's going on. However, in my own case, today, a simple Atkins Induction for two weeks will do exactly the same thing to me. It causes my blood glucose levels to rise into dangerous territory and results in a Neuropathy flare-up.

My hypothesis is that the body remembers what I put it through by eating zero carbs before, so it interprets a low-carb diet to be a famine situation, and therefore, an emergency.

What I've learned since I went through this experience is that a lack of carbs causes your body to secrete cortisol, a stress hormone that encourages the liver to dump it's glycogen stores into the bloodstream whenever the mind perceives an emergency situation. Cortisol is a part of our "fight or flight" response. It's secreted whenever the body is under internal or environmental stress.

It's job is to provide the energy one needs to fight an immediate physical danger or run away, so it temporarily lowers insulin levels in order to do that. When glycogen stores are low, cortisol's presence commands the liver to use gluconeogenesis to fuel the emergency. This is a normal response, but if that state of emergency continues, cortisol levels will stay elevated and gluconeogenesis will never shut off.

Without enough insulin to process all of that excess glucose you can find yourself in a very dangerous situation. It doesn't matter that the emergency isn't real. The liver will react as if your life is in danger and keep producing glucose. The liver doesn't read your blood sugar level. It uses signals, such as elevated cortisol to determine the amount of energy you need.

Personally, I think the way that Dr. Atkins originally set up his diet is the best way to go, but for some people, that type of diet won't work. A good alternative would be to implement a low-carb diet backwards. Or you could simply move to a well-balanced diet of 120 grams of carbs per day, cut down on the amount of food you are eating, and see how you do. The important thing to remember is that the higher in carbs you go, the lower in fat your diet needs to be.

Can a Zero-Carb Diet Raise Your Blood Sugar?

Can a Zero-Carb Diet Raise Your Blood Sugar?

Questions??

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. It was originally posted at my Sharing the Magic of Low-Carb Living blog. I'm moving it here because the information is important, and I have other plans for that blog now.)

Over the course of my low-carb journey, I have tried several different types of low-carb diets. Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, Atkins 72, the Kimkins Diet, Protein Power, and a round of hHCG are just a few. Each time I made a change or tweak, I would carefully evaluate my progress to see if what I was doing was working, or if I needed to toss it aside.

In the Spring of 2009, I started participating in a 100-Day Very Low-Carb Challenge. The reason I entered into that challenge was because a traditional low-carb diet had stopped working for me. Since the whole idea of a low-carb diet is to find your own personal carbohydrate sensitivity, I thought the basis for the challenge made perfect sense.

If you aren't losing weight, then you're eating too many carbohydrates. Period!

So dropping my carbs down to zero, or almost zero, made a lot of sense to me. However, no one had ever mentioned that the lower in carbs you go, the higher your cortisol and adrenaline release will be. Why? Because a low-carb diet creates internal stress for a lot of people. The body perceives a diet (ANY type of diet) to be a famine, so the fewer carbohydrates you eat, the greater the famine response is going to be.

Does Zero Carb Lower Blood Sugar and Insulin Levels?

I don't remember how many days I lasted, but I had to call a halt to that 100-Day Very Low-Carb Challenge because I started having serious blood sugar issues. It's absolutely mind-blowing to me that the very basic principles of a low-carb diet do not fit my own experience. But how can that be?

Now maybe it's because we are all individuals and react differently to various foods and macronutrients, but when the very foundation that you've been standing on for months and even decades is ripped out from beneath your feet, it's hard to toss away the disappointment. I have to tell you, I really felt more than a little bit let down. I felt absolutely devastated.

When you lower your carbs, Dr. Atkins and Dr. Eades have said that you automatically lower your blood sugar and thereby lower your insulin levels. Right?

BUT THAT'S WRONG.

Or, at least, that doesn't always hold true if you lower your carbs down to biologically zero. For those of us that are sitting on the fence of pre-diabetes, that's very important information to have and know before you embark into zero-carb territory.

Now, was that stuff withheld deliberately? No. I don't think so. I think that ignorance about the reality of a very low-carb diet sits on both sides of the fence. But one would think that sincerity of heart would keep the doors of discussion open long enough to allow the facts to be revealed without having to pry it out of someone.

That's not how it works though.

Higher Blood Glucose Levels On Zero Carb

I lasted 5 weeks on zero carb. And even though my original intent wasn't to go that low, that's still what I ended up doing -- biologically zero carbs.

When I began that journey, my basal blood glucose was around 84. According to Dr. Bernstein, that's a perfectly normal blood glucose level. In addition, my blood glucose level never bounced up higher than 120, even on as many as 100 to 150 carbs per day, provided I stayed away from gluten.

I did have problems before my gluten intolerance was discovered, but I had absolutely no problems with my blood glucose since then. So I was of the mind-set that my blood glucose problems were in direct relationship to my gluten sensitivity.

The first week without carbs I felt absolutely great. My energy increased, my sinuses improved, and all of my digestion issues went away. My teeth felt cleaner, and the pain I was having in a broken tooth also went completely away.

But after that first week things started to do an about face. Slowly, I started to go down hill. I started out not feeling very well, and then suddenly I found myself having to endure a lot of tiredness. Excessive tiredness. At first, I thought that was because my body had run out of glucose and was trying to convert itself to predominantly burning fatty acids. Everything that we are told by Dr. Atkins and Dr. Eades will happen as our glycogen stores begin to run low.

At that time, I took my blood sugar, because I had one strip left. Although it had been hours since I'd last eaten, I was worried because I felt so terrible. The reading was 98.

That shocked me, not only because it had been hours since I'd last eaten, but because I've always had basal glucose levels in the lower 80s. Even when I was having issues before, between meals, my glucose had always returned to normal levels. But now, I was staring at a number that fell in the upper 90s. My guess at that time was that my levels were never falling back to normal.

So What Do Your Insulin Levels Do on Zero Carbs?

I tried to find information about our insulin levels on one of the zero-carb forums that I was participating in at the time, but it seemed the greater majority of participants there believed that when you cut out the carbs, insulin stays at basal levels giving you a flat line blood sugar curve. Or thereabouts. They didn't believe that the body needed insulin to digest proteins or dairy products.

There was no scientific data to back up that hypothesis. They simply told me that no carbohydrate in the diet came with a different set of normals. At the time, I didn't feel like arguing. I just accepted their viewpoint. As long as my blood glucose level didn't cross over 100, it was safe enough to assume that basal insulin levels were probably normal. Second insulin response kicks in and continues to manufacture and secrete insulin at blood sugar levels that are over 100.

Serious Trouble Begins

After about a month, I started having SERIOUS issues.

Neuropathy had resurrected itself, and I started having heart palpitations. That wasn't a good sign because it meant I was way above my blood glucose threshold.

BUT HOW COULD THAT BE????

I wasn't eating any carbs for heaven's sake. I was just eating meat and eggs. Insulin should be at basal levels. Blood sugar should be low. But my body was telling me that it wasn't.

About that time, I happened to read on one of the zero-carb forums that Bear, the original zero-carb guru, had told folks that protein is not converted to glucose through gluconeogenesis except under starvation or emergency conditions, and that his blood sugar constantly ran in the 100s all of the time. His perspective was that the goal of going zero carb wasn't low blood sugar, but stable blood sugar.

At which time, I thought...SAY WHAT????

At a blood glucose level over 100, stable or not, insulin doesn't shut off! The body perceives that level of blood glucose to be a threat!

For Part 2 click here.