Low carb diet for high blood sugar

Bucknutz247
Bucknutz247 Posts: 224 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
So the doc tells me my blood sugar was a little high. There is diabetes in my family so I have to take this seriously. Anyone had luck with high protein low carb diets to keep sugar levels low?

Replies

  • CharlieBeansmomTracey
    CharlieBeansmomTracey Posts: 7,682 Member
    yes for many low carb does help with blood sugar issues but as anubis609 said weight loss can help with lowering blood sugar too, most people also pair their carbs they do eat with fat and protein which helps. high protein low carb may work only one way to find out is to try it and see. how high is a little high? but I see your concern since it runs in your family.
  • ssbbg
    ssbbg Posts: 153 Member
    My mom has had incredible success in reducing her diabetes meds after switching to a low carb/ high protein diet. I recommend buying a blood glucose meter and just running some experiments for yourself. Even though my labs are fine, I have one and test myself. There are some foods/ quantities of foods that spike my blood sugar into levels that I want to avoid (200+ mg/dL for a big baked potato... after a 3-hour bike ride when I thought I could handle "all the carbs". I actually felt weird... and now that I can link that feeling to high blood sugar, I know that many times over the years I've put myself there. Normally at brunches in restaurants, where I have pastries/bread & potatoes and not a lot of protein. I always thought that feeling was from having one too many cups of coffee.)
  • nvmomketo
    nvmomketo Posts: 12,019 Member
    edited January 2019
    I agree with a previous poster who said that self BG testing is important. It really helps. Some react badly to sugars and fruits while others find starches are a larger problem. Some like me find they do best, and feel my best when all carbs are very low. Testing before and after eating is the only way to know how foods affect you.

    I recommend Doctor Bernstein's Diabetes Solution as a great guide. Sarah Hallberg has a lot of helpful info on the web.

    I used a moderate protein high fat diet to stabilize my BG. It started working within days, and I lost a few pounds to get into a normal BMI range, and then some. As mentioned, weight loss can help too, as can reduced stress and adequate sleep, but if I eat higher carb my BG will rise and fall more than I like. I'm low carb for life. I feel better this way so it really is a no brainer for me.
  • ssbbg
    ssbbg Posts: 153 Member
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    The best thing you can do for your pancreas and liver is lose excess weight. The second best thing you can do is get regular exercise, at least 30 minutes of moderate activity every day. Both of those are more important for someone who is not yet diabetic than watching carbs. Watching carbs will reduce your A1c, but losing weight will actually improve insulin resistance.

    I agree that exercise and losing weight are important and especially for the improvement of insulin sensitivity. I disagree that watching carbs isn't important. Persistent high blood sugar causes damage to many different systems. Lowering blood sugar via low carb lowers the potential damage and can be implemented immediately (hopefully while you are working on longer-term things like exercise and weight loss.) I'd say it is also extremely empowering because you get immediate feedback to your actions.
    Eating a moderate amount of carbs, no more than 150g a day, should also help cravings which are caused by insulin resistance.

    I'd argue that for many people this is in fact "low carb" and would require a concerted effort to achieve. For example, MFP's defaults suggest I eat 256 g of carbs a day.

    I personally think 150 g of carbs is a fine place to start, but that adjustments do need to be made based on post-meal blood glucose measurements.
    @ssbbg I assume you are diabetic with numbers over 200? A healthy person should never see a number above 160, regardless of what they eat, which limits the usefulness of a blood sugar meter for a healthy person.

    Nope. Blood work from the doc is fine. I test my blood sugar out of curiosity. I think it is an interesting tool even for a "healthy person". (I don't actually know what you mean by "healthy person", which is why I'm putting it in quotes. I'm assuming you mean non-diabetic from context.) My own self-tested BG data (outside the potato incident I mentioned above) is well within the normal range for both fasting and post-prandial.

    With regard to the 2 lb baked potato incident (which I think I ate in about 30 seconds (probably an exaggeration) because I was ravenously hungry from a long bike ride), I didn't actually recall the exact number other than "very high" and guessed that it was 200+ when writing my response. (Looking back through my meter data the highest number since I bought it was 157, so probably that) I physically felt ill. It was an extreme outlier to my normal data and it was a memorable experience. If you found that one of your meal choices was spiking your blood sugar into pre-diabetic ranges, wouldn't you like to know and want to change it? Or even if you think 157 mg/mL is a perfectly normal response to a massive carb dose for a "healthy person", wouldn't you want to know what was behind a weird and unpleasant feeling you had so you could prevent it (or at least make an informed choice)? I don't want to feel like that again and I'll be careful about eating that many carbs that quickly moving forwards.

    On a related note, an article was published where the researchers put continuous blood glucose meters on a bunch people and fed them different types of meals (macro splits). An interesting finding was, "Importantly, we found that even individuals considered normoglycemic by standard measures exhibit high glucose variability using CGM, with glucose levels reaching prediabetic and diabetic ranges 15% and 2% of the time, respectively."

    So I'm not the only "healthy person" who has run into high blood glucose with certain meals. :)

    The article is here: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2005143
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    Does your doctor know about that 200 reading? Have you had a glucose tolerance test? Fasting tests and A1c are not the only things out there - anyway, I was basing my statement on the ADA diagnostic criteria, which say that any reading over 200 which can be duplicated on more than one day is diagnostic of diabetes.

    Normal range for post-prandial is different from acceptable range for a diabetic - the ADA is fine with diabetics having post-prandial readings up to 180. "Normal" goes up to 140 but in practice a non-diabetic person should have to eat a ton of carbs to see readings over 120.

    Also, the point of the quoted article is that the people with the high readings are not okay, even though standard testing failed to indicate a problem. It's not meant to say that those high readings happen to people who are fine.
  • Bucknutz247
    Bucknutz247 Posts: 224 Member
    Thanks to everyone for your advice. I really appreciate all of it.
  • __Chanda__
    __Chanda__ Posts: 30 Member
    Diabetes runs in my family as well. I was pre-diabetic with high cholesterol. At a physical my doctor told me to lose weight and had a list of things to change/supplements to take. I had lost wieght with low carb/keto in the past, so thought I'd try it again. After going back to Keto, I've started losing weight, and at my last physical, my labs were perfect. My doctor said, "Whatever you're doing, don't stop". My blood sugars and cholesteral have shown significant improvement. Good luck to you!!

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