The pizza challenge! 🍕

As you know I’ve recently begun to experiment with my blood sugar using my Continuous Glucose Montior – trying out foods to see how badly (if at all) they spike my blood sugar.

So far I’ve seen that popcorn is perfectly safe. Today was an experiment that I knew would fail, but I wanted to see how badly. Today was homemade pizza day.

My home made pizza has been a mainstay of my diet frankly for decades. It has evolved over the years, but the fundamentals of what makes it mine – and quite different to “regular” pizzas – haven’t changed much.

Instead of using a pizza dough base of any kind I use tortilla wraps. I’ve experimented with many over the years and what held together best after cooking, as well as offering a great taste, were brioche wraps.

My pizzas are also very cheesy! I take two wraps, and put pizza sauce and grated cheese (cheddar is fine, but I often use once of those “chilli cheese” mixes with jalapenos for some extra bite.

Then I add the second wrap on top and another layer of pizza sauce and then the toppings. Obviously toppings may vary but tonight’s pizza was a fair example.

I must confess I’ve never looked at the nutritional values on my brioche wraps and was utterly shocked to see they contain 33.7g of carbs each, which is insane! For two thin wraps it’s over 67g of carbs! My normal daily carb allowance is 30g!

Ken’s home made NOT keto friendly pizza!

The total carb count for this monstrosity is somewhere around 75 grams!

Now, I’m not entirely stupid! So for the sake of my experiment, I decided to just have half of the pizza – there was no way I was going to shove more than two days worth of carbs into my system in one meal, no matter how much I used to “love” pizza!

Even half of this pizza comes to 37.7g of carbs!

But the important point was to measure my response – and I watched with some trepidation as I saw the single biggest spike I’ve seen on my CGM (bear in mind I’ve only had it 9 days! 😊).

I sat down to eat just around 8pm, with a baseline blood sugar of 6.3mmol/L (113mg/dL) – so a little higher than I might have liked as a staring point.

You can see there is a drop before the spike – this is not unusual, apparently – this is due to insulin release in anticipation of food which brings my blood sugar down initially to 5.8 (104), but then the spike begins from around 8.10pm to 8.50pm there’s a steady rise that gets sharper and sharper, taking me all the way to a peak of 8.4 (151)! This is by far the highest reading I’ve seen on my CGM, and of course, the sharpest spike.

But the good news is I actually manage to deal with it quite quickly – clearly my insulin sensitivity is pretty good, because immediately after the peak it begins to drop sharply. There’s another spike, and then another drop, and then another little spike, before we then see a steady drop off.

So let’s look at the point at which my blood sugar raises above the baseline, which is actually not straight away – there is an initial dip which is almost certainly from what is generally referred to as the “phase 1 insulin response” which can be an anticipatory release as your senses tell your body food is coming! You will see it drops from 6.3 to 5.8 before climbing.

It only goes above 6.3 around 8.28pm, before peaking around 9pm, roughly 1hr after eating.

It then comes back down to the 6.3 at around 9.45 pm.

So in fact, I only spent about 1 hour and 17 minutes above the baseline.

As you can see, I actually shoot past the baseline to level out around 5.8 (104), so lower than my baseline starting point.

So, it wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting, or as bad as it might have been. In fact in there’s a lot to be positive about – the return to baseline was really fast!

But it’s also well worth noting – I have never in the past eaten just half of one of my pizzas! Not ever! This was a first. In the past, my carb load would have been double! It’s no wonder I wound up not just with diabetes but significant complications!

Weirdly enough, after eating that half pizza, I still felt hungry! And I don’t think it’s just because it’s half of what I used to eat, the fact is I haven’t had pizza since November last year, and I eat a lot less these days. But I think it’s because refined carbs disrupt our satiety signals – that rapid insulin spike blocks the signals that should trigger the release of “fullness hormones” which respond when we eat fats and proteins. Even though there was a lot of protein and fat on that pizza to fill me up, it wasn’t enough to offset the impact of the sugar roller coaster.

Because I was hungry, after my blood sugar went down to 5.8 I ended up having another snack – entirely keto this time of course! Just 3 slices of cheese, a few pork scratchings, and four slices of pepperoni. Just that small snack was more filling than half a pizza! But also – a lot of calories when you combine the two, and since the insulin would have locked my fat cells in “fat storage” mode, it’s likely I’ll see a bit of weight gain this week.

So the summary is – there was good news and bad news. The good news is my insulin response was actually pretty fantastic for someone who was in the “severe danger zone” for diabetes just five months ago! Clearing a very high-carb meal like that in 1 hour 45 minutes is a great achievement.

The bad news is the size of that spike. Given my history with nerve damage, I simply cannot afford to allow myself spikes like that. I’ve seen the terrifying climb my blood sugar went through, and also felt the side effects – still feeling hungry, but also feeling fatigued, a natural side-effect of carb-spikes. That “afternoon slump” we often feel – which btw has otherwise disappeared for me entirely since switching to keto.

So there’s an important lesson for me, which is to avoid eating pizza! I may at some point try another experiment, maybe if I am recommended a particularly good, very low-carb keto base. But those brioche wraps I’m done with – I honestly can’t believe such skinny little wraps have such a high carb count!

I only have a few more days left with the CGM and I think I’m done with experiments. I get the general gist – I’m still going to spike badly if I have large amounts of carbs. I’ve become very comfortable with my eating habits and sticking to less than 30g per day.

I guess it should really come as no great surprise that suddenly injecting nearly 40g of carbs in one sitting will cause a problem!