Yakumo, are you aware that when you are following a low carb plan that the results of a GTT can not be considered accurate unless you have been consuming a diet consisting of a minimum of 150 grams of carb for 3-4 days prior to the test?

I should also point out that anorexia/starvation will cause insulin resistance as can stress (high levels of cortisol) and high levels of human growth hormone (HGH).

As you are trying to gain weight, what is wrong with getting your appetite back? It could well be that your body is telling you that it needs more fat intake by increasing your appetite when fat in increased.

Let me just get right out on the table now and let you know that your hunger is NEVER GOING TO GO AWAY until you eat food consistent to maintain a somewhat normal weight.

Trust me from experience. You will be hungry all the time, food will always be on the cusp of your thoughts; in fact you may even find yourself so getting used to this mild hunger that you forget you are living your life in a chronic food-obsessed energy deprived underweight state.

No matter how big your meals are (for those times you do eat a lot), you're still going to be a little hungry until you put on weight. The more weight you gain, the more consistent you feed your body, the more normal your hunger will become. Eventually you will reach a point where you can skip meals and go just fine without eating something and not think about food all the time.

This is assuming you continue to control blood sugar and IR of course (assuming you have thes eproblems) - if you neglect to do this, then gain all the weight you want and your body will never regulate weight and appetite. Uncontrolled IR is like starving (depriving your body of energy), only while eating food and gaining fat. It does similar hormonal things as true starving does in so far as food intake impulse and hunger.

But yea, if you are wondering why no matter what you eat you feel like crap, and are still hungry, it's because you're 140 pounds and a 6'2 man.
Also be aware that as you gain weight your tolerance for food will increase. Initially a big meal may knock you out, even if it's LC. If you keep at it and let your body gain the fat and muscle it needs from the excess sugar and insulin,
eventually your "tolerance" for food will increase. You will find yourself feeling normal, and eventually good after eating.

Sorry guy but I think all of your problems stem from your self starvation. They may be rooted partially in IR (in that it was initially IR which caused you to starve yourself for relief). But as of today your emaciated size and habitual starvation is the reason eating messes you up, and why you are always slightly hungry no matter what and how much you eat.
If you eat normally they will go away. If you have IR, then just keep carbs lowish and you'll be fine. The reason starving originally made you feel good is because starving purged the sugar from your system, which caused your high insulin levels to drop to normal. This energized you and made you feel better.
But you should know you can feel this way simply by eating normal meals that are low in carbs, high in fats, protein, and veggies.

No need to do atkins or count carbs either - just use common sense by avoiding many sugars (use artifical sweetener and bake your own sweets - YUM YUM thanksgiving pumpkin pie w/ whole grain flour and splenda)
don't eat starches (eat fats or diet starch products instead) and
eat lots of veggies and adequate fat & protein.
Odds are this will fix you up nicely. Works for me.


WHen you starve yourself (eat very little) eating more turns back on your appetite. It's related to insulin and sugar and stuff, yes, but the answer is not to continue starving yourself. It is a deprived body's natural response to deprivation. You have to "tough it out" and gain that weight, suffer through hunger signals that make no sense and energy levels that mimic death. This is actually pretty common. Soon you will find yourself able to tolerate food like others can.

You can do it slow by slowly giving in to the hunger, or you can do with the guys in the minesota experiment did and just go on binges, get fat, and then wait for your body to fix itself with time. Either way you have to accept that you will be pretty screwed up for awhile until your body reaches a sufficient weight and stable energy intake. Not until then will your energy levels be good, hunger normal, etc.




If you have a sensitivity to carbs, this is an extraneous factor (of the starvation state you've induced on yourself to control it). You can control the IR that originally lead to you desiring to starve yourself for peace, by avoiding meals that are too high in carbs.

Don't worry about "ideal ratios" or any mumbo jumbo - unless you are severely IR or diabetic or afflicted with some serious blood sugar disease, odds are just using common sense will be enough. Use splenda instead of sugar, avoid starches, and when you do eat them make sure they are small portions & diet. Eat a staple of veggies, meats/fats, fruits, dairy, etc. Doing this will take care of the numbers so you don't have to.

You have never had obesity so you don't have to worry about controlling that (calorie levels).

Just eating common sense - watching sugar and starches (and fruits and other carb sources) and trying to avoid them as much as possible should work for you.

One thing I can tell you with certainty is that you will never get better if you keep on eating broccoli and beans for meals.


Like I said, yes you do have metabolic problems. You can expect crazy hunger and screwed up energy and insulin levels after normal meals.
They are mostly related to starvation and the condition you induced by becoming underweight.

If it was IR which originally caused you to turn to starvation for peace (which is understandable), then controlling carbs will allow you to gain weight and return to a healthful condition without encouraging the original condition that triggered the starvation behavior.

Either way, it's clear the first step to gaining health is eating food. It's unreasonable to expect your body to forget how seriously emaciated and malnourished its become even if you eat a big meal once in awhile. A big meal of steak and eggs is not going to satisfy you the way it made me and other overweight LC dieters feel at first. It doesn't matter what you eat you are still going to be hungry until you allow your body to rebuild its muscle and fat stores to normal. This is all hormones and stuff, you can't trick it.

Again I would like to make something clear.
Carbs cause an ABNORMAL state.
LC restores a NORMAL state.

I've been on both sides of the coin - LCing while fat, LCing while rather underweight. LC does not take away appetite magically, it just allows it to work normally. Carbs broke mymetabolism and took away this ability. LC gave it back.
So LC does not suppress appetite, it just allows it to work (at least this is true for me). It only so happens that LC suppresses appetite if you are overfat from uncontrolled IR (a low energy state that encourages fat gain and hunger to try to keep energy up). If you are under fat and your muscles are emaciated, you will be hungry even if you are LCing. Fat store state WILL affect the shape and curve of your appetite's intensity, no matter what you eat.

Does this make sense to you?

Hmmm. That was a seriously helpful post, Itsthewoo. Yeah, initially I was not starving myself, I was just doing regular Atkins. But I found that I needed to eat less and less to feel as good. Now, I find it near impossible to stay in ketosis without severely undereating. But I don't think I should be in ketosis anyway if I want to rebuild. So I agree that 90% of my current metabolic problems come from starving myself, the rest from candida and my liver issues and being so underweight. I do, however, still have IR. The trouble is that it comes back so quickly (high insulin) even if I avoid carbs. I think it's because insulin is such an anabolic, rebuilding hormone and my body kinda needs relatively high insulin to repair itself. That Schwarzbein woman seems to think along these lines. In fact, after reading about it, it seems high insulin is part of the body's natural repair/rebuild mechanism after you've had some kind of serious illness or infection and I still have an infection. So maybe you're right and I should just eat and not be so afraid of it. The trouble is that eating makes me feel like rubbish (tired all the time, fall asleep after meals, or hungry all the time or hyper or jittery or something) while undereating makes me feel so good. I definitely do better LC than HC. I don't think I'll ever be able to eat HC again (What a bummer. Going to miss those doughnuts). I was IR and struggled with carbs and blood sugar (mostly hypoglycaemic) long before I ever went on LC or started to undereat. Only weight training helped the situation. But back then I weighed 198lb and could eat a whole lot more and never passed out after meals.

The thing is, if I start eating above about 30 or 40g of carbs a day OR if I start eating meals high in sat fat, or any sort of reasonable sized meals, then my appetite quickly increases seemingly without bound. It's exacerbated by the fact that often if I eat a normal-sized meal (e.g. last night I went out and had a hamburger patty with some low-carb veg), I can't digest it well, but my insulin seems to go up anyway and I end up just feeling more hungry instead of more satisfied. So it can get to the point where I feel like I'm STARVING and I could eat a whole buffet sort of thing. But if I ever give into my hunger (even if I avoid carbs), I end up feeling like rubbish. It's really, really, really difficult to control. What I find is that I can keep it on a cyclic basis. I eat progressively more and more as my appetite increases, then it gets too great so through force of will I go back to a mini-fast and sort of reset it.

I just don't know what or how to eat. Just about any food seems to either increase my appetite too much, or make me feel sick. Unless I eat really low calorie "non" food like broccoli and stuff and lots of oils. But eventually if I do that I end up starving again. I guess I just have to stick it out and keep trying. Food also tends to make my liver hurt and my vision in my right eye blur. It gives me skin rashes and makes my neck lymph glands swell. At least most of my abdominal pains seem to be subsiding though (thought I had Chron's or something for a while). This seems to be relevantly independent of the nature of the food that I eat and it's because of rubbish like this that I used to just not eat. Eating sucks, but it's all I want to do. I'd kill for Big Mac. I'm also really scared of putting on weight because I think it'll make my IR worse. But I can't really put on lean weight because my hormones are so messed up and I eat so badly. But I REALLY need to put on weight.

Perhaps I'll keep trying the homo optimus diet. It made me feel really good, except that I was hungry a lot. And it was quite weird how I could eat 100g of double cream just before bed and yet my weight was not increasing. Kind of fun as diets go, but I'd rather eat a nice bowl of butternut and sweet potato over a pork loin-chop anyday.

Anyway, I get what you're saying. So do you think my insulin and energy will really stop going ballistic eventually if I just continue to eat? I do think I should throw a bit more carbs back in too though. Non-starchy variety, but I think I should shoot for at least 50g-100g a day (though I don't really count). Perhaps you could email me and we could discuss this. U sound like you've had some experience. you can get me at dirk.coetsee~accenture.com

The thing is, like I said, eating is not my only problem. Liver, hormones, adrenals, candida, some sort of viral infection, hashimoto's. My body is really, really unhappy. But I think that undereating allowed a lot of these problems to creep in. Drat. So anorexia causes IR? What a bummer. And to think I used to undereat to try and REVERSE my IR. Wish my doctor had said something instead of just giving me HRT.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any more advice you guys can give. I still think that I should not eat too much sat fat since in published literature it seems to worsen IR while mono-unsat fat seems to make it better. But I do need some and no amount of olive oil can satisfy appetite like animal fat. Also, I have read a good study that said that eating a LC diet with lots of protein and fat also caused IR. So I need to avoid eating too much protein also. And I need to get out of ketosis. What a mission...

Perhaps if I just ate lots of veggies? Really low-gi variety and lots of mono-unsat oil? I donno. I never did well as a vegetarian...

I just have no idea what to eat. Sauerkraut makes me feel good! But that's because it has basically no calories...

See, it's not just a hormonal problem. I primarily feel better when I don't eat because it makes my autoimmune/inflammatory disease go away. I'm not sure what it is. Some kind of IBD, like Chron's, but not as severe. Abdominal pain, skin rashes, liver pain. Perhaps I am developing Chron's? And I keep it at bay by not eating? I don't know. Maybe the Optimal (homo optimus) diet would be best. I just don't know

Are you sure that your health problems are directly linked to your food intake?

Jo

Most of them are. At least, insofar as if I don't eat, I feel well. If I eat certain foods, I feel sick. If I eat a certain way or a certain volume, I feel sick. However, there is an underlying problem that is not so much related to what I eat as how my body reacts to it. Food intolerances, inflammation, infection, liver problems, insulin problems, digestion/enzyme problems, glucose utilisation problems, hormonal problems. All these things make eating very difficult. I don't really know what the root cause is. Candida? Leaky gut? Something more sinister? Am I a budding Chron's patient? No idea. My doctors aren't all that helpful "just eat" they say. As if it were that easy.

There are certain foods that I can eat without feeling sick though, so I'm trying to stick to those. Broccoli! I love broccoli.

Do yourself a favor. See if you can find any of the research done on recovering concentration camp victims from WWII. I'm sorry I can't provide a citation, but if you can find the records, you'll find that all of these reactions, particularly the sleepiness after meals, is normal for someone recovering from starvation. You put in nutrition, your body wants to use it for rebuilding immediately, rather than letting you 'waste' it. I think if you can consistantly eat proper nutrition, you'll find that goes away after a while.

You say a lot about "I read thus and such...". I propose to you that studies prove all sorts of things, many of which are dependant on who is paying for the study. I also point out that listing to all that advice hasn't helped you one bit so far.

If you think you have Chron's, or some other serious intestitinal disorder, I highly recommend "Breaking the Vicious Cycle" by Elaine Gottschall, which is designed to help people with serious problems. It can be interpreted in a low carb fashion.

As someone who has had insulin resistance and hypoglycemia all my life, I can tell you that eating low carb gives me very stable insulin and blood sugar levels.

I can also tell you that I eat all saturated fat all the time, and I believe my insulin resistance has improved, rather than worsened. My body likes butter much better than olive oil.

Glad to see we are agreeing that starvation is probably the major reason you are so FUBAR with food and health. Many of your symptoms correlate to recovering from starvation. It's not fun or easy.

Out of curosity have you had all these conditions verified by medical doctors and blood tests? To be as IR as you are it is highly abnormal to have no present weight problem (or history of excessive eating and obesity). IR correlates with obesity mainly because eating a lot of carbs (food) and gaining weight does things to our metabolisms that cause it. It's a lifestyle disease with strong genetic predisposition. In other words, IR shows up when we cause it after a long history of really crap eating habits. It's really really really rare for someone who is both thin and young to be super insulin resistant like you are.

I would like to point out that many symptoms of IR - such as hypoglycemia for example - may actually stem from another condition unrelated to classic metabolic syndrome (which is more a consequence of american/western diet & obesity). Hypoglycemia is caused by a relative deficiency in adrenal hormones, it alone is NOT necessarily indicative of metabolic syndrome. The source of this "deficiency" is often assumed to be hyperinsulinemia as a consequence of insulin resistance & too much glucose food (the high insulin makes it impossible for competing adrenal hormones to function and "overrule" the insulin level). Other disorders completely unrelated to IR and hyperinsulinemia may be the reason a person is hypoglycemic.
Saying you have IR because you have hypoglycemia is like saying you have IR because you have hyperglycemia; usually it's true (only because metabolic syndrome is so sadly common due to our lifestyles and diets). However, there are a whole population of hyperglycemics who have no metabolic syndrome at all! They are the type 1 diabetics - they don't have too MUCH insulin but too little due to autoimmune disease.

So you see the danger in diagnosing yourself with conditions based on symptoms alone?

Just trying to give you some food for thought.
If there really is a serious disease(s) at the end of all your starvation behavior, do NOT assume you know what it is based on symptoms alone. It's not that I'm against self diagnosis. Sometimes we can self diagnose. I diagnosed my IR (and reactive hypoglycemia and PCOS) for many years before actually having a doctor tell me a few months ago. It was funny hearing a doctor tell me I was glucose intolerant and had reactive hypoglycemia, as if he were explaining it to a patient with zero understanding of the conditions.
However in my case my symptoms were so numerous, classic, and extreme, plus I had blood tests to support me, that it really was a no-brainer. I had the works. Plus my case responded very well and rapidly to treatment (LC diet & weight loss) which further reinforced my diagnosis.

In your case, your symptoms are sketchy and often contradictory, are not responding to typical treatments (LC is making your IR worse? Say what?) and as far as I understand they are not supported at all with any kind of labwork. Plus you have been starving yourself for a fairly long time, are presently underweight, and we all know that sort of behavior will cause many of the problems you are struggling with. So in your case, I do not think it is appropriate to go on self diagnosis at all, and if I were you, I would see doctor(s) to assist me in finding out the root of my problems.
BTW you should also be very honest with your doctors - that is, disclose the true nature of your eating habits and weight - it woudl do neither of you good for them to "chase a phantom" when it may very well be EXCLUSIVELY a problem of self starvation & abnormal eating patterns.

This is completely normal.
It might help you out to read some anorexia recovery literature, because it would seriously demystify what's happening to you.

Starving initially suppresses appetite. You can't tolerate more than very small bits of food.
Once you take those first few bites, watch OUT. You become insatiable.
Then you may be sated and stuffed a bit after your binge. You want to doze off and feel as if you've been hit by a truck energy wise.
However, the hunger is still there, and is in fact more intense than it was before. The only solace from this is the overnight fast where your body again gets the wretched stuff out of its body, insulin is back low, body is back burning it's tissues for sustinance.
Sound familiar?
I went through this once i started gaining weight. I would literally lose control and just binge out on meats and feel like death. Go read back my old posts and journal from a few weeks ago (I gained about 5-10 pounds in 3 months). I thought my body turned too much protein into sugar.
Now I know it was a part of the weight regain process. Now I no longer feel like that. Eating meat doesn't do that to me anymore, normal sized meals do not phase me, big meals barely do at all either (bad news for my weight ). In fact, I can even eat big meals with carbs and not experience as dramatically those symptoms (yes carbs still knock me out but not like they did in the very begining).

It's all part of the underweight & drastic under eating.
Your body is FUBAR right now. You just gotta keep eating and gain weight and eventually your metabolism will adapt. Keep on controlling carbs reasonably (don't go and eat no carbs or anything stupid) and you'll be okay.

It's not eating broccoli, it's NOT EATING FOOD that makes you feel good. Not eating makes you feel good because you've ruined your body by adapting it to starvation.
Don't consider your broccoli diet a diet, because it's not, it's starvation. Even Melissa DeHart the famous anorexic eats beans and a bunch of equal packets (which have trace calories) - she got down to 58 pounds that way.

It would help you to think of it in clinical terms like this.
If you continue to starve on your broccoli and beans diet, you will only get worse. You will continue the starvation cycle that makes your body not able to tolerate food.
If you start to eat, you will feel discomfort initially. You will experience losses of control with food, and at times paradoxically eating more will make you hungrier and more tired. This is part of the process. Like batspit said: your body WANTS you to be that way so it can more effectively rebuild its lost tissues. It's not a stupid body, it knows what it's doing.

Whatever diet you do just make sure it's reasonably low in bad carbs like sugar and too many starches (if you have IR) and sufficient in cals. That's what is most important.

Yes

I agree, this will also help speed your recovery. Carbs help you grow tissues. Problem for your average fat american? Heck yes. Problem for an emaciated man? Heck no, it's what you want, it will help. Just make sure you get plenty of protein and fat, too, as these are even MORE essential than carbs for rebuilding your tissues.

Sure I will send this reply to your email
If you ever need to ask me any questions feel free to drop them in my journal, or you can email me at withthelightsout00~yahoo.com

If these problems came AFTER starvation it's likely they did.
Carbs are actually a very common impetus for anorexia.

Then of course the anorexia makes you way sicker than you were, and so you starve more to feel better, and it's just a vicious cycle. The only way to stop it is to eat and control carbs.

Well under eating DOES help improve IR. However if you are starving to the point where you are in this adrenal-hormone environment from all the physiological (and psychological) stress of wasting essential tissues and barely getting basic nutrition (TRUE prolonged starvation, not occasional restriction to lose excessweight)... then yea, it will also cause it.

General practicioners are pill dispensors who know what to do for what symptoms. Really. You usually have to go to a specialist and a good one to get any kind of meaningful help.

I disagree completely. In fact my metabolism is best (that is I can tell it is most balanced by hunger levels, energy, and ease of entering ketosis) when I'm eating relatively more animal fats like eggs. As you can see from my bloodwork I am only healthier after doing this.

Beware of anti-LC studies; most are funded by industry with vested interests.
You would be well served to peruse our media forum. You would be surprised how extensive the distorting of facts; the layperson will get sucked in totally unless he's digging deep.

I hope some of this helps you out...
Bottom line, if you take nothing else from my post, you need to start eating food. This alone will fix most of your health problems.

This is like reading a low-carb novel.

Hi guys,

Only saw now that there were more replies to this thread. Thanks for the input.

Yeah, my symptoms are definitely a classical result of post-starvation. But some of them predate all that. I don't know why I got so IR since I was weight training and doing cardio and was fit and lean when I developed it. But my IR condition was supported by lab work. I wasn't eating well at the time. I think though that excessive exercise and stress contributed to it all (cortisol, adrenaline etc.). So I think I took the alternate route to IR described by Dr. Schwarzbein (elevated cortisol and adrenaline). Also, My infection started before the starvation. Some sort of chronic virus or mycoplasm or something. Made me really weak. And then other infections eventually crept in (candida etc.). But yeah, I'll try just eat more and put up with the fatigue etc. Makes me suck at my job though. I'm a machine when I don't eat. But, can't keep that up.

Anyway, thanks very much. In addition, I never received your email, ItsTheWoo, since I changed jobs and email addresses. Perhaps u could contact me on dirk.coetsee~gmail.com if you wouldn't mind

Sincerely
Dirk

No, you're still talking about controlling it. Just because my mom takes insulin for her Type 1 diabetes, doesn't mean it's cured. If you have to take medication like that, you're controlling the ailment, not curing it.

No, I have heard of people who take Glucophage and go on a diet to control their IR and then they no longer need to take glucophage or be so careful. If they are overweight and become lean and strong this helps tons and tons too. There are hormonal issues as well I think. Although I think that if you've been IR once, you'll have to be careful forever.

I'm not sure why anyone who wants to gain 57 pounds would starve themselves...I'm so confused...

what i've always learned is that type two diabetes can be carefully controlled by diet, to the point of not needing medication, but that it cannot be cured. kind of like remission. under control, but not gone.

With each new post he contradicts what he said in the previous post. I think he is a poor soul looking for some attention.