Yeah, this is more of a test of a protein-sparing modified fast. Blood sugar is behaving very well, no big surprise.

Too bad we can't see his insulin levels. If I had to bet, I'd say his insulin is lower, even if his blood glucose is the same. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a case where somebody's body could produce enough insulin to handle the carbs and protein that he's eating, but not enough to handle the increase in insulin needed to handle the combined carb/protein/fat load.

Okay, he's on the third day of Phase two now and has upped his carbs. He posted this:




Will be interesting to see the details.

Definitely. Wonder how high the carbs are?

I'd like to know too as well as if he's eating ad lib.

Here are his BG from the last two days... the 19th:





And the 20th:

On October 1 switched up my macros - going from the 20 net carbs that I had been doing over the summer to 40 net carbs per day. The extra carbs are mostly from eating more LC fruits & veggies and the addition of a limited amount of starchy beans. I increased my protein some and lowered the calories from around 2400 per day to around 2100. My fasting BG was mostly between 75 to 85 over the summer. Since adding back more carbs, it has dropped to the upper 60's to low 70's. I have not had a FBG in the 80's (or above) all month. I didn't really expect this -- and I'm not sure why it is happening. But I am eating more sugar and my FBG has dropped. I guess I can assume that my insulin resistance is improved and my insulin is doing it's job.

I read through that link about Steve's experiment. What caught my attention was the comment "I was hungry this morning and I'm hungry now." Eating low fat and carbs at a level that the body can deal with might be just fine for glycemic control. But is it sustainable? I'm not hungry doing what I'm doing. I can sustain what I'm doing. I like how I eat.

Yes, I'd really like to see how that works long term. At 700-1,200 calories for an adult male, that is really almost a starvation diet over time. The U of Minnesota study was almost 1,600 calories. Fat in the same range as his at 17%. They did not do very well after a period of time. But I bet their BG numbers were beautiful!

Krushva--I suspect you had physiological insulin resistance while down at 20g per day (not a bad thing). Now that you've added more carbs, it has eased up. That is what happened to my sister. It would be interesting to look at your insulin levels, as apposed to BG readings.

The reason his calories were so low in phase 1 is because he wanted his body to adapt to VLF while keeping a normal BG before adding in the carbs for phase 2.

I've been giving the Rice Diet some thought, and it seems to me that it was a calorie restricted diet that maintains life through some restricted digestion, shutting down of many metabolic processes, kind of way. What kind of shape were their gall bladders in, I wonder? Would they be condemned to eating this way forever?

Now that's a circle of perpetually hungry hell, I tell ya.

They were able to add in other foods including animals but it still had to be VLF. *Minger said in her AHS speech that if they added so much as a tablespoon of oil, they'd be back on their insulin.

*Edit: https://youtu.be/KFfK27B_qZY?t=20m15s about the 20:15 minute mark

Now that is a very depressing thought!

If that's the case, it's not a cure of course. I don't know why addressing fat tolerance as well as glucose tolerance isn't assumed to be necessary to call an approach a cure as opposed to therapeutic. I still think both approaches should be considered--because there's enough variability in what can go wrong that a person who doesn't respond to one might respond to the other. A person who just doesn't respond to the rice diet with a substantial decrease in free fatty acids, for instance, probably wouldn't experience the expected increase in insulin sensitivity from the high carb intake. On the other side--if a person's body just plain insists on producing large amounts of glucose, even on a very low carbohydrate intake, it might be their own endogenously produced glucose that they're intolerant of and that's keeping insulin levels high on an approach that keeps free fatty acids elevated. Or something. These approaches are different enough that if the one doesn't get you there, the other might.

And... I wonder how well tested the effect of that one tablespoon of oil was. After his diabetic retinopathy paper, people accused Kempner of fudging the data and cross-labeling the before and after pictures. He took his toys and went home, pearls before swine, no more studies for you.

Also--you try eating about four grams a day of fat for half a year or so, and see what it does to your fat tolerance. The body's not going to handle it the same way it would after a period of adaptation, and the more time that's passed since you've eaten any appreciable amount of fat, the longer that period of readaptation is going to be.

Your gall bladder is likely to be sludged up too.

I don't know about that, Nancy. If diabetics are at higher risk of stones because high blood sugars cause peristalsis, a VLF diet might be as beneficial in that regard as a LC diet. More studies needed!

One day, there will be a doctor with enough insight to offer both remedies to his patients. Where one fails, try the other. Over time, they'd probably get pretty good at predicting who'd fare better on what as the clinical experience comes.

Edit: I just want to thank the forum owners for allowing such discourse. Try explaining why a LC diet works on a LF vegan forum and you'd probably get booted.

I remember reading about the Drs. Eades saying they ran into so many formerly low fat eaters with bum gall bladders because it requires fat to express the bile. Unexpressed it remains inside and eventually crystallizes then hurts like hell when you eat fat.

I thought peristalsis had to do with the movement of food through the alimentary tract. Don't know how accurate the source is: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/ga...ml#.Vif0CH6rRhE

Yes, we can debate nicely! Unlike certain political party debates that go like this:

Candidate 1: "You're stupid and ugly!"
Candidate 2: "No, you're stupid and ugly!"
Candidate 14: "Hey, what about me?"
Candidate 1: "You're just a dumb dodo."

You have a point. One thing about VLF cultures is that they periodically have feast days where they eat fatty meals and maybe work out the sludge before it forms stones. The thing is though, that it doesn't take very much fat to stimulate bile secretion and people on SAD should be expressing bile on a daily basis yet they still get stones.

Edit: I meant VLF above not VLC (so used to typing VLC) Corrected.