I was very interested in the interview with Dr. Taylor of Newcastle University in the Diabetes Summit, and since I’ve been having difficulties in normalizing my blood sugars, no matter how low I take my carb intake, I decided to give his program a try. Basically, his program attempts to replicate what happens to diabetes patients who have gastric surgeries. These patients often have complete normalization of their blood sugars immediately or shortly after surgery. There are various theories as to why this happens, perhaps changes in hormones and enzymes, etc. Taylor thinks it’s caused by the immediate, drastic drop in calorie intake.

As I understand it, Dr. Taylor has a theory (the Twin Cycle theory) that type 2 diabetes is caused by fat that builds up in the liver over time, and which eventually spills over into the pancreas and causes progressive beta cell damage and misfunction. He has theorized that what is happening to the diabetes patients who have gastric surgery is that when they are suddenly put on a severely limited diet after surgery, their body accesses the fat in the liver and depletes it, causing an immediate drop in the glucose production of that organ. If you want to read more about his theory and his work I posted a few links below.

In one study conducted by Dr. Taylor and his team, many of the participants did indeed normalize their fasting blood glucose within a week of starting the diet, and in following weeks the beta cells of the pancreas gradually returned to normal function. These effects, after 8 weeks of dieting, have lasted in many patients so long as they do not put the weight back on.

For simplicity, and because some of his patients didn’t know a carb from a calorie, he had them using Optifast shakes for most of their calories, with a few added veggies. He did say that for those who know how, they can follow the program using normal foods. There have been a number of people who have followed his program on their own with considerable success.

So, for the past week I have held my daily calorie intake to between 600 and 800. I found it easier to do this by limiting myself to one full meal per day, so I would have a little cream in my morning coffee and then eat a fairly normal meal at lunchtime and have nothing after that. Obviously, by doing this I am also adding IF into the mix, since I fast from about 1:00pm in the afternoon until the following morning. I have kept my carbs very low as well, but have eaten more vegetables than I usually do, because they fill me up very well.

My results have been very good so far. In this first week I have lost 7.6 lbs and my blood sugars have returned to levels I haven’t seen in many years. My weight is down into the 220s for the first time in 4 years, and my blood glucose numbers are very much improved. I was finding it impossible to keep my fasting BG down below 100. Now it is usually in the 80s. Again, something I haven’t seen in years.

My percentages for fat, carbs, and proteins have remained about the same as usual. The only difference is lowering intake across the board. My average daily food intake for the week:

Calories 749
Fat 58g 69%
Carbs 25g 11%
Protein 34g 18%

My fasting blood sugar the day before I started this was 122.
Day 1: 97
Day 2: 100
Day 3: 99
Day 4: 86
Day 5: 85
Day 6: 89
Day 7: 85
Day 8: 90

Frankly, I'm tickled with these results and I plan on continuing this, hopefully for the full eight weeks. If anyone is interested in more info on Dr. Taylor’s program, here are a few links.

Newcastle web site Newcastle web site

His Banting Lecture in 2012 Taylor's Banting Lecture in 2012

Article in Diabetes Care Journal Article in Diabetes Care Journal

Wow, that's really great Turtle. It seems so sensible to marry his calorie restriction with what we know about carb restriction and Real Food. Glad it has worked out so well for you so far and I hope it will continue. Keep us posted.

My question when I watched his talk was what happens after the 8 weeks? Can the benefits be sustained? I'll be interested in seeing how you progress. Glad it's worked for you so far.

From what I have read, some people retain the good effects, some people don't. It depends on what they do after the 8 weeks. As with any diet or eating plan, those who go right back to the junk food and regain the weight go right back to bad blood sugars.

And then there's the guy in the article in the Daily Mail who got diabetes despite being slim. When he finished the diet he said, " It was time to stop the diet. (I then returned to a healthy wholegrain diet comprising lots of fruit and veg, chicken, fish and non-fatty foods)". So he went right back to the diet that had given him diabetes, because, you know, they're healthywholegrains.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...l#ixzz3W5ctOdZ1

Cool stuff. Thanks for posting.

Looks like liver fat fell 80 percent or so over the full 8 weeks of the Newcastle study. I wonder how quickly it builds up, normally? As long as something was available to take it off faster than it went on, even if things did worsen with time with return to a regular diet, periodic repeats of a low calorie/fasting protocol might not have to be as long in duration as the first run through.



I remember one old study in rodents where feeding them a high fat and sugar cafeteria diet one week, and normal chow the next, etc. prevented the development of obesity and diabetes. The animals just naturally tended to under-eat on the chow weeks, and avoided getting in trouble.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/9....expansion.html



Dr. Taylor references this study in that Banting lecture. It shows the increase in liver fat for overweight subjects who already had about nine percent liver fat at baseline when 1000 calories of sugary junk was added to the diet for three weeks, and then the reversal of the liver fat with a six-month diet, where subjects lost four percent of body weight. They only show the effect at six months, so there might be a compliance issue, further into the diet. The amount of fat gained and lost from the liver in this study is roughly similar to the amount of fat lost from the liver during the first week of Dr. Taylor's 600-800 calorie protocol--subjects went from about 9 percent liver fat to about 12 percent liver fat, where Dr. Taylor's subjects started at 12.5 percent liver fat and went down from 12.5 percent to about 9 percent, judging by the graph.

Subjects spent six months on a "moderate" approach to do far less than they probably could have done in two weeks of 800 calories. Which is really the moderate approach? Years of an ineffective protocol, or a month or two of an effective one? You can see the advantage if it takes a week to reverse the fatty liver that can accumulate in a three week period, instead of half a year.

Turtle I'm wondering how this compares to the Fung protocol for you. Did you try Fung? If so, how did your carbohydrate levels compare, particularly vegetables? How did your calories vary?

I wonder if Fung's good results are more about
1) timing of eating or pure reduction of calories, or
2) combination of reduced calories and carbohydrates or
3) a combination of two or all three....

Could it just be easier to reduce calories overall by fasting than by eating 3 small or 4-6 smaller meals per day? Perhaps the reduction of insulin response makes fasting the easier way of reducing calories and carbohydrates.

I also wonder if reducing carbs would enhance Taylor's results....he seemed to indicate the Optifast worked fine, but I wonder if his results might have been even better if he'd used a real food low carb approach.

My guess would be all three--all of them address insulin. An argument I see a lot, talking about low calorie diets is that it's hard to lower calories for people on the SAD without lowering carbohydrate--since such a large part of the diet is carbohydrate, and people don't want protein intake to be too low, etc. I even see this argument applied to very high carbohydrate approaches like Ornish and McDougall. I think I saw this argument from Gary Taubes first, although I don't know if it originated with him.

It doesn't really wash for me. Take a person eating fifty percent carbohydrate, make it eighty percent, cut calories thirty percent. Seventy percent as many calories, eighty percent of that is fifty six--so now, instead of eating fifty calories as carbohydrate for every hundred calories, a person would be eating fifty six for every seventy, and slightly more carbohydrate, not less. Add protein or fat to a carbohydrate load, and the insulin required goes up. Carbohydrate restriction might be the most effective single macronutrient change to decrease insulin secretion/requirement--but reducing fat and protein that's eaten along with the carbohydrate will have an enhancing effect on the decrease in insulin at a given level of carb restriction. I think maybe this is a strength of something like bulletproof coffee--fat taken many hours away from more insulinogenic foods nourishes the body without raising insulin, and then later one, maybe a person doesn't need to eat as much fat with their carbohydrate and protein--so there's less of an insulin response at that meal, as well (as long as enough time has passed between the fat feeding and the protein/carb feeding that the fat has been fully digested by the time of the second meal).

All 3 would be my guess too, Teaser, from what I've read. Obesity and insulin resistance are fairly complex conditions needing complex treatments.

The reason I'm curious if Turtle can see any difference on the protocols - ease in compliance, effectiveness, etc. between Fung and Taylor is that Taylor professes that it is only reduced calories that makes a difference and he seems less convinced that carb intake makes a difference. Fung seems to think timing and to a lesser extent carb intake makes more difference. Of course, Fung never says to make up your calories missed when you finally eat. He says to eat a normal meal when fasting is complete which would naturally result in many fewer calories on fasting days than eating days.

I guess I did try Fung in a way, because I was doing some IF-ing off and on. I never tried a long water fast. Just didn't feel capable of it. I don't remember all of Fung's program to be honest, and I'm too lazy to look at it again right now. The fasting is the main thing I recall.



My guess would be 'all of the above' though I'm not sure if his patients doing long term water fasts were going to be eating low carb when they broke their fasts.



For me, anything would be easier than eating 3 to 6 small meals each day. That's how I got into this mess - too many meals.

I'm finding myself liking the one meal a day plan more and more. I actually started training myself to eat this way a few months ago after I read a couple of studies about people eating more of their calories early in the day and then having a small dinner - the old idea about 'eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.' In the studies, people who did this lost more weight and improved their insulin sensitivity vs folks who ate the same number of calories each day but more of them in the evening.

I started eating a large breakfast/lunch at midday, and then I would often find myself not at all hungry at dinner time, but if I went ahead and ate something anyway I tended to eat way too much, so I started just skipping dinner. Good preparation for what I'm doing right now. I don’t recall Taylor saying anything about fasting or skipping meals.



I think his results would probably have been better, but whether Taylor is not interested in low carb dieting or simply didn't want to put one more requirement on his patients, I don't know. The way he goes on about calorie counts makes me think he's not a fan of LCHF eating. I was not at all impressed with his CICO comments about how many calories it takes to maintain an obese body. I could show him a thing or two about maintaining an obese body.

I'm hoping that my efforts will be enhanced by the fact that I'm employing low carb and intermittent fasting in addition to the calorie cutting prescribed by Taylor. This simply comes naturally to me at this point. I'm so used to eating low carb now that it's just easier for me to continue to do so, and I described above how I kind of fell into the one meal, IF, way of eating. I’m not saying this is easy, just easier for me than complete fasting or eating a bunch of small meals during the day.

This discussion reminds me Brad Pilon's (of Eat, Stop, Eat ) latest email:



Turtle, happy that you are trying this and will be following all your posts. Know I would be hungry...and cranky ...on so few calories.

Janet, those are interesting words from Pilon. Thanks for posting them.

At first I thought to myself that perhaps I might try that kind of unstructured 'plan' some time or other. Then I remembered that if I cross up my digestive tract with changes like that I have to spend an awful lot of hours in the bathroom. My system likes consistency, not change. IBS, thou art a heartless bitch.

The second thing I thought of was to google Brad Pilon and see what he looks like. Uh, just as I suspected. Young, male, and composed entirely of muscle. Then there's me, old, female, and I know medical science says I must have muscles under there somewhere, but I'm not so sure. He and I may as well be two different species.

Oh, and chocolate and ice cream almost every day? The last time I could get away with that I was 11.



Now that I agree with.

I had the same thought when I listened to a podcast with Brad Pilon. I found it hard to believe that I could generalize from what works for a young male body builder to what works for me, a 67 year old woman with more fat than muscle. I thought he he made a lot of sense in the podcast but that his target audience seemed to be youngish and fit, female as well as male, not old and out of shape.

Jean

Got to say that with today's weight, my BMI just dropped below 40. I am no longer morbidly obese. That makes me so happy. Thank you Dr. Taylor.

That's great news, Turtle. It's always interesting how different bodies respond to different approaches. It's wonderful you've found something that is working for you.