Glucose of 92 mg/dL on 7th day of water fast

tittiger

I think I have asked this before but have yet to get an explanation that made sense to me.
On a previous day of this fast my glucose was 79 mg/dL which is not too bad, now it is 92 mg/dL.

I am grasping for explanations here.

Could I have sudden increase in the need for glucose? ( have sat in this chair ALL day - me bad)

Could not being outside and exercising be the reason? Perhaps my body is making all this glucose for some reason and exercise is the only way to use it up as perhaps glycogen storage may be shut down when I have a BHB of 5 or so?

Could my body be creating extra glucose and storing it because gluconeogenesis doesn't work efficiently for me and is not supplying my energy needs.?

Perhaps this is a normal thing for me during a fast. I don't recall this during earlier fasts.

Perhaps I need to record glucose more closely when fasting to look for patterns.

There a tons of plausible explanations. And I don't think the science in this area is real hard yet. I hear lots of conflicting thoughts.

If you have an idea please feel free to chime in.

Thanks in advance

Susan_RD_101

Hi @tittiger

It's difficult to say for sure what's happening in your body but my guess is that since the body is being deprived of energy, and generally prefers using glucose, it's probably generating its own to meet the demands of keeping you alive. Your values are still well within normal range, so nothing I would be concerned about (although, I do need to convert units to mmol/L first to be able to interpret them).

Kind regards,

tittiger

THanks for you answer Susan

It is my understanding that the body requires glucose in certain organs, even when in ketosis.

Parts of the brain need glucose but it runs mainly on ketones when you are in ketosis such as during a water fast. The liver I understand runs on glucose exclusively, as do parts of the kidneys. The bottom line is that the body needs some glucose at all times and must either use stored glycogen, sugars in the blood or if they are not available perform gluconeogenesis on proteins ( many in this case obtained through autophagy) There is also a process to produce glucose from fats in a pinch.

I don't' have it figured out either and think the ranges OK. But when you are trying to resolve insulin resistance and to obtain lower fasting and everyday blood sugars it does concern me as to what I may be doing wrong or missing.

I may do an hourly glucose here tomorrow and also throw in some activity to see how that affects my glucose readings.

Never a dull moment trying to figure these things out.

Thanks again Susan :-)

Susan_RD_101

Let us know what you discover!

tittiger

I have learned that it's not as simple as it's made out to be.

Someone has to know what's likley going on. Until then, I'll keep reading and experimenting and hopefully I'll stumble across an answer before too long.

Will keep the forum appraised of my state of confusion Susan.
Thanks for chiming in.

tittiger

Finally found my way back to this thread..... :-P

I am looking more at GKI when fasting for the time being.
Just now I had a fasting glucose of 93 (which I do not like) and a BHB of 1.3
that gives a respectable GKI of 1.7!

https://keto-mojo.com/pages/glucose-ketone-index-gki

Not a complete answer but it does ese my concerns a bit.