I wrote recently about my “pizza challenge” – an experiment to see how badly one of my former favourite foods, a mainstay in my diet, would impact my blood sugar. It was a disaster. And the disaster kept on going, as it raised my blood sugar levels for four days!
Today’s weigh-in demonstrated just how bad it was – I put on 4.3 lbs (1.95 kg)this week!
Of course, this isn’t all from just half of one pizza – it’s a mix of things.
Firstly, increased glucose in the blood triggers the pancreas to release insulin – the fat storage hormone. Once you’re in “fat storage mode” you cannot also burn stored fat – they are opposed and incompatible physiological processes.
But there is also a limit to how much fat you can store in such a short space of time, and one half a pizza wouldn’t account for 4.3lbs, so the good news is that most of that is in fact water. Insulin also causes fluid retention by signaling your body to hold onto salt and water, and because water binds to replenished glycogen stores.
Despite getting back into my usual eating / fasting / exercise habits I’m still not fully back to normal, with my blood sugar once again elevated this morning – around 7.5 mmol/L (135 mg/dL) compared to my usual fasted morning blood sugar of around 6.5 (117)- but I’m sure over the next few days things will settle back down and I’ll lose all of that weight again in no time.
But seeing how badly this one meal affected me makes me absolutely shocked about how badly I was treating my body before. For this experiment, I ate just HALF of the normal pizza I would normally eat. And this was my homemade pizza, with “just” 38 grams of carbohydrates. I would normally have eaten the whole thing – around 76g of carbs!
And this was by no means the worst of my former “favourite meals” – my staple food from the local Chinese restaurant – crispy duck with pancakes and hoisin sauce – would be around 50-60g of carbs. But I wouldn’t eat that on it’s own, I’d often get some crispy seaweed (~10g carbs), bbq ribs (12-20g depending on the specific spices /rub used), chicken satay (10-15g) and the piece de la resistance – sweet and sour chicken balls (90-120g of carbs!)
The burger and sweet potato fries I’d often order at a restaurant had more like 80-120g of carbs!
It’s really no surprise my HbA1c eventually went up to 79 (9.4%) in December last year.
Anyway – lesson learned – and I’ll be sticking strictly to my whole foods keto diet from here on out! No more experiments for me – they are just way too costly to my progress towards my weight loss target and reversing my type 2 diabetes!
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