Paleo Judy's Journal, 28 Nov 16

Great loss Judy. I'm very impressed with you post today. Great reading Buddy X✔✔✔ 

That's an interesting read. I'm following a diet that Prof Taylor helped to design and it seems to be working quite well for me (given that I've had lots of interruptions since I started). It's the Blood Sugar Diet and is aimed at the kind of people you mention. 

Hi Snoop Puss, I think the Blood Sugar Diet is really interesting, but you must get hungry going so low calorie. I've read two of Dr Michael Mosley's books: The Blood Sugar Diet and The Fast Diet. My ex husband (still friends with him) was diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes and he came to me looking at my various dietary bits and pieces. He was very disciplined completely cutting out sugar and strictly reducing fats. He reduced his portion sizes and ate a lot of stir fries and healthier foods and started doing some exercise. He lost weight and reversed his diabetes, so that his test results were between normal and prediabetic. It happened in quite a short time - about 2 months, so its really worth trying to lose weight and get healthier for certain conditions.  

Thanks Mrs Maths - I know you are interested in Professor Taylor and Dr Michael Mosley's work, because you were trying the Blood Sugar Diet. I think the whole evolutionary framework that's suggested for Paleo is really important too. If you imagine what hunter-gatherers would have eaten in a forest environment, or what early Neolithic farmers would have eaten, it really brings it home to you what is natural. there's an interesting paper on this which you can get online;think it's called "Old Genes New Foods". 

I don't know about Mrs Maths, but in fact when I was doing the BSD strictly, I felt hungry for the first day or so but not thereafter. And I was absolutely fizzing with energy. I didn't follow the meal plan or recipes in the book but just adapted or made up my own recipes, weighing ingredients and logging my intake on here. I'm still keeping track on here of what I eat, but essentially I now eat a fairly normal diet, just no pasta, rice, bread or potatoes if I can help it. If I stopped drinking wine and eating biscuits, I'd probably clock in at between 800-1000 calories. I never feel hungry and absolutely love the food I'm eating. I don't feel deprived in any way. Yesterday I ate far too many butter cookies. I have no idea why I even had one, as I didn't enjoy them. If you go looking at my history, I don't want you to think I had them all at once! Two with a cup of tea in the morning, two after lunch and two in the afternoon. Total idiocy! 

Oh, the other thing I should say is that I am careful about the quantity of fat I use because it is so calorific, but I haven't cut it out of my diet by any stretch of the imagination, as you will see from my food yesterday: chicken gyros with salad for lunch plus a lemon mousse, yogurt blend for pudding; courgetti cooked in butter with tomatoes, smoked salmon and creme fraiche in the evening. 

Thanks for the information Snoop Puss. It's interesting that you haven't felt hungry and have had plenty of energy on the Blood Sugar Diet. People on the CRON diet are supposed to have very good readings for blood sugar, cholesterol level, blood pressure etc and they have similar levels of calorie restriction. My worry would be keeping to good nutrition on the diet. 800 calories doesn't seem that much for packing in adequate levels of vitamins, calcium, fibre etc. etc. Dietitians tend to recommend 1200 calories as the lowest level for a diet and this would allow a bit more lee-way. The other thing is in the book he says the diet is Mediterranean and a bit low-carb, but doesn't say quite how low-carb he recommends. Do you find you are aiming for a certain amount of net carbs in grams each day?  

Snoop Puss. Yes felt a bit hungry for about 36 hours , but after that WOW!!! Mostly love what I make for myself. Like you I am adapting the diet and using it merely as a framework for my eating plan. I don't get the hunger pangs and I feel absolutely great . On the other side of the coin,.. nothing to do with my diet .. is that I can lose my appetite in an instant. I've had this issue all my born days and I know it has played a part in my weight gain. But thanks to my new regime I can see the wood for the trees . I'm such a happy Buddy now.x 

Hi PJ, lots of people on the BSD forum are trying to restrict their carbs to less than 50 g a day, but they tend to be diabetics and prediabetics, so it's an issue for them, whereas it isn't for me as I'm neither. The recipes in the book focus on calories, not carbs. In the opening 'theory' part, people are advised to cut out the usual starches (pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, that kind of thing), as I call them to try and distinguish them from carbs in veg and dairy foodstuffs. Dr Mosley doesn't recommend a restricted carb level in the book, but by cutting out the starches, it's likely that carb intake will fall. One of the problems with restricting net carbs to something like 50 g, as far as I can tell, is that by doing so you're restricting your fibre intake as well. At one point, I tried to watch the grams of net carbs but found it didn't really make much difference to my weight loss, so I stopped bothering with that. My net carb level varies according to Fat Secret but is usually below 100 g simply because I don't eat much in the way of starchy food. I eat plenty of veg but not much fruit, maybe one portion a day at the moment (tangerines are in season and absolutely delicious). It's a rare day when I don't get at least my five a day in and I have been known to go up to ten a day and more. I regularly eat legumes and do eat quite a lot of dairy (milk and yogurt in the main, as well as cheese), so they're quite a source of carbs for me. In the recently published recipe book written by his wife (also a doctor), she recommends taking a vitamin supplement. I wondered about that, but I'm eating a lot of veg and extremely healthily on the whole, so I haven't bothered. I am taking some supplements however: zinc, magnesium and vitamin B complex, but those are because I take medication that makes it difficult for my body to extract them from food (though they can be extracted from mineral sources, hence the supplements). Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions. Either that or go and look at the website (thebloodsugardiet.com) or Facebook page. In addition, on the official BSD Facebook page, he says the diet is really only intended for eight weeks to 'reset' your body (especially the pancreas and liver). For people with a lot to lose, he suggests a maximum of 12 weeks before taking a break for a bit and then perhaps restarting. On the forum, there are people who have been doing it for several months consecutively, and I have to admit their weight loss and improved health results are spectacular. You mentioned reversing diabetes. Remission is certainly possible (people have reported coming off enormous numbers of units of insulin and other diabetes drugs, as well as blood pressure pills and statins). What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually a reversal.  

The other point is that it's possible to apply the general principles to any calorie level. My OH eats the same as me, plus porridge in the morning and something extra in the afternoon. His calories probably come in at between 1000-1300 calories depending on what he's had. He is prediabetic (I started this as a kind of encouragement to get him thinking) and is definitely benefiting from the reduced starches: diabetics often have disturbed sleep patterns, but if he keeps off the starches in the evening, he now sleeps like a baby, he seems to have more energy and he's losing weight. So if you thought 800 was too low but were interested in the general principles, there's nothing to stop you giving it a go but just upping the calories to see whether it suits you or not. The results will be slower and certainly you might not see the same benefits if you're trying to 'reset' your body in response to diabetes or prediabetes, but that's all.