You will need to monitor your sugars well, especially at first as any meds may need to be adjusted. But keto diets are recommended by many doctors for T2 diabetics, and low carb/keto diets used to be the main treatment before insulin was invented.
Medicine has known about the link between carbs and diabetes since Roman times, and the first diabetic cookbook published in 1917 or so was based on a 40g net carb diet.
Whatever diet you end up choosing, you will plateau and do it more once, and more than you like. Your body doesn’t really like to change, so it will fight you. When that scale doesn’t move, don’t get discouraged. Just keep on, and stay the course and the results will happen. It’s more of a mental battle then they let on sometimes.
Low carb food shopping list: quite easy to remember
My shopping list is easy enough to remember. I eat simple, whole foods. I shop for the best deals on whatever protein is on sale like tri-tip, chicken, or pork.
Grocery list is simple: 3 cheapest meats I like, 2 cheap lunch meats I like, eggs, frozen veggies and salad makings, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese and cream cheese, canned tuna. No special tools needed beyond the websites for my local grocery stores of choice.
I eat nuts, cheeses, half/half, greens, avocados, eggs, and anything else that grabs my eye that is low carb. I don’t get into baking or trying to find substitutes for things I used to eat. My suggestion is to incorporate those things (or reevaluate it) when you hit your goal weight.
Why fasting is good for most type 2 diabetics?
During fasting time according to one study autophagy was increased in a body by about 300%. Essentially eating away all body’s cells old worn-out proteins and lipid parts a body is constantly remodeled and being refreshed. I a way allowing for autophagy by short fasting time, essential parts are renewed and made young again too.
In a fasted state you make it easy on insulin production pancreas to be renewed and refreshed. Our bodies were made to have some periods of time off. My insulin levels were dropping throughout the day according to many experts.
The greatest cause of insulin resistance is simply the presence of high levels of insulin in your bloodstream. Day after day taking some time to reverse that through fasting can help reverse the process. When your insulin levels are low and your body has no carbs to burn for fuel it starts burning sugar and fat.
Nothing burns the fat out of your liver as well as fasting. Yet, it won’t happen with a single fast. But if you start doing some consistent fasting you’ll do yourself a world of good and getting your glucose levels under control. At its very core type 2 diabetes is simply too much sugar in the body thus reversal depends upon two things.
If you craft your diet so it aims to burn remaining sugar off then just metabolically you can see advantage. A low carb healthy fat diet reduces the incoming glucose load, but it does little to burn it off. Intermittent fasting though can help simultaneously with both facets of diabetes.
Is there anyone who shouldn’t fast?
Fasting is a pretty severe practice especially longer fast. So, you do need to check with your doctor and be especially careful because you could easily end up getting a hypo and having your blood sugar going dangerously low and that’s also true for type 2 diabetics who take insulin or powerful blood sugar lowering drugs.
So, by all means get your doctor’s permission, but if he or she says it’s okay for you consider what type of fasting you want to implement and then go for it. Also, not everyone is going to see a blood sugar dropped throughout the day by simple fast. If you have a lot of fat and sugar in your liver during your fast your liver may be dumping out a lot of that sugar and as a result your blood sugar may not go down.
Check your sugar, Hemoglobin A1C regularly
Have A1c done. Fasting blood sugar under keto can be deceiving. Under keto you BG is supplied by gluconeogenesis on demand. You can see patterns but for the most part glucose meters result in people get out of focus. Learn to listen to your body. Few need a glucose meter to know how snack bars affect them, they can feel it if they pay attention.
How to manage carb cravings?
From personal experience, I’ve found eating a pickle or two works wonders for nighttime cravings. You could also be making your own pickles, or pickling a mix of veggies, like cucumber/radish/carrot, with a light pickling liquid vinegar.
If going keto means not going out for beer and pretzels with your buds after work every Friday or skipping desserts or passing on the (free) donuts at work, people will choose not to inflict that on themselves.
Cravings usually are not from hunger. It’s a mental battle. So try experimenting with the following:
Get yourself a hard-boiled egg and a glass of water. Plain hard-boiled eggs are tasty but not too tasty (meaning, you won’t “binge” on them), are full of good low-carb nutrition, are easy to have on hand, and won’t feed any sugar cravings. Plus, they’re pretty low in calories.
Most of the time I don’t ever get to the point of eating the egg because it usually turns out that I am not hungry. Cravings aren’t hunger. They are whiny two-year olds demanding treats they don’t need.
High carb foods are notorious for generating cravings
So indulging every few days might well be enough to make you crave them consistently as well as keeping you out of ketosis, where your appetite drops, your energy level increase and a lot of the “magic” of low carb happens.
I usually go for peanut butter, whatever brand has the lowest carb count. But I know almond butter has a lower count generally.
The carb counting didn’t work for me. Learn what kind of foods you should avoid and pay attention to labels. I would look for something with fats instead of carbs when you do feel hungry or get cravings.
Consider being a little more tolerant to your feeding window, at least until you’ve stabilized the cravings. If you instead ate when you were hungry until you are no longer hungry and looked to fats instead of carbs when you’re craving, within a few days you won’t have the cravings to contend with anymore.
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