I have unintentionally become pescatarian recently because I’ve come to realize that fish have a lot of nutritional value. So far, my meal plan looks like this:
Breakfast
- 3 eggs
- 1 slice of Ezekial bread toasted
- Mixed berry smoothie with banana, peanut powder, collagen peptides, chia, creatine, non-fat greek yogurt, and water
Lunch
- 2 tin cans of sardines, mashed
- Non-fat greek yogurt
- Tzaziki sauce
- Lemon
- Black pepper
- 2 slices of Ezekial bread toast or one ezekial tortilla, depending on my mood
Dinner
- Shrimp kebabs made with olive oil and veggies
- 1 corn roll or asparagus
Some days I’ll switch out my dinner for a salmon salad / salmon wrap, or I’ll change the shrimp kebabs for a shrimp ceasar wrap with a nice avocado oil based dressing. Being pescatarian is really great because it’s easier to make, shelf life lasts very long, and it’s generally cheaper than buying meats.
ensure?
unsolicited advice on prediabetes
If your worried about pre-diabetes and other metabolic symptoms (hyper tension, fatty liver, visceral obesity excess adiposity, snoring, etc) ; you might want to talk to your doctor about going low carb. Lots of the food you listed will spike your blood glucose (especially the adult formula), which will spike your insulin, which is the foremost cause of pre-diabetes and other metabolic problems. While whole grain/complex carbs are less bad then refined carbs - they are not good and will still spike your blood glucose. You can see this in real time if you put a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) on for two weeks
Yep ensure was the one. I wasn’t sure if it was available internationally so I didn’t put name brand in there.
Complicated Medical Stuff
Yeah I have all those problems lol. I actually did use a CGM and the most concerning thing noted was I was going into high 2’s and low 3’s blood sugar. Normal range is 4–7 so I was hypoglycemic for a big part of every day.
It turns out I was massively undereating for a long time and slowly starving to death, somehow without losing weight as well. When I brought it up in the past doctors were like, well you’re not massively losing weight so you’re fine. But I was measuring my calories and only getting 800–1400 on a good day, when my maintenance was meant to be 2400.
My doctor told me to stop starving to death as a top priority, but due to various other medical issues I physically can’t eat enough food per day. It got really confusing so now I’m using Ensure even though it’s not ideal for prediabetes (I can see it on the graph). All the doctors I’ve seen have mostly just been confused and not really sure how to help me. My disability makes it impossible to exercise enough per day.
My body seems mostly ok with my current diet of whole meal stuff, but any sugar or refined carbs really fucked me up and made me very unwell. So I’m definitely avoiding all sugar like the plague. I did keto for a while but it wasn’t sustainable for me long term. So wholemeal is my compromise.
Overall a shitty situation, not much can be done to help me it seems.
complicated response
That is a common sign of insulin resistance, basically the human insulin is more attuned to the insulin curves (gentle but long lasting) for protein, but we have a diet high in carbs which spike blood glucose - so to get enough insulin to bring down the glucose in a resistant person will actually cause hypoglycemic events!
The vast majority of doctors receive little to no nutritional training (even endocrinologists) outside of tube feeding in a hospital setting - so nutritional help isn’t what they are strong at.
I’m curious what happened, if your open to going into details.
You might want to reach out to medically supervised low carb programs, they may actually be equipped to help you with your medical history. Virta health is the one I have personal experience with, and they are great.
Oh that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll try a dietician instead, I just assumed doctors know all about diabetes stuff…
Keto Problems
What happened with Keto was, I felt like I was eating too much fat per day. I felt greasy and horrible and disgusting and heavy, and my LDL cholesterol went even worse (6.3–7.8).
I tried fixing it by eating mostly protein and low fat instead, but considering I can’t eat much volume per day, that just ended up with me eating almost nothing and things went real bad from there. I couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time levels of fatigue. So I slowly added back in wholemeal carbs and some fat, and at least now I know what types of carbs cause spikes.
The reason I can’t eat much is I have erosion in my esophagus, stomach, and intestines from GERD acid reflux (confirmed via endoscopy). I’ve been on strong acid suppressants for a while but it seems like the “damage is done” so to speak from decades of acid splashing all over the place, and it’s not healing. At least I don’t wake up with a melting throat anymore so I’ll take that.
I’m on statins recently to try and reduce my LDL. The first type I tried gave me severe full body cramps so hopefully this type is better. And this is only a small part of my medical problems. Before we get into POTS, CFS, hEDS, MCAS, chronic migraines, arthritis, hormone problems, heart problems, neuropathy… I always forget most of my issues as well I can’t keep track of them all. I take more than 10 pills per day to manage all that.
I just accepted I’m going to die sometime soon based on this trajectory.
I’ve been trying to increase my walking per day because I heard walking is a great way to reduce diabetes and heart attack risk. I’m up to 15 minutes walk per day and some sneaky resistance training, which knocks me out for the rest of the day, but it makes me feel like I’m doing something at least.
Basically my body is failing in a million different ways at once at this point. If I only had one problem it would be easy to fix, but everything interacts and compounds the issue. Thanks for listening and trying to help by the way, you’re a kind person.
nerdy details
They do! They know how the hormones work, but not how the food relates to the hormones - they really don’t get training on this.
This sounds like a gallbladder wake up issue - after a long time on low fat the gallbladder has some starting pains.
LDL, and cholesterol is not a disease - if your doing proper LCHF and in ketosis - very lean people do see a elevation in LDL, but since you indicated some adiposity this probably wasn’t your scenario.
Low fat isn’t sustainable on keto, if you join one of the medically supervised nutrition programs they won’t let you stay low fat for the reasons you describe. The probably will have you slowly increase fat so your gallbaladder can keep up, or add some bile supplements while you adjust.
Suppressing stomach acidity does match up with your fat intake symptoms. The literature does indicate that keto (but especially zero carb) helps with GERD, but this must be done under medical supervision as medications will need to be adjusted during the onboard phase. I’d recommend either revero (zero carb) or virta health (keto) as programs to work with their physicians in a Telehealth setting.
Statins increase the risk of t2d, so that lines up with the prediabetes.
I’m not familiar with all of those - but migraines, arthritis, hormonal issues, heart, and neuropathy all have strong foundations in the underlying diet and hyperinsulinemia.
I don’t think thats necessary. Work with a low carb doctor to improve your metabolic health. There are LOTS of people with testimonials about how their life turned around by focusing on small metabolic changes. I’m happy to share those if you would find them motivating. Where ever you are - you can improve - just focus on one step at a time.
That is great! every bit of movement helps.
My suspicion is that everything is rooted in metabolic problems just manifest in a hundred different ways.
Yeah! I’m happy to help if I can. I really think you should reach out to virta, this is exactly their focus. Please reach out to either revero (zero carb) or virta health (keto) to see if they can help with your health management.
I get high LDL on very low carb even at 20% body fat (but with a waist smaller than my hips)
You don’t need to be super lean to be a lean mass hyper responder
Really? wow. I didn’t realize the effect was so common