Ignoring matters of satiety and thinking purely in terms of calories and how that relates to body fat…
It is possible to burn a significant number of calories through exercise but, generally, you need to do things like waking up at 3am and run for 12 miles or otherwise doing many hours of steady activity in cold conditions or under a relatively heavy load. Walking for 30 minutes a day or working out for an hour a few times a week doesn’t generally burn all that many extra calories, relative to the amount of energy in a candy bar.
Alternately, a little discussed technique is that you can try to convert calories into muscle rather than fat. A 200 pound man of average height, whose non-skeletal mass is largely fat is going to look like a slob and a man whose non-skeletal mass is largely muscle is going to look like a bodybuilder, and there probably isn’t such a large difference in their calorie intakes.
There aren’t 500 pound bodybuilders of any height - if you’re in that zone, you will need to either cut calories or start long-distance running - but if you weigh a relatively similar weight to a bodybuilder of your own height then a more time-efficient mechanism for improving your visual presence and health is to turn calories into muscle, rather than fat.
If you go into the gym with the goal of weight loss and jog on a treadmill for 30 minutes, you’ll trim off a few nuts worth of fat. If you go into the gym and build up to deadlifting 400 lbs, those nuts have probably mostly turned into muscle, rather than into fat. You won’t weigh less but you will look better.
That completely ignores the difference in resting metabolism between a couch potato and someone who is only moderately active. Yes, walking or treadmilling for 30 minutes will offset only a few nuts.
But the elevation in your basal metabolic rate for the other 23-1/2 hours due to regular exercise will do the “heavy lifting” of burning a lot more calories. And, as you say, altering what your body does with the calories you do take in.
It is a truism in sports nutrition that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. But it is also true that regular exercise goes a long way to converting an OK diet into a good one. And within reason, more exercise tends to result in less desire to eat crap. Eating less crap also makes exercising more easier.
There are a LOT of mutually reinforcing feedback loops for good or ill in human behavior, nutrition, and conditioning. Any time somebody trots out the “calories in minus calories out = weight gain (loss)” argument they’ve demonstrated they’re looking at the foam in the bathwater, not the baby or even all the water.
We are really getting away from “glucose flattening” but I will try to connect:
Forest trees comes into mind too. Lots of opportunities to fixate on details and miss bigger picture items that emerge out of a chaotic background.
Long term health best served by moderate aerobic exercise 150 minutes plus a week (or less of more intense) and strength training once or twice a week adding up to 30 to 60 minutes (although small amounts make a huge difference over none), and a plant forward diet such as the Mediterranean or DASH. Much less likely obese but even if still as healthy as possible from where you started and given being you.
Is impact on resting energy expenditure meaningful? Debatable and don’t care. Lots of reasons why. Is that going to result in the flattest glucose curve? Maybe maybe not. Still healthiest.
Both table sugar (sucrose) and corn syrup essentially contain equal parts of fructose and glucose. It is not irrelevant that fructose is metabolized in the liver if it is true that high levels of fructose are responsible for fatty liver, which makes much sense, but has not been definitively shown. The amount of sucrose (and so fructose, and so corn syrup) added to many tasty things is far more than the amount of fructose in whole fruit most people would reasonably consume. Your body can handle some fructose and so eating fruit is still a good idea for its other nutrients. People eat far more sugar than in the past, and most of this fructose does not come from fruit.
Some things in the body work better when they vary from time to time. This is likely true of sugar levels. You want insulin to be higher in times of growth and lower insulin when undergoing repair and maintenance. It is likely this variation is required for optimal function. Ideally, exercise might be a time for growth and at other times reducing the spike might help. The idea can probably be taken too far, I doubt a bigger spike once in a while matters that much, but I am following this experiment with interest.
I suspect this is true of most things. Even our temperature varies over the day, and increases to fight disease. “Glucose flattening” may be a generally excellent idea but i can’t imagine that it’s ideal to have totally constant blood glucose. And i don’t think anyone has suggested that, either.
It’s true of other hormone levels, the natural pattern of food acquisition for most of human history (feast and famine), the heart rate of babies in the womb and much else in medicine. Some medical interventions are stronger for being intermittent.
I am also following with interest albeit I think my interest may slightly differ from @Dr_Paprika’s; it’s really the question suggested by @puzzlegal’s comment:
I was able to find fairly little on what CGM metrics are in the “normal” population. What is the normal amount to vary and what is possibly “ideal”? But more and more people are going to buy these on their own. Cost will continue to drop. Within a few, maybe even a couple of model releases the iWatch will have some version of CGM built in!
The “nuance” questions are going to quickly become extremely important to start trying to answer. And without real answers the void will be filled in by those who know just a little stating random things as facts.
Will particular indices calculable from CGM data correlate better with present insulin resistance than the routine screening measures currently used?
Will they be more predictive of future insulin resistance, diabetes, or specific morbidities?
Will any specific sorts or degrees of altering the curves in any way have specific positive impacts on anyone? Will there be impacts in some circumstances but not others?
What if any are the potential harms of wide spread CGM use? How often are those potential harms likely to occur?
CGM gives much more information than either FBG or HgbA1c. It potentially can help segregate those with prediabetic values on FBG and/or HgbA1c into very different groups.
But the large volume of users getting data, trying to parse that data, acting on that data, is going to far outpace the understanding of what the data actually means and what sorts of interventions can actually accomplish what in whom.
Those are all great questions. I don’t think anyone knows the answers, though admittedly this is not my field of expertise. I see the experiment as worthwhile because data may help answer these questions, but one should likely hesitate to draw too many conclusions from data at the moment.
It’s the end of Day 18 of my 28 days of testing and I’m starting to see correlations that may tell me something. I’ve been able to keep my glucose spikes down in the “safe zone” and only have significant spikes when I consume something that is designed to cause a large spike, like a sugary food, a lot of a starchy food, or a sugary drink.
I’ve been on a Low-Carb Mediterranean Diet for a few months and that seems to be working well as far as keeping my spikes down as long as I moderate my starches and avoid added sugar. I’ve also been trying to keep my weight down so I’m monitoring that too. My intermittent fasting limits me to three meals a day with no snacks within an 8 or 9 hour feeding window, depending on whether I work that day or not, so I don’t have that much data to analyze.
I’m currently tracking 10 different parameters daily; Weight, Fasting Blood Glucose, Total Carbs, Activity Calories, Spike Average, Total Calories In, Glucose Average, Percent Carbs, Sleep Time, and Basal Metabolic Rate. I get some of this data from my CGM app and the rest from my digital scale. I’ve been building some graphs and looking for correlations between the different parameters. Akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. More to follow…
I don’t believe it is simply a question of whether fructose is a contributor to a fatty liver or not. Without regard to that, given that NAFL is so commonly associated with metabolic syndrome, with obesity, it seems to me it is worth asking what are the effects of chronic overexposure to fructose and NAFL? Where does it go, what is it doing, before it is metabolized in an individual with impaired liver function?
I should also mention that I’m tracking everything I eat in an app called Cronometer so I know the breakdown of my calories and the timing of my meals.
This is my point as well. When attempting to recover from NAFLD is is better to give the liver a break and not load it up with any unneccasary work so it can go about healing.
Otherwise, eating fruit is fine and processing frutose is what the liver does without any issues. I am halfway through my NAFLD recovery and have stopped using insulin, I look forward to eating fruit again once I have obtained my goal. I have no fear that eating fruit will cause NAFLD.
I also must state that I really like this thread and what @dolphinboy is doing.
I like you idea, but it would break my fasting period. Fortunately, my dawn spike isn’t big enough for me to worry about, however it is clearly visible on my CGM.
While researching something else, I ran into the medical terms Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT) and Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG). I hadn’t heard of them before, and according to this, “From 10 to 15 percent of adults in the United States have one of these conditions. Impaired glucose tolerance is defined as two-hour glucose levels of 140 to 199 mg per dL (7.8 to 11.0 mmol) on the 75-g oral glucose tolerance test, and impaired fasting glucose is defined as glucose levels of 100 to 125 mg per dL (5.6 to 6.9 mmol per L) in fasting patients. These glucose levels are above normal but below the level that is diagnostic for diabetes.”
As I said, I have never had a glucose tolerance test so I don’t know whether I have IGT, although it doesn’t appear I do based on my CGM results, but my fasting glucose is always over 100, and during my testing the average for me is 108 mg/dl, although I don’t know if some of that is due to latent dawn effect.
This doesn’t change anything for me, but at least I have a name for what I may have. To manage both IFG and IGT they recommend lifestyle changes, although their recommendations don’t match up with what I am doing. Since I’m seeing some success lowering my glucose spikes I will stick with my current lifestyle changes until I have a good reason to change them.
If anyone has any other suggestions on how to lower fasting blood glucose, beyond what has already been suggested in his thread, I would love to hear what worked for you.
I was comparing a moderately active person with a belly to a moderately active person who uses that moderate amount of time to progressively overload. You can do your usual strength exercises that you usually do and that give you your current belly or you can up the weights and try to move the mass on your body to a different location.
I haven’t seen any strong evidence that there’s much difference between a couch potato and a moderately active person. From what I’ve seen and experienced of the world - and as I expressly said in the post - you need to go further than most people have the willingness or freedom of time to go to start getting into metabolically relevant territory to change your body shape. Health is a different matter. 60 minutes of walking is better than 30 minutes of walking, for your health. But it’s not going to burn many calories nor increase your metabolic rate by much.
