Why is my blood sugar plummeting? page 4

[Matt]

It's interesting what you learn when you venture outside the die-hard "fat-is-everything" realm... thanks for all the advice.

Choco takes a lot of flak here on these boards, but I have really appreciated his posts. I was also part of the HFLC camp since starting paleo 3.5 months ago. I did quite well eating this way for a month or so, but eventually hit a wall and was feeling awful. I read many of Choco's posts and they really started to make sense to me. In the past 2.5 months I have slowly raised my carbs per day, to a point where I now eat a banana, 1 cup of berries, and an orange/apple throughout the day and a starch at both lunch and supper (potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice) every single day and I feel fantastic. I've still been losing the same amount of weight (2-3 pounds per week), and I feel much more satisfied with my "diet".

Listen to what he is telling you, and I bet you will notice fantastic results!

Edit: just for info, I am 5'9 and weighed 205 lbs 3.5 months ago. I now weight 175.

[cori93437]

I probably average more like 150-200g. If I workout it's not unlikely that I polish off 250-300g in a sitting.

Chronic low carbohydrate is rough on your thyroid and adrenals. Many people in the LC camp will deny it to their grave even as their hair thins. Just eat real food.

Choco... can't you give advice without the fear mongering BS.
The truth is that some people do HFLC badly. They make poor food choices and they eat too low calorically and make themselves sick. The SAME thing can happen on LFHC, or just low calorie. It happens to people all the time. They freaking starve themselves, they eat shit foods and give themselves illness, they CW "low fat and low cal" themselves into hair loss and and worse.


I'm all for the girl eating more carbs. But you are seriously hung up.

Also, do you remember one of PrimalStudent's earlier posts... she was eating the same way but also consuming a couple of eggs every day for breakfast, which her parents were riding her about as "unhealthy".

It appears as if she has removed those eggs and their balancing yolk-y fats from her morning routine... replacing them with chicken breast... and now she feels bad.

I think I see what happened.
It's not rocket science.
And I'm not saying she needs to do "oil shots" or "eat bacon and sausage" all day as you so often like to throw about in abject hyperbole.
But eating some real food with some fat in it, just like she was doing before... would be just as valid a response as "eat carbs".

[Derpamix]

She's cooking the chicken in ghee and eggs have a terrible composition of fats, it's mostly unsaturated.

[ChocoTaco369]

Choco, do you think it is important to keep blood sugar in a normal range? If chronic low carb is hard on thyroid and adrenals, what are the consequences of chronic high blood sugar? Thanks.

Too much eating and chronically elevated blood sugar is an issue as well. That's why I don't buy into the whole "6 small meals a day" BS. Spiking your blood sugar is healthy - it promotes insulin sensitivity - but when you are constantly snacking so much your blood sugar is elevated more than it is baseline...that's a whole new problem.

I eat 2 meals a day, maybe 3 if it's an off day or I'm unusually hungry, but it's within an 8-10 hour window or so. 75% of the day my blood glucose is baseline. When you're snacking on food from the moment you wake up until bed, even under controlled calories where you aren't eating a surplus and sticking to whole foods, I question how healthy it is. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see how chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin is healthy, either. Go awhile without food, eat a good quality meal of a healthy size, then go until you're hungry again. That's my opinion.

[ChocoTaco369]

Choco... can't you give advice without the fear mongering BS.
The truth is that some people do HFLC badly. They make poor food choices and they eat too low calorically and make themselves sick. The SAME thing can happen on LFHC, or just low calorie. It happens to people all the time. They freaking starve themselves, they eat shit foods and give themselves illness, they CW "low fat and low cal" themselves into hair loss and and worse.


I'm all for the girl eating more carbs. But you are seriously hung up.

Also, do you remember one of PrimalStudent's earlier posts... she was eating the same way but also consuming a couple of eggs every day for breakfast, which her parents were riding her about as "unhealthy".

It appears as if she has removed those eggs and their balancing yolk-y fats from her morning routine... replacing them with chicken breast... and now she feels bad.

I think I see what happened.
It's not rocket science.
And I'm not saying she needs to do "oil shots" or "eat bacon and sausage" all day as you so often like to throw about in abject hyperbole.
But eating some real food with some fat in it, just like she was doing before... would be just as valid a response as "eat carbs"

It isn't fear mongering. What's fear mongering is the typical exclusionary dieting around here. How can you honestly say "Just eat whole foods regardless of macronutrient composition" is fear mongering? That's fear mongering is trying to stay in between specific fat or carbohydrate ranges 'just because' or something terrible will happen!!! She's clearly afraid of consuming carbs because she's bought into the fear mongering. So how am I wrong exactly?

You can do HFLC without serious health side effects if your diet is nutritious enough and you have the genes to handle it. However, for the majority of people, it is not appropriate, and even if you tolerate it well it will never be ideal. We are made to run on fat AND glucose, not one or the other, and when you're chronically overconsuming one and forcing your body to convert the excess into the other that it needs to survive, you will never function optimally. That's why I eat everything in roughly even ratios - my body doesn't have to work hard to convert macro surpluses to compensate for deficiencies. If you do that for too long, there likely will be consequences. And similar to food choices on the SAD, the consequences oven sneak up on you so gradually you don't even know there is a problem until it's too late. You'll just attribute it to "aging" or something like all the 40 YO's I know that tell me I'll start breaking down once I get out of my 20's. I call BS.

[Artbuc]

Too much eating and chronically elevated blood sugar is an issue as well. That's why I don't buy into the whole "6 small meals a day" BS. Spiking your blood sugar is healthy - it promotes insulin sensitivity - but when you are constantly snacking so much your blood sugar is elevated more than it is baseline...that's a whole new problem.

I eat 2 meals a day, maybe 3 if it's an off day or I'm unusually hungry, but it's within an 8-10 hour window or so. 75% of the day my blood glucose is baseline. When you're snacking on food from the moment you wake up until bed, even under controlled calories where you aren't eating a surplus and sticking to whole foods, I question how healthy it is. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see how chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin is healthy, either. Go awhile without food, eat a good quality meal of a healthy size, then go until you're hungry again. That's my opinion.

Thanks. I asked my question incorrectly. I eat only 3x/day with zero snacks. I eat at 4am, 9am and 2:30pm. What I meant by chronically elevated blood sugar was having a one hour spike of 170+ after every meal. Is it better to limit carbs so my 1 hour spike is 140 or less or better to eat more carbs and let the one hour spike hit 170-200? I can usually get back below 120 at 2-3 hours PP.

[PrimalStudent]

She's cooking the chicken in ghee and eggs have a terrible composition of fats, it's mostly unsaturated.

And I was eating a LOT of ghee... like 1/6th of a cup (which felt like a lot to me at least). And ghee is supposed to be the purest fat out there, yet I felt like crap.

[marcadav]

Chronic low carbohydrate is rough on your thyroid and adrenals. Many people in the LC camp will deny it to their grave even as their hair thins. Just eat real food.

I think it's important to be more specific in terms of LC (especially VLC) and the thyroid. The problem some people run into with VLC has to do, not with how the thyroid gland is functioning, but how thyroid hormone conversion does or does not take place.

Thyroid hormone conversion T4 (known as the storage hormone) to T3 ( active usable hormone) mainly takes place outside of the thyroid gland-- in the liver, kidney, etc. Besides adequate glucose-- thyroidmanager.org states 50 grams as the lower limit needed-- adequate selenium, ferritin, vitamin D helps T4 to T3 conversion.

Other things that can disrupt conversion include stress, overtraining, undereating in general.

To be clear-- in many cases where VLC negatively impacts thyroid hormones and wellbeing it is with hormone conversion NOT thyroid gland function. Test results under this condition often reveal normal TSH, normal FT4 and low FT3.