Personal Training Experience

Type 1 & LADA
1

Hola! I’ve recently started a PT program and today was week 1 weigh-in. I’m down 2.5 lbs, but my muscle mass and fat have not changed.

My program is this:
8,000 steps a day
2 litres of water a day
I have a daily calorie and protein goal that is based on my specific needs
5x a week at home core workouts (15 mins ea)
3x a week HIIT workouts 50 min each with trainer

It’s been 1 week and I have been consistent and not cheated. I need to lower my fat intake and increase my protein intake. It’s hard to find that combo (low fat/high protein). Any meal ideas, feel free to send my way!

Also, my insulin needs have gone way down over the week. Several lows during the night so that’s been rough. Going to keep fine tuning the basal as I’ll be at this until February!!

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2

It just occurred to me…if my muscle and fat are the same, and so was my hydration, where is the 2.5 lb loss from??? It wasn’t until I typed out my initial question that it occurred to me how does that make sense?

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3

So, the numbers that you are quoting tell me that you are using one of those fancy new scales that uses electrodes that you stand on and some others that you probably hold in your hand and they try to measure fat/muscle etc.

I would advise you to ignore these numbers, and treat them as anything other than somewhat correct. I had measurements 3 months and 15 lbs apart and the muscle mass and fat numbers were complete bs. The system said my fat pounds went up despite the weight loss, and my muscle mass had gone down, despite lifting 5 days a week and getting stronger and visibly bigger in my muscle mass.

Congrats on the 2.5 lb weight loss. Keep at it, just like diabetes it is a marathon not a sprint.

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4

I agree with what Chris said about the measurements. Even if they are doing a caliper pinch test in the PT office, it is not completely accurate.

Ultimately, hydrating well is important. Water weight is only a concern if there is come underlying medical condition that is causing your body to retain too much water. If you are now drinking more water than you used to, you will have some water weight, which is not a problem.

If you are exercising regularly, and you have a calorie deficit that is within a certain range (not too extreme, which can cause shifts in your metabolism), you will lose fat.

As far as your question about lower fat items, it can be tough. The fat calories add up so much quicker, because there are over twice the calories in a gram of fat than there are in a gram of carbs or protein.

Make sure you are using either 1% milk or skim milk. Low fat everything, like cheese or any of the other things you buy.

Breakfast cereals like Total or Wheaties don’t have a lot of protein, but they have ZERO fat. :+1:

Things like chicken noodle soup or chicken broth can also be good because of the lower fat (check the label though, any cream soup will have a lot of fat).

Lean meat, turkey, fish (something like salmon which has about 20g of protein for every 5 grams of fat, and the fat content is unsaturated fat which is the good one).

Just a lot of label checking.

Carbs are easy, but protein can be tough. So a protein powder you add to your drinks can help you reach your number there.

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5

One thing I think Chris and Eric didn’t quite articulate is carbohydrate storage. The body stores a certain amount of glycogen in the liver and muscles. If you’re not dieting or exercising, its safe to assume glycogen stores are plentiful. As you begin a caloric deficit, the body uses glycogen before fat or other stored energy. Each gram of glycogen holds a few grams of water. So as you start to deplete glycogen stores, you exponentially reduce intracellular water weight. Its not clear to me if this shows up in those hydration tests or not, since they’re measuring whole body resistance.

I think this is also the reason insulin needs will go down in a caloric deficit.

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6

Exactly, it’s a scale I have to stand on in bare feet and grab these two handles with my thumbs on some kind of reader. I was so surprised my muscle mass hadn’t increased. More so that it had fractionally decreased (like barely anything, but still). That said, it’s been 1 week, so yeah… patience.

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7

Follow up question… it seems there is no clear answer that I can find re how much protein I can absorb in one meal. I bought these pre-packaged protein shakes which claim to have a 42g serving of protein in them, but then read that I can only absorb about 25g at a time. So, if I aim for about 20g with each meal, that is only 60g. I usually have 1 snack, so if that’s 20g that’s only 80g and I’m supposed to meet a goal of 109g daily. And what is one sitting? Like how many hours later equals the next sitting (like where I can ingest another 20g that will actually count)?

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8

I just had 1/3rd cup of GF oats with 1/3rd cup egg whites and topped with 2TPB. My app says I had 20g protein. I may look for powdered PB to get the fat down.

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9

I just thought that maybe the protein is set to 110g to help with satiety vs meeting a goal. That would make more sense. I’ll ask my trainer tonight :slight_smile:

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10

Your body continually replaces both liver glycogen and muscle glycogen as they are used. If you do not have sufficient carbs, it will generally use fat stores to generate the glucose to use for replenishing.

So an overly-simplified version is:

  • Exercise uses muscle glycogen, liver glycogen, and fat as fuels. The amount of each will greatly depend on the exercise intensity. At lower levels of intensity it will use a higher percentage of fat as fuel, and at higher intensities it will use more glycogen.

  • Your body continually replenishes the used muscle and liver glycogen with excess glucose it has (the process is called glycogenesis).

  • If there is not sufficient glucose or carbs available, your body needs to create glucose from other sources (the process is called gluconeogenesis).

  • Having a calorie deficit (burning more calories than you take in) means your body needs to create glucose from stored fat. So there is where you see weight loss.

Also worth noting, you do not need to fully burn through all of your stored glycogen before using fat for fuel. They are used together, but in different amounts depending on the exercise intensity.

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11

Okay, so I wasn’t going to give my exact stats, but you all seem to know way more than I do on this topic and I really want to succeed.

My trainer has set my Calories at 1450 and my Protein at 109g. She hasn’t established a fat or carb ratio, but she says I’m eating higher fat than she would normally recommend someone trying to lose weight eat. That said, she’s never trained a T1D. I flipped through a few days of eating and it looks like I’m averaging 46-50% fat most days, and about 25-30% each protein and carbs.

If I can only absorb 20g protein per meal and I eat 4x a day (3 meals, 1 snack) then in my mind I should be aiming for 80g of protein, not 109g because the last 29g would be waste, no? Furthermore, what should I set my fat and carb ratios at?? I like the idea of high fat low carb for ease of doing all this working out without huge boluses on hand, but I love the taste of low fat high carb so I can sort it out if I need to (although haven’t successfully done that to date).

Urrrggg I’m so frustrated because I don’t fully understand what to aim for and I don’t know if my trainer will actually know the T1D side of this all!!!

Please help me!!! LOL

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12

At 3:29 this video talks about a rice cooker that separates the sugar from the rice making it lower carb…??? Is this for real? That’s so cool if it is!!

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13

I think that is too much fat. How is your BG? Are you able to deal with a higher carb and protein diet?

You can lose weight on any diet, as long as it is sufficiently reduced in caloric content. Calories in versus calories out.

But the problems with a higher fat diet are:

  1. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbs, so you may not feel as full. You are not getting “as much” food if you have a higher fat content compared to carbs or protein.

  2. Higher fat content might mean you are causing problems with your cholesterol, which ends up being an issue for heart and arteries. You might be okay with higher fat if you have the right genetics, but it can be an issue for some people.

  3. Not getting sufficient carbs in your diet, it might make the exercise harder. If you start burning a lot of carbs for exercise, and don’t replace it, the exercise will feel harder and your BG might drop a lot.

I would ask your trainer for an idea of percentages for each - carbs, protein, and fat. Based on the numbers you shared (1450 calories and 109 grams of protein), you already have your percentage of protein. It’s 30%.

Don’t worry about the T1D side of it. Let your trainer set your diet and your exercise, and we can help you with the diabetes side of it.

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14

Thank you!!!

My numbers were great the first week but lots of lows during the night. Then the last few they’ve been too high, but that was right after a pod change and I have a really hard time with my pod and consistent absorption (I’m trying to get on a tube pump for more landscape and the IQ technology).

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15

My suggestion is to not do this thing weekly, better to stretch it out to 30 days. Then you can see proper trends. These devices are probably not particularly accurate, but they do give some indication of trends.

Rereading your post, it appears that your personal terrorist :smiling_imp: wants to do weekly scans and weigh ins. Just take it will a grain of salt. My son has been doing 3 gym workouts per week for about 6 months. He goes to a place that sells nutrition powders and potions to get scanned. He has visibly lost weight and increased strength and the monthly scans show it,

I just think of these things like glucometers and CGMs. They give us a snapshot of something dynamic. The results could change if, in example, you are more or less hydrated. Remember a pint of water is one pound. We lose water in sweat, breathing and urine.

I would say the great thing is you have become more insulin sensitive.

BTW, The scans my son and I have done, show weight, skeletal muscle for each arm and leg, BMI, fat and water weight.

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16

Sort of would be my best answer. If you read this and believe it, you need to cook your rice for 40 minutes in the presence of coconut oil, then store it in the fridge overnight. I am not sure what that rice cooker is doing, but that would be my best guess. As for my rice, it cooks just fine over very low heat in only 20 minutes and tastes great.

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17

Yeah, the weekly thing is part of the program but ultimately the final weigh-in will be the one that counts. My hydration was exactly the same @ 52% which is odd since I’ve been drinking more water than ever before + an electrolyte pack, so I was confused about what was 2.5lbs less, since apparently it wasn’t water, muscle or fat :woman_shrugging:t3:

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18

Interesting… I wonder how one would carb count for that!! A lot of trial and error I suppose.

19

Agreed, I still am not sold on adding fat and cooking equals 1/2 the carbs and calories. I understand what they are saying, but I just think if it worked the way they say someone would be selling low carb low calorie rice to us that had already been cooked. I don’t know what to believe there. And yes, I think it would take trial and error to figure out how to dose.

21

Is this possible? If so, wouldn’t people on a keto diet have a poor exercise experience?

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