high fat, keto, feeling sick all the time

[littleElefant]

Hi,

I feel like a total failure. I would love to do the ketoginic raw paleo diet, but my body does not do the work. I have and allways had problems with fat digestion.  The amounts of fat I have to eat to keep my weight or even to gain weight I can not digest. I have to take a lot of enzymes and herbs and ACV and Lemon and 1000 other things to help me digest and even with this I feel most of the days very very sick and anxious. I'm breating hard and short like a 70 jears old fat man,  I have body odor, if I eat a lot of beef fat. I loose weight every day at the moment, now I'm on 38 kg, 1.65 m, Is it possible that some people just can't adapt to a high fat livestyle? I'm sick every day and sometimes I think a starch based diet would be so much easier. I'm diabetic type 2 but when I tried the futarian very low fat diet last year my blood sugar was not so bad (but I did not like it at all; all this sugar, I was quite disgusted)
When I read what some of you eat without discomfort I'm amazed. Don't know what to do, dont want to be sick any more because I force myself to eat things he apparently can not handel. This is so wrong and I'm getting sicker and weaker every day? This is redicioulus. Is it possible that some people will never adapt to a high fat diet?

[aem42290]

Not all of us are built for high fat/low carb diets. I, for one, tolerated the diet well for the first few months, and then my body began to crumble.  Judging from your general symptoms, it would seem that your body is kindly screaming at you to stop the experiment. However, as a type 2 diabetic, ketosis may benefit your metabolism in some ways--so long as you use the diet intermittently and very carefully. But let me ask a few questions before saying much more:

How long have you been on the diet for? The adaptation curve for a ketogenic diet can be rather steep, and typically people experience negative side effects for the first few days, up to a couple of weeks.

What fat/protein ratios are you working with?

Are you eating fresh organs along with muscle meats?

Are you getting at least 30-40g carbs per day for your brain's glucose needs?

How is your gut health?

Regarding the weight loss, what you are experiencing does not seem to be completely out of the ordinary, as ketogenic diets have a tendency to initially cause a significant decrease in the body's ability to store water, I.E., reducing water weight. As a diabetic, though, you should be extra cautious with sudden drops in weight.

As a final thought, I think balance is key when it comes to a functional, optimal diet. Going down the strictly fruitarian path is as problematic as reducing carbs to a negligible amount. You can still reap the metabolic benefits of a moderately low carb diet even if you include some more fruits, greens, and certain vegetables. For some of us, being in either ketosis or ultra-high carb mode constantly can really take its toll on our health. Again, think balance.

[eveheart]

When I read what some of you eat without discomfort I'm amazed.

I'm not sure what motivates you to copy what someone else is eating when you don't feel that it works for you. Also, I don't want to challenge you about what type of diabetes you have, but weight loss like you describe is not typical of diabetes type 2. What does a medical doctor say about your situation? That information might be helpful to you - I find that information useful - but it doesn't mean you have to follow a doctor's treatment plan if you can do well on your own.

If there are foods that you tolerate (without high blood sugar) within the 100 g - 200 g range of daily carbohydrates, why not start there? That should put you in the "low carb" range without ketosis. In terms of "diabetes" jargon, you'd probably be eating 3% and 6% vegetables plus some fruits.

[aem42290]

I'm not sure what motivates you to copy what someone else is eating when you don't feel that it works for you. Also, I don't want to challenge you about what type of diabetes you have, but weight loss like you describe is not typical of diabetes type 2. What does a medical doctor say about your situation? That information might be helpful to you - I find that information useful - but it doesn't mean you have to follow a doctor's treatment plan if you can do well on your own.

If there are foods that you tolerate (without high blood sugar) within the 100 g - 200 g range of daily carbohydrates, why not start there? That should put you in the "low carb" range without ketosis. In terms of "diabetes" jargon, you'd probably be eating 3% and 6% vegetables plus some fruits.

Eve makes some very valid points here. How do you know that you are a type 2 diabetic? Are you self-diagnosed?

[jessica]

Littleelephant you are sick because you are not willing to practice moderation.  Please stop torturing yourself by seeking dietary perfection and listen to your body.  You are likely losing weight because your adrenal glands and endocrine system are over stressed and because you are underweight they are in constant stress mode.  The best thing would be to focus on eating a more well rounded diet that includes different types of meats, organs, fish, broths and (while I might get flack for this) some cooked veggies, including starchy veggies.  I personally think it would be best for you to eat warm and soothing foods that are very slowl and lovingly cooked like thick meat(such as oxtail) with some cooked veggies and seaweeds.  And also to find a source of raw dairy.  And to take a probiotic and multivitamin.  The purpose is to get decent nourishment into you and calories that will be absorbed.  Once your body stops loosing weight I should become less stressed.  But the focus now should be slowing down, moderation and balance.  Allow yourself time and space for healing.  Be gentle with yourself emotionally, do not Judge yourself to be a failure.  You have been given a difficult path because you are strong and inquisitive enough to heal.

[RogueFarmer]

If you can't digest the fat that means you are eating too much because you aren't producing enough bile to digest it. If you don't have enough bile then most of the fat isn't ever going to get digested. You need a lot of minerals to replace the bile that you lose. I have read and it is my experience that high mineral sugars with plenty of enzymes from raw honey and perhaps certain fruits will help digest fat. Also if you do some research people are claiming things like extract of celery, artichoke and beets help to stimulate bile production.

I would definitely eat smaller amounts of fat and just eat a small amount slowly until you feel you have reached a comfortable amount and then stop until you have finished digesting it. Eating the fat will help to stimulate the increased production of bile eventually too as long as you aren't eating so much that you don't have enough bile. This just turns the fat into soap which is constipating and unabsorbable. Finally remember that fat is 7 times higher in calories than protein.

So say you wanted to eat like 40 40 20 for example, you would still be eating 7 servings of protein to 1 serving of fat, which is around what a regular and untrimmed steak amounts to.

Perhaps you should focus on foods that are easier to digest to get your digestion going, raw whey, especially from goats, raw eggs, raw honey, these all can be blended into a nutritious shake, you could add minced liver and hopefully especially the enzymes and nutrients in the liver will help your liver and gall bladder to start functioning...

Heck you might even try eating actual bile if you can butcher your own animal or of course you can buy beef bile supplements!

http://www.livestrong.com/article/549878-beef-bile-supplement/

also i think that raw seafood is easier to digest than land meats, and super imortant are thinks like the big clams or sea urchins or other animals that you eat the entirety of their organs.

And finally eating predigested foods like raw kefir is where i would go. My person protocol in the past was to just have a 5 gallon bucket of kefir in the fridge that i would consume with a bit of honey on the end of a spoon.

As said vegetable broth may help in the production of bile you may also get away with fermenting them or juicing them.

Have you read the Aajonus juicing protocol? He mainly wants you to juice celery and parsley perhaps with a couple carrots, adding 3 tablespoons raw honey and a cup of raw cream I believe per gallon of raw juice. The honey will make the juice keep three days in the reefer. If that won't stimulate bile production I dunno what will.

[RogueFarmer]

It's easy to remember the main fruits high in enzymes to help you digest, the three p's persimmons, pineapples and papayas, but make sure ur papaya didn't come from a non organic farm in Hawaii :X


Oh and actually the whey mixed with eggs and honey might not be so delicious, i got a bit confused there. Typically I mix eggs with honey milk and cream and ginger.

The point though was that whey and eggs are the first and second most easily digestible foods.

There was one testimony here of a guy who gained an incredible amount of weight eating mostly eggs and honey (and cream???)  if someone can send her a link to that guy.

[eveheart]

Finally remember that fat is 7 times higher in calories than protein.

I'm  not sure what you meant to write, but (by weight) this statement is incorrect. A gram of far has 9 calories vs a gram of protein has 4 calories.

[RogueFarmer]

Oh thanks not sure how i got mixed up.

[A_Tribe_Called_Paleo]

My advice would be look at a more instinctive approach to your eating patterns. Try raw dairy, different animal fats/organs than just beef. Food combining May also be causing you some distress. 

[Iguana]

Dear LittleElephant,

Even if you had a type 2 diabetes, which is highly unlikely, it would be asymptomatic with a proper raw paleo diet, as I already told you.

In June an old friend of mine was here and he ate 100% raw paleo along with me. I had told him: if you practice the “instincto nutrition”, your diabetes will be over, but he hadn’t believed it. After 10 days here, he could reduce his insulin uptake by 50% and at he end of his one month lodging at my place he could reduce it by 75%, while eating as many sweet fruits as he wanted, even dates.

Why would you love to do a “ketogenic raw paleo diet”? Didn’t you see the posts of PaleoPhil and others showing that such an ideology is a total nonsense?

Zero Carb and VLC/Ketogenic - A Lethal Recipe for Disaster
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/carnivorous-zero-carb-approach/zero-carb-and-vlcketogenic-a-lethal-recipe-for-disaster/

The Zero Carb Myth: Why a zero carb diet is not optimal for human health
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/carnivorous-zero-carb-approach/the-zero-carb-myth-why-a-zero-carb-diet-is-not-optimal-for-human-health/

Hanna also posted that one:
Inuits didn’t eat a ketogenic diet
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/instinctoanopsology/inuits-didnt-eat-a-ketogenic-diet/

As I see it, your main problems are orthorexia and fear of being too thin. Get out of these and stop unceasingly shifting your diet from one extreme to the other. No one knows your body requirements better than itself. Do not care about what others single individuals do and experiment, don’t listen to various and often contradictory advices based one personal views and individual short-term results which don’t prove anything. Some people are lucky enough to remain in excellent health with a totally conventional, standard cooked diet. It doesn’t prove that their diet is the most suitable one.

You can’t conclude anything either on the basis of your personal short-term reactions. Therefore, the only safe way is to go along the lines of what has been thoroughly experimented during several decades and has been proved to be the best way to let our bodies self-heal, with tremendously successful and dutifully documented results that you’re have the chance to be able to read in French.

Is it possible that some people will never adapt to a high fat diet?

When possible, an adaptation takes hundreds or thousands of generations. Do not confuse habituation and adaptation!

François

[Iguana]

 

The amounts of fat I have to eat to keep my weight or even to gain weight I can not digest. I have to take a lot of enzymes and herbs and ACV and Lemon and 1000 other things to help me digest and even with this I feel most of the days very very sick and anxious. (…)

So, you see where those silly practices have brought you. You should stop them before it’s too late, progressively or at once if possible. I guess your meats are not all right and are thus dangerous to eat raw, especially their fat because toxins accumulate in the fat.

[eveheart]

So, you see where those silly practices have brought you....

I wouldn't call her practices "silly" when they are just attempts to heal what medicine cannot heal.

In saying that LittleElefant does not have diabetes type 2 (poor utilization of insulin) and then telling her that proper diet did heal another type 2 diabetic is besides the point. Diabetes type 2 is practically a no-brainer to heal completely, anyway. Also, being able to eat dates is not a test for the absence of diabetes.

LittleElefant's symptoms are more like severe "leaky gut" or diabetes type 1 (low or no production of insulin). I tend to think that it's not diabetes type 1 because even though she does have weight loss, she has a lot of other miseries that are not part of diabetes.

(Sorry, LittleElefant, that I sound like I am talking "about" you rather than to you. Wishing and hoping to be healed, and then not having healing, is very hard and can make you search frantically for a cure, especially when you think that others are getting perfectly well and you are not.

If I had to select any one suggestion from this thread, I'd go with what Jessica has suggested because you need that kind of soothing.)

[Iguana]

I wouldn't call her practices "silly" when they are just attempts to heal what medicine cannot heal.

Aren’t synthetic enzymes medicine? Taking apple cider vinegar and lemon juice in an attempt to digest amounts of things you force yourself to eat is also a medical act, in my view, or at least an interventionist practice — instead in trusting nature and the self-healing properties of one’s body.   

In saying that LittleElefant does not have diabetes type 2 (poor utilization of insulin) and then telling her that proper diet did heal another type 2 diabetic is besides the point. Diabetes type 2 is practically a no-brainer to heal completely, anyway. Also, being able to eat dates is not a test for the absence of diabetes.

I didn’t say it shows an absence of diabetes: I said my friend could drastically reduce his uptake of insulin in one month of raw paleo while eating a normal amount of sweet fruits. There have been several cases of diabetics having seen their symptoms vanish with instinctive raw paleo nutrition, so his case is not unique as you seem to imply.     

Sorry, but LittleElefant is a friend of mine and I’m enraged because she’s in such a state although she’s been having all the info, knowledge and opportunities to regain a good health, but instead has been during several years in an erratic course from an unproven extreme diet to an other one in the opposite extreme with in-between periods of cooked diet. I hope that by telling her “stop it before it’s too late” it will finally ring an alarm bell in her mind.

[eveheart]

Sorry, but LittleElefant is a friend of mine and I’m enraged because she’s in such a state although she’s been having all the info, knowledge and opportunities to regain a good health, but instead has been during several years in an erratic course from an unproven extreme diet to an other one in the opposite extreme with in-between periods of cooked diet. I hope that by telling her “stop it before it’s too late” it will finally ring an alarm bell in her mind.

Why become enraged, when compassion is what is needed? "Telling" someone to "stop it" makes matters worse, precisely because it lacks compassion. As her friend, perhaps you can think of something that will help.

[Iguana]

I hope that telling a bit harshly what I think will help, since all other ways have repeatedly failed. It doesn't mean at all that I have non compassion!