I just got a new toy: a device for measuring blood ketones. This is a far more exact and reliable measurement than testing for urine ketones using cheap dipsticks. Ketosis is of course the state the body is in when eating very low carb. Ketones, made from fat, will then fuel the brain instead of glucose.
So who needs one of these gadgets? Perhaps nobody. Obviously it’s easy to eat LCHF without it. This is for curious nerds (like me) and for those who want definite proof that they are eating so little carbs that insulin levels are low and fat burning is maximized.
A ketone level somewhere between 1.5 – 3 is said to be an optimal level for maximizing weight loss. It means that insulin levels are very low. As you can see my first measurement was 0.2, after a caesar sallad dinner. I’m not surprised as I’ve probably eaten at least 50 grams of carbs a day lately.
I will try it out fasting in the mornings during the coming days. Perhaps I’ll try being really strict with the carbs for a while to see what happens.
Have you tried one of these or are you interested in doing it?
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120 Comments
Thanks,
Dave
I find this meter fascinating, because I had worked on the first generation of clinical testing methods, back when they were expensive and rare. It is like following the cost, size and availability of computer chips.
Peggy, some folks over at Jack Kruse's site have seriously reduced fasting BG with CT. It sometimes takes awhile, but I think the results are pretty dramatic. Perhaps it is a solution for people who are on long-term low carb but still find their FBG's creeping up.
If one have long time type 2, one can get a mix diabetes with damaged insulin secretion, so one can have to little insulin to.
And its better to take small amounts of insulin then having high blood sugar, becuse its gonna damage ones internal organs and eys.
And it sems that there is a lot of wrong diagnoses.
Becuse if one dosent have enough with insulin, the body do make glucose.
Becuse Insulin is the major regulator of that.
http://www.diabetesresearchclinicalpractice.com/article/S0168-8227(08)00334-3/abstract
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&...
It hasn't been a magic bullet for weight loss but it has done wonders for our blood sugar. So overall it was a worthwhile purchase.
Thanks JB for the resources for the free ketone tester and lower priced strips.
To those of you who are getting the ratios right, could you give a couple examples of a keto breakfast, lunch and dinner? I'm afraid of both eating too much protein and not getting enough since I lift weights but have around 150 pounds to lose as well.
Thanks for your time.
And yes, I'm a woman (and Sietske is my real, a little uncommon and Dutch, name) so everything is always a little more complicated :-S I am keeping more records than Jimmy too, I just want to have all the data, so I track everything I eat, but find that it's hard to only observe and therefore to not change my diet accordingly. Thanks again for your info, I'm always in for a good read and just wanted to know more! I'm curious for your data too... Do you keep a blog or something maybe? You seem very well informed and committed.
My breakfast usually consists of "butter-me-up-coffe", i.e. a double coffee blended with 50 grams of grass-fed butter and 30 grams of whipping cream or coconut oil. Sometimes I make myself another single coffee this way letter in the morning. I was never one for big breakfasts so this serves me fine.
For lunch I like bacon and eggs, 3 slices of bacon, 2 or 3 eggs (2 most of the time actually), scrambled with 20-40 grams of cream cheese or crème fraîche or in an omelet with whipping cream or Just fried with an avocado on the side. And afterwards a single butter-me-up-coffee.
For diner I eat simply a piece of meat (chicken wings with skin, spareribs, liver, ribeye steak, whatever you like but look for fatty meats) about 120-150 grams, a medium portion of vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots sometimes, green beans, salad, eggplant, champignons, sweet peppers, zucchini) and more grass-fed butter, like 25-55 grams over my meat and/or veggies. And afterwards a single butter-me-up-coffee.
IF I snack I like a tablespoon of almond butter and like 4 brazil nuts, or 1 piece of dark chocolate, some high fat cheese or sometimes like 30 gram blueberries richly covered with 80 gram or so whipped cream.
That's it, it's not so hard, everything still tastes as great as it did when I ate only 74% fat, it's even easier to manage hunger-feelings (since they have gone from "sometimes" to "non-existent") I seem to eat less, but my intake is usually above 2500 kcal and if I dip to about 2000 for too long I start to feel lazy, sleepy, chagrined, sad and deprived and I gain weight. Now I have tons of energy, a clarity of mind, I just feel great! And I loose weight, or at least I don't gain, and my ketones are between 2.0-3.5 or something.
It seems we all assume that you already tried a ketone meter, the current subject.
Else I see in other posts here on the blog they come for usd30.- with 10 sticks +p&p.
It would be most interesting to hear what ketone levels you achieved with those high BS.
Also, anyone, Is it possible to have high ketones AND high blood sugar for more than a few days, weeks?
I tried high fat but I started putting on lots and lots of weight very fast. In a few weeks I put on 10lb or more....I was however indulging in nuts...they also have quite a bit of protein and so called incomplete protein for that matter so that it would be of little use to build muscle/enzymes etc and it may go straight to gluconeogenesis...could that have been the problem?
In order to stop myself balooning I ahve returned to a more moderate fat consumption and removed the nuts plus introduced intermittent fasting or rather alternate day fasting/feasting (recent BBS documentary estolling the benefits...etc etc). I find fasting rather easy wondering if it is because I might be in mild ketosis...? I would love to own one such keton meter jsut to give me an idea of what is going on in the black box that is teh body!!....
@peggy..I ahve indeed heard that one can have type 2 D and then develop type 1 with loss of function of the insulin secreting cells due to exhaustion as well as inflammation/autoimmune destruction..that could explain your sister's problems....hope you can get this sorted
Guess the way to use them is one first time in the morning as this is after the time when the liver has been able to produce more BS than used for a few hours.
High ketones in the morning must mean not too much proteins (or carbs...) consumed night before.
If ketones read low reduce proteins and carbs (!) more in the evenings. Then measure again in a few days time until "better tuned".
Think it could be a good way to detect foods "assumed" to be ok.
Therefore I plan to get a meter, maybe for monthly check after first tuning in ...
Any interesting experiences?
Any UK outlet?
If diabetic with a BS meter it could be enough to see that BS is NOT high immediately in the morning, from liver converting proteins during the night....
Without backed by keto-meter I think many claims of what low carb/ketogenic cannot achieve are simply irrelevant. I will go find if new posts from Jimmy Moore on this now!
Has anybody yet found a European place to buy the keto-meter and the sticks ?
Please post the link!. The last US one I found only shipped to US and Canada....
Also, my fasting glucose dropped when I dropped the protein. It bounces around a lot, but the trend seems to be upper 90s before, low 80s afterwards.
It doesn't seem to matter how many calories I eat, or how much fat I eat. Ketosis seems to be directly tied to the ABSOLUTE amount of protein and carbs I eat. Once I've hit my protein and carb limit for the day, I can stop eating or I can guzzle pure fat; it doesn't matter. This holds true whether I eat 800 or 1600 calories in a day. It basically means I have a meat and eggs budget for the day (my two largest sources of protein).
I don't think it's really about the macronutrient ratio in your diet. I think it's about absolute amounts that you can tolerate. I think focusing on percentages of macronutrients just confuses the issue; if you eat 70g of protein each day, the daily percentage of protein will change if you eat 800 calories one day and 2000 the next. Percentages only make sense in the context of a constant number of calories. It's not mathematically incorrect to talk about percentages, it's just a more indirect way to calculate things. Just like expressing your carb limit as 20g/day; it's much simpler to track.
I bought the ketone strips from the Canadian pharmacy that Jimmy mentioned in his original post. Much cheaper, but they did take almost a month to arrive. But even at high US $ rates, I think a pack or two of strips is a worthwhile investment if you aren't already dialed into steady weight loss.
I don't think that makes it less healthy but I think whats natural generally works pretty well and if its not working it has something to do with a mismatch.
As far as I can tell hunter-gatherers have higher protein % and lower fat. Where is the mismatch?
The downside to absolute numbers, of course, is that you have to weigh and track a lot more, at least for a couple weeks till you can start eyeing things up. I find myself eating the same three foods just cuz I can't be bothered to look up the nutrition data and enter it for new stuff. Makes shopping easy, though.
And volek/phinney's "rule of sevens" is really handy when you're on the road and have to figure out how much of your restaurant dinner to leave on the plate.
I'm hopeful this new development will really make people reexamine the negativity on low carbing. I have no idea what effect a low carb, not-even-close-to-ketogenic diet has on metabolism, but it probably ain't good. The last three years of it felt a lot like my old high-carb days.
I'd guess that the more you have to worry about minutia like this, the more broken you are. Healthy people can eat anything. That was my takeaway from Price; all the people he looked at ate radically different diets and were uniformly better off.
I bet hgs could survive fine on nothing but twinkles for a month. 20 years of twinkles, however...
Second, might it be that the hunter-gatherers ate less than we do now? Then their ratios protein/carb to fat would be higher than what's reported here, but their absolute numbers might've come close to what Phinney and Volek recommend... I'm just thinking aloud here, I've not read anything about this anywhere.
But then again, you're right too of course. Theirs was a healthy population, where ours most definitely isn't!
@Willis I agree this newfound definition of my low carb diet and way to measure my ketosis explains a lot for me too, like why all the highs of eating LC seems wear off after some time and why the weight loss stalled. It's a great new development!
Interesting things to ponder heh.
Sadly, I think you're right. I really enjoyed learning how to cook and eat all those huge slabs of meat from Richard Nikoley at Free the Animal. I guess now one big roast will feed me for two weeks instead of a day
Have you played around with more "safe starches" since dialing back on protein? That might be one upside, if cutting back on meat allows me to tolerate some potatoes or rice now and then. I've got to get a lot more dialed in before I'll start experimenting like this.
It took me 59 years of heavy carb eating ( with 30 cigs a day..) to reach the breakpoint where I could not walk 30 yards wihout chest pain and was told that only stents, medications and/or bypass could hold me useful/alive from then on. Now 7 years later I have or use none of that, especially since 6 months ago, when my unstable angina disappeared (!) after a month+ on very strict low-carb!
I was not much overweight, 97 kgs, have dropped to 90 and should be 80.
Why my heart condition reversed that quickly I don't really know, but I will guess. It disappeared together with the first 5 kgs, but 4-5 months later I noted that something was coming back again, yet only very little, and weight had then also stagnated around 92. It was after then I started watching proteins, after reading up about these interesting ketones!
And, soon that well being and increased energy from the first few months came right back, and now I dont feel anything in the chest walking briskly for 10 minutes after only a week, still without that ketone-meter....
Is insulin -or the lack of it - the main connection to my increased well being? A slow insulin drip left in a dog (by accident we hope) for 3 months, more or less completely clogged the entrance bloodvessel. Insulin drives sugar-based energy into our tissues and prevents fat - and what else ? - to come out/ be used/burnt. Like a one way valve, or wind. And the harder we work and the more we manage to focus our minds, the more we manage to drive that required energy into our tissues, gray as well as others, to accomplish just what we want. Insulin resistance and higher insulin levels follows slowly (decades) until side effects like higher blood pressure from hardened arteries, angina or heart attacks results, but usually after long. But at that point there was no return, until some clever guys discovered that many foods that does not contain carbs requires no insulin to whip the energy out into our tissues! Back to that great high energy state, with a brand new engine, as it is still "as new" as left "unused" for 99 % of (my) life, up to then! But I surely see plaque regression as well, else I would not improve like this! Could the regression be a pure result of lower insulin levels, allowing the "fasting or starving body" to scavenge for any materials in tissues our bloodvessels that it can produce energy/ bloodsugar of?
I can never forget the reports from the doctors that performed post mortums on starved people from concentration camps after WWII: Their organs and tissues had shrunk to next to nothing, yet their bloodvessel were as those from new born babies. In principal the ketogenic diet is adding fat in sufficient amounts from the outside instead of from inside body depots, like under normal starvation, but functions in other aspects as if in "starvation", "with excellent fat stores"! The abscence of carbs and very low bloodsugar in part replaced by ketones allows the insulin levels to drop dramatically, which may allow the tissues that normally only absorbs nutrienst to be cleansed from usable excess materials.
That's my take of it; the current take I mean as I hope tp progress!
I think only now research is trying to elucidate the different effects of CR and IF. Unfortunately the background is usually one of HIGH carbs and conventional diets where particpants (or lab animals) are fed artificial diet or think they can binge of cheese cake and chocs after the fast. nobody as far as i know as looked at the combined benefits of CR/IF in a lchf background...except perhaps those studying the last few survyivng traditional tribes.
Metabolically the body bahaves very differently depending on whether you eat regularly or not and what is the interval between meals. Then what you eat is crucial because we do not want starvation and emaciation we want lean-ness and health!
I feel the question of meals and their spacing through the day is very important as is the nutritional value of the foods consumed....I am going to look into this a bit more....hmhmhh
My diet contains a substantial amount of coconut products such as coconut oil, coconut milk powder and coconut chips.
My non-fasting blood glucose also runs in the 80's and 90's, although it does go down to the 60's one hour after an intense workout and breakfast. Before going low-carb, a low blood sugar would have made me weak and really hungry. Nowadays, I feel just fine and don't experience any symptoms consistent with low blood sugar.
I've also been trying to get my serum cholesterol back up to 200, but I'm having little success. I eat 3 dozen eggs a week, the equivalent of 10 tbsp coconut oil, heavy cream and cheese and other "unhealthy" foods and I can't get my serum cholesterol above 180. I guess the only way to get it above 200 is starting eating a "healthy" low fat diet.
After I gave up artifical sweeteners, my taste buds were reset to the "primal" setting. Anything sweeter than a berry is very unpleasant.
"My non-fasting blood glucose also runs in the 80's and 90's"
<86 is better. If you find it sometimes higher, try swapping 2% of your protein for fat, or reducing the amount of protein you eat at night. Try eating most of your protein at breakfast and lunch. This helps a lot of folks.
I have read that MCT's like coconut oil is preferrentially(?) used as energy and not stored in the body. I am guessing that maybe by replacing some of that with real grass-based butter you may be able to raise your (HDL) cholestrol easier.
Sietske:
Re "too much fat and fewer vitamin": Lard is said to contain Vitamin D. Although probably less than what can be got in an UV exposed lanolin (sheep oil) capsule, I guess that the lard vitamin D is probably 100% sulphated and "ready to go".
Our smart systems have probably stored up far more useful nutrients and vitamins in animal fats, including our own than we have been able to map out yet.
Since the sun is our ultimate source of everything , out door "free range" even if less is better in my opinion.
Why do you eat less eggs? Eat only the yolks if you eat to much protein. Yolks have all the vitamines and minerals you need. Eat atleast 4 or more a day. Also some bouillon for sodium make you feel good.
The short story is that now that I am in nutritional ketosis, verified by my ketone meter, I am losing weight for the first time in over a year. There is no doubt in my mind that I was eating too much protein up until now.
Did I need the meter? I guess I could have just reduced the protein and waited to see if I got results, but that would not have been as much fun!
I bought the Precision Xtra from Amazon.com and I got the strips from the Canadian pharmacy for around $2 each from universaldrugstore.com
What does low Ketone blood measure mean in regard to Ketogenic state?
What other fats can I eat to avoid continued weight loss (I may be eating too much protein now?)
And the big question, how does the body utilize fuels in an Anaerobic state if there aren't adequate sugars availabe for fuel???
Thask for any input...
Hes adjusted and seems to be losing weight and his ketones avg between some amount and 2.
http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/jimmy-moores-n1-experiments-nutrit...
http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/jimmy-moores-n1-experiments-nutrit...
http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/jimmy-moores-n1-experiments-nutrit...
Reading the posts/comments may help with clues as to why you aren't there. Good luck.
Still hoping for an answer to anaerobic fuels while on keto diet???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongongo
The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance by Volek and Phinney
It will answer all of your questions and probably more.
he is a sports performance minded doctor that subscribes to low carb performamce
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU
the whole video for me was very very informative but around 1:02:00 might answer what you are looking for. or maybe not. hope it helps.
Peace
Joe E O
I have cushing's disease and the high cortisol is what makes my diabetes uncontrollable no matter how few carbs I eat, even reducing protein hasn't helped because of the cortisol.