One of the biggest challenges that serious, long-term calorie restrictors face is eating enough calories to maintain their weight. Digesting high fiber food choices can be difficult if you aren’t used to it. Your bowels can slow down, and eating a lot could be difficult for you, much less maintaining a healthy gut microbiome.
Many things can help with this. Drinking enough water (2 liters/day), regular use of fermented foods, and taking advantage of easy-to-digest foods like the new bean pastas.
The other day, Meredith and I both noticed that our weight was lower than we wanted. So we ate substantial amounts of a delicious bean pasta flavored with red onion and dill and mixed with sweet potatoes. The servings were huge, 1200 grams each. After eating them, we made it a point to take our postprandial glucose levels. Mine was 86 mg/dL or 4.8 mmol. and Meredith’s was even better at 79 mg/dL or 4.3 mmol. We followed that meal with a walk up and down hills for an hour.
We are not bragging. We are just illustrating that it’s possible to eat enough calories and still control glucose levels.
- Highly intelligent, diligent folks often try to control glucose by eating too few calories. You probably know that there are lots of nutritious foods that you can eat with abandon and you won’t raise glucose very much – broccoli, cauliflower or salads and the list goes on and on.
However, if you fill up on these, you will lose weight. Don’t do that! Your glucose levels might not be perfect right away, but give yourself time. It took us years to get to this point. Many of you have achieved extraordinary results within just a few weeks. Your glucose levels are better than ours were after a few years.
Glucose control takes time. Your pancreatic β cells need to relearn lower fasting set points so they will help you get your glucose where it needs to be.
Bowel health takes time too. If you’ve eaten high-protein or high-fat meals for years, or you’ve taken antibiotics or steroids, you probably have work to do before you can process very complex carbohydrate meals easily. Case in point: The other day I ate a big serving (200 grams) of cooked hulled barley along with lots of red cabbage (300 grams). In earlier times, those foods alone would have created so much gas and bloating that I would feel like I could explode. They had this effect on me after I took a course of antibiotics to rid myself of multiple tick-borne diseases. But no longer: After using fermented foods to work my way back to a healthy gut microbiome, I enjoy these very complex carbohydrate foods without any problems.
Other lifestyle habits may help with glucose control too. We will be talking about those on the Glucose Control Basics teleconference, set for this Saturday, April 23, at 11:30 am (ET). The day before that – Friday, April 22, tomorrow! at 7:30 pm (ET) – we will have a special teleconference for Great Glucose Control subscribers with diabetes. Find out more information and join the classes by using this link or call us at 877-481-4841.
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