In the 30 days since I completed the fast, my fasting blood glucose has dropped from ~80-90 down to 65-75.
I'm concerned about the accuracy of my Freestyle Libre, but it was previously consistent with professional labs.
Anyway, a long term fast like the one I did may help improve your insulin resistance; it seems it did for me.
The only obvious changes have been 1. Smoother, younger looking skin with fewer blemishes 2. I look ripped
In this study, people with FBG levels above 95 had more than 3x the risk of developing future diabetes than people with FBG levels below 90: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(08)00231-3/fulltex...
This study showed progressively increasing risk of heart disease in men with FBG levels above 85 mg/dL, as compared to those with FBG levels of 81 mg/dL or lower: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16207847
https://vitamindwiki.com/Overview+Metabolic+Syndrome+and+vit...
The pain may be related to blood pressure.
Is there any reason you didn't also add a multivitamin? How much D and K? Magnesium? Ever had any lab work done?
My BP is under control though I would love to stop using BP drugs. In fact, I would like to see legislation around the use of them, i.e., doctors must within 180 days, find the root causes of the abnormal BP and within 360 days, have the person on a program to fix it. BP drugs are bad news and put people at grave risk (as the body fights the effect) which means if you stop taking them, your body fighting the ffect triggers a rebound. It's happened to me twice when the pharmacy was screwing around with my prescription.
Magnesium is 100mg, 3 times a day. It is chelated and bound to a couple amino acids. K2 MK4, 100mcg twice a day. K2 MK7 100mcg twice a day.
The only lab work I've had done was testing for the usual things, cholesterol, triglycerides, checking for h.pylori, etc... I don't think they even do a ldl lipoprotein spectrum graph.
Because a ketogenic diet depends the amount of carbohydrate restriction that will cause your body to physiologically be generating ketone bodies (eg, say less than 20g of net carbs), even at a constant formulation that doesn't change (as your TDEE changes) you will still be in the same state of ketosis - eg, if you measured your mmol concentration of BHB, it would likely remain the same. However, your caloric deficit of course would change (and you would need to lower it to match that to maintain your rate of weight loss).
In your hypothetical example, if your TDEE were 2000kCal and you were able to eat and absorb 4000kCal of butter a day, you would gain weight (although slower than the expected 0.57lb/day due to increased TDEE; this expenditure change (up to +50%!) was shown in the Vermont State Prison overfeeding experiments in the 60s). But despite that, due to the complete lack of carbohydrates, this diet would definitely stimulate ketogenesis (and would do so regardless if your TDEE were a 2000kCal surplus or deficit).
Due to the complete lack of proteins, you would eventually start consuming some lean body mass to produce some of the glucose (a percentage of glucose would be provided by the glycerol molecule holding together each triglyceride) required by the brain (~30%) and RBCs. I'd expect a pure butter diet to have about the same physiologic effect on protein-sparing as an extended fast (eg, you'd probably last a couple months before eventually expiring).
Never said it's healthy, but you will lose fat. If you're not keen on the ethanol poisoning aspect of the diet, you can substitute complex fibrous carbs like broccoli or some such and get similar results.
Of course if you really don't care about health you could poison yourself with Dinitrophenol. It's the fat burning drug. Literally. Users routinely die from their bodies cooking them to death.
If you were taking a drug and it made you feel horrible would you take more? Most likely you would stop or at least forego increasing the dosage.
These people didn't die because of dinitrophenol. They died because of an underlying condition. It's an accidental suicide.
Linking an article to with a brief overview, but there are many studies that can be found online.
[1] https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure...
Interested why you decided against metformin. Lots of people without DM or Metabolic syndrome are taking it for its apparent life extension effects (mostly unproven this far in humans). For diabetes, there's pretty solid evidence.
I work in this space tangentially and I had not heard of berberine before. What are you hoping to achieve with this supplement?
While I can't disagree w/ Metformin/Berberine being effective for glucose control, I personally don't think that they aren't great long term for the dysbiosis, B12-deficiency (for metformin) and toxicity (for Berberine) effects... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478780/
Most people that haven't long-term diabetic (eg, completely destroyed beta cells) should be able to get their health back in order via primarily dietary interventions, although it may require some detective work (conscientious dietary, blood work, body composition tracking).
Some of the hypertension may require addressing the IR, which can just take time to resolve: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/3299096/
Some of it may also be insuring adequate electrolytes, most people are much too low on ketogenic diets: https://blog.virtahealth.com/sodium-potassium-magnesium-keto...
I think waist:height ratio is definitely the best home measurement, but hopefully you're getting good supporting bloodwork as well, which can be very helpful in helping diagnosing problem areas. Also I found DXA and RER testing to be personally quite useful as well, especially for tracking progress on visceral fat (I took off 25% of my body weight off starting last summer). Good luck!
Adding 20-30mn HIIT sessions fasted right before breaking the fast may help also.
The hypertension may be related in some cases to sodium depletion causing aldosterone production (and cortisol and adrenaline) leading to fluid retention (and potassium excretion).
For this reason some people supplement themselves with sodium/potassium during keto or long term (72h optimally) water fasts.
Egg whites are the most bioavailable protein. Humans can use about 98 percent of it. I used egg whites to good effect when one of my sons needed more protein for some reason.
Reference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748147
(This is not advice per se. I'm just making conversation and super tired.)
I don't exactly know why, but some suggest it reduces inflammation, or improves blood sugar regulation.
From wikipedia:
Multiple human and animal trials indicate MSM may reduce oxidative stress and inflammation.
A recent review of 2009-2016 NHANES data concluded that only 12.2% of Americans were in "optimal cardiometabolic health". https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/met.2018.0105
The guidelines they used were (very similar but slightly more stringent than the ATP III):
* waist circumference (WC <102/88 cm for men/women)
* glucose (fasting glucose <100 mg/dL and hemoglobin A1c <5.7%)
* blood pressure (systolic <120 and diastolic <80 mmHg)
* triglycerides (<150 mg/dL)
* high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (≥40/50 mg/dL for men/women)
* not taking any related medication
Even w/ ATP III, only 19.9% of American adults don't have metabolic syndrome.
What metabolic syndrome really is, is hyperinsulinemia/insulin resistance. You should get your estimates by having fasting glucose and fasting insulin tested for to get HOMA-IR and QUICKI estimates (TG-FB and TC/HDL are two other estimates you can use). If you are IR (probably 80% of American adults), then you can improve this by eating less often, eating earlier in the day, or eating less carbohydrates (especially those with a high glycemic load) - doing all three is pretty doable and actually tends to work synergistically (endocrinology!). Exercise also helps improve insulin sensitivity, but you can't really outrun a bad diet.
Praise the power to define/change definitions of these values...