Diabetes

Professor Roy Taylor’s diabetes diet and what went wrong for me

April 8, 2020 By Sue Moseley

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll notice things have been quiet since last July when I weighed up the results of my 8-week attempt to cure my diabetes using the principles of Professor Roy Taylor’s research. I followed his principles, not his method. I am pretty confident people would not run into these problems, if they used his method of nutritionally balanced meal substitute milkshakes. I stuck to the caloric restriction of 5,600 calories per week in the hope of reducing my body weight and in particular my visceral fat to a point where my insulin response became normal. I did this using a ketogenic, plant-based diet, plus supplements, in place of Professor Taylor’s milkshake alternative, which I think would be hard to stick to for most people, and for me, impossible unless there was a dairy-free equivalent.

Listen to the blog post

Improvements

I made overall improvements in my stats, including fat levels, bmi, weight, resting heart rate, and my blood sugar management was great, however I was completely disappointed to discover that my body’s ability to handle carbs hadn’t improved at all. A high-carb meal still provoked unacceptably high post-prandial blood sugar levels. I still believe though that Professor Taylor’s research holds a key to curing type 2 diabetes. I do think that if I can get my visceral fat down low enough my insulin response will return to normal and I haven’t given up on proving that yet. However I’m no longer going to try and achieve this using the drastic methodology of my 8 week experiment, and here’s why:

Unexpected complications

I was taking some supplements during the very low calorie phase, to make up for any nutrients I may be missing due to the severely restricted caloric intake. I thought supplementing would easily cover my nutritional needs, but I was wrong.

Because of the drugs I take for the Rheumatoid Arthritis I have regular blood tests and at the end of the 8 weeks my blood tests flagged a potassium deficiency. My hair also started to fall out in handfuls – masses of it every time I brushed my hair or took a shower. Clearly my body did not get sufficient nutrients to function properly as a result of what I was doing and so I don’t recommend that anyone should attempt to do what I did. Less drastic action, that is sustainable over the long term, is a better way to go in my opinion. I still consider fasting to be highly beneficial, the problem of nutrient depletion came from my sustained low-calorie intake over a period of weeks, which is the typical method of many weight loss diets. Short fasts and time-restricted eating, where I ate sufficient calories but limited the amount of time in a day when these were eaten did not result in the same negative consequences, and only bought me the beneficial results of less pain, more energy, more mental clarity, improved vision, lower CRP levels and lower cholesterol levels.

Why did I become potassium deficient?

I hadn’t really appreciated how much I needed to increase my electrolyte intake when on a very low calorie, ketogenic diet. When you’re in ketosis your body flushes out more electrolytes than it would when eating carbs. Advice given to ‘cut salt intake’ is based on people eating carbs, which cause you to retain excess salt and that results in water retention. When you get into ketosis you’ll notice all that excess water in the body goes away and that’s because you are no longer holding onto the electrolytes, including salt, therefore you actually need to add salt to food if you are in ketosis. I was losing potassium due to being in ketosis and I was not eating enough potassium in my diet because of the caloric restriction; I realised after I became deficient that the multivitamin and mineral tablet I’d been taking didn’t actually have any potassium in it at all. The diuretic drug I am on for high blood pressure also causes electrolytes to be flushed from the body, a problem I was aware of due to becoming magnesium deficient a few years earlier, but I hadn’t really thought about as far as potassium intake went, so I’d assumed all my minerals were covered by the supplement I was taking.

Every cell in your body needs minerals to function. Picture of Himalayan salt.

Hair loss

My hairdresser agreed with my assumption that the hair loss was caused by the nutritional deficiencies of my diet. He gave me some products to stop the hair loss, which I’m greatly relieved to find actually work and suggested specific nutrients that I might be deficient in. I have seen bloggers claim that hair loss on a ketogenic diet is normal and part of the process of the body adjusting and will correct itself in time. I disagree. It’s a result of not getting enough nutrients and the diet needs adjusting in my opinion. Using a site like www.cronometer.com to track your nutritional intake will help you to see which nutrients you might be short of, but bear in mind that if you’re in ketosis you may need a higher intake of electrolytes than indicated.

Conclusions

I’m pretty much back to where I started and I’ve regained all the weight I lost. I don’t know what my current V02 Max readings are – due to the lockdown I’m spending most of my time indoors, and I have, in recent months had a few mild episodes of tachycardia again, which my Apple Watch alerted me to, and a mild angina attack. These have given me the motivation to get back on track with exercise and diet. A series of serious illnesses and injury in my family, plus my involvement in a business start-up have meant that diet and exercise took a back seat in my priorities for a while and I’m now reaping the results of that. Without health I have nothing and I’m no good to anyone if I’m dead, so I’m starting over. Being out of ketosis makes me feel constantly hungry and craving carbs, which makes it quite a challenge to be strict with my dietary choices, so burning off the sugar stores and getting back into ketosis (with plenty of electrolytes) needs to be high a priority for me. Starting over is tough though, especially as we are now in the midst of a pandemic which puts restrictions on my diet and exercise choices.

The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere - Barack Obama

Maybe you didn't reach your goals last year. Don't let it stop you from trying again - Sue Moseley

Fasting glucose – my DIY method

May 12, 2019 By Sue Moseley

My own GP no longer carries out fasting glucose testing, instead, relying on the HbA1c test to indicate if a patient is diabetic. The HbA1c test will show an accurate picture of a patients blood sugar levels over the previous 3 months (providing they don’t have any inflammatory disease as mentioned in my previous post), but it will not show how the patient responds to carbs in a particular moment in time.

Listen to the blog post

Why does this matter?

Well, if all that matters to you is good blood sugar control, then it doesn’t matter, but if you’re looking for a cure for diabetes and not just good blood sugar control, then you want to know whether you’re having a normal insulin response to food or not, and you can’t rely on the HbA1c test for that. If you go on a low-carb diet, which I highly recommend if you are diabetic, then you could be getting a good HbA1c result, but still have an abnormal insulin response to food. For example, you can have your blood sugars under control for months because you’re eating low-carb, but then eat some rice or potatoes, test your glucose levels and find that they are sky high and take hours to come down, showing that you are still very much diabetic, even if your HbA1c test gives readings in the normal range.

My DIY method

When you take a fasting glucose tolerance test, you have blood drawn after fasting from the night before, to get a baseline blood glucose reading. Then you’re given a drink containing a specific amount of glucose, and then an hour later more blood is drawn, from which they can gauge how your body has responded to the glucose. So what I have decided to do before starting my diabetes challenge is to eat a high-carb, highly processed and refined meal, testing my blood sugars before the meal and every hour after for 4 hours, to see how my body responds. I intend to repeat this test every 8 weeks and compare the results. If I can cure my diabetes, then my tests should show improvement over time, eventually culminating in a completely normal response to the carbs. When that happens, I am cured, and not just merely maintaining good blood sugar control.

McDonald’s!

So, my source for my highly processed high-carb meal is McDonald’s. The McDonald’s app makes it easy to work out how many calories I’m getting (around 800) and having a set meal allows for consistency at every testing. In the week before I started my diabetes challenge, I ate at McDonald’s and tested my blood sugar before and after it. I had a large vegetable deluxe meal, holding the mayo, and adding ketchup, with a diet coke. This was it:

Vegetable deluxe meal, hold the mayo, add ketchup

My reading before eating the meal

This was in a fasted state from the day before, so too high to begin with.

1 hour after eating

2 hours after eating

3 hours after eating

4 hours after eating

Still too high!

I was hungry and didn’t want to carry on testing to see how much longer it was going to take to get back to normal. I was hungry even in the first hour after eating. Eating highly processed, high-carb food is not filling and seems to make me crave more food.

This was a useful exercise to give me a snapshot of how my body is currently dealing with carbs, which shows clearly that my body can’t cope with them at all well. I’m looking forward to seeing this change over the coming months.

The ineffectiveness of the HbA1c test when a patient has active inflammation

April 28, 2019 By Sue Moseley

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I went undiagnosed for a long time as a diabetic due to having normal HbA1c readings. However I also have rheumatoid arthritis, which wasn’t in remission at the time, so I had active inflammation, which in turn meant that the HbA1c test results could not be correct. Here’s why:

Listen to the blog post

New red blood cells are created in the bone marrow, and when you have inflammation in your body, for example, caused by one of many inflammatory autoimmune diseases, then the production of new red blood cells slows down. In addition to this, you have what is called rapid red cell clearance, which means the red blood cells that you are generating aren’t living as long as they should; they are getting killed off by the cytokines released by inflamed tissue. Red blood cells contain about 70 percent of the body’s iron, which is why when you have a lot of inflammation in the body you also struggle with chronic anaemia, as you have many fewer red blood cells than normal.

Glycation

Haemoglobin, the iron-containing protein found in red blood cells that transports oxygen, becomes bonded with glucose in the bloodstream. This bonding is called glycation, and this process forms harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs for short, which is apt since they cause, among many other things, cell dysfunction, blood vessel stiffness and damage to the collagen and elastin in the skin, producing the effects we associate with ageing.

How does the HbA1c test work?

The HbA1c test measures the amount of glycated haemoglobin in the blood. Red cells normally live in the body for about 3 months and the HbA1c test reflects a person’s blood sugar levels for about the past 2 to 3 months. So, if you are anaemic and don’t have sufficient haemoglobin, or are inflamed, and so the red cells are not living as long as they should, then the HbA1c test cannot produce a true assessment of recent blood sugar levels. Picture this, the HbA1c result gives a reading based on the glycation created over 3 months, now imagine your red blood cells are only actually living for 6 weeks (just a random figure for illustrative purposes), in that case, the amount of glycation could be double the actual test result given, meaning that blood sugar levels were much higher than the test indicated.

The alternative

If you have any inflammatory disease, such as cancer, kidney disease or autoimmune diseases, or you are anaemic, and you’ve been told you’re not diabetic based on a normal HbA1c reading, even though you suspect you have diabetes, then you need to get rechecked using a fructosamine test. The fructosamine test gives a result based on the last 3 weeks rather than 3 months and is much more likely to be accurate for people whose red cells are dying off faster than normal.

Despite the inaccuracy of the HbA1c test in my case, doctors have continued to give me one regularly and when compared to the fructosamine tests, my endocrinologist noticed that as my inflammation came under control then the test results from the HbA1c and fructosamine tests became more in line with each other.