Okay so in brutal honesty I’m sharing this fear with you. While my glucose levels had begun to be pretty consistently in the “normal” range when I decided to get serious about keto and intermittent fasting, they have crept back up over the 100 range. After searching EVERYWHERE for the answer to the question; why are my blood glucose levels rising on a Keto Diet With Intermittent Fasting, I finally found an acceptable answer.
The answer actually came to me in my email box! Don’t you love when you get answers to your questions randomly?
Dr. Fung in his wisdom explains why this happens in great detail which you can read here, but I am going to synthesize it down to bite sized chunks. Using his analogy of a storage cabinet, perhaps you will feel the relief once you understand why this happens, too.
As Dr. Fung describes the process of metabolism, very simplistically, your liver stores fat and sugar. Think of your liver as the storage cabinet. When you measure your glucose levels, what you are measuring reflects what the level of glucose is in your blood stream. What isn’t getting measured is the insulin. Insulin’s job is to tidy up. It wants to cram all the excess glucose into your liver.
If you are insulin resistant, which means your cells are rejecting the call to accept glucose, you have been having the excess stored in the liver. Over time this creates a fatty liver. We call it that, but think of it as being the cabinet that is stuffed full of too much of the clutter that was in your room.
Intermittent Fasting (or not eating for longer periods of time) in conjunction with a Low Carb High Fat Diet helps tidy up that closet. Or heals your liver. As the glucose that was stored in the liver is released, for a while, those glucose numbers are going to stay higher, but should be consistent.
Over all I was good with my glucose numbers up until recently. A couple things changed. One I stopped doing tons of cardio and two I started seriously intermittent fasting. No calories for 16 hours a day. The fasting part is pretty easy once you get fat adapted. Yet the fat adaption part seems to be the thing causing this rise in glucose number.
As your liver releases glucose into your blood normally the muscles and brain would soak it up. (If everything else works the way it should) But, being fat adapted your muscles and brain are choosing to use fat/ketones instead of glucose. This increases the amount of glucose in your blood but isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as there isn’t a lot of insulin there too.
While I’m confident these conclusions will change over time as I collect more data, for now it seems that eating something with significant enough carbs to stimulate an insulin response brings down my glucose. Because of that I will likely continue to see high fasting glucose numbers as I continue intermittent fasting.
Over the course of the last couple days, and after watching a bunch of videos on this topic, I have come to a revelation. Not everyone should do intermittent fasting. I have decided to eat some calories in the morning but no carbs. Specifically coffee with ripple half n half and keto protein powder. There is just a small amount of carb in the coffee. Doing this and then eating a large meal around 10 or 11 consisting of primarily meat and cheese seems to keep my glucose numbers under 100. Where I want them to be.
I find that gentle exercise, not aerobic, like yoga for example, will lower my blood glucose. And believe it or not, sitting in hot water! We have hot springs close to our home so my hubby n I visit twice a week or so. Sitting in the hot tubs for an hour does a great job bringing down my glucose levels.
Over all I feel more secure knowing that my high numbers aren’t something to be terrified of. The 14 week journey to lose 25 pounds continues.
Be sure to grab your copy of Keto Basics and join us over on Facebook.