Gluconeogenesis...the nemesis of every low-carber. For those interested, here’s my version of “Gluconeogenesis Made Ridiculously Simple”
Some tissues (e.g. brain) need glucose, so there is a constant impetus for our liver to produce it. Without ingesting it, the body needs to make it. How it does it is quite complicated, but here’s the gist of it:
-glucose is a 6 carbon molecule.
-amino acids have a 2-carbon chain
-proteins are made of amino acids
-the carbon skeleton of amino acids can be separated from it’s amino group (deamination)
-those 2-carbon units can be used to make a 6-carbon glucose
So, most of this happens in the liver, but what controls it? Well, the two things that modulate this process are:
1) levels of glucagon versus insulin
2) availability of substrate, i.e. amino acid concentration in the blood
Okay…being a low carber, you have one strike against you. When in ketosis, glucagon is high and insulin is low. This favors mobilization of amino acids to provide the carbon skeletons for gluconeogenesis.
So…nothing you can do about that. However, you can control #2 in two ways. One is to simply decrease your protein intake. The other is to increase you protein requirement. As Lisa N. has suggested already, adding weight training to your program would accomplish this.
See, once you start weight training, muscle cells are going to start competing with the liver for those amino acids...since they'll need them to recover from your weight training workouts. Think of it as a tug-of-war: your LIVER wants amino acids for the purposes of making glucose, while your MUSCLES want amino acids to repair damage - they're both fighting over a limited amount of amino acids in your blood. The more you workout (i.e. "damage" your muscles) the more you'll favor your MUSCLES in this tug-of-war analogy.
I either really helped explain this or confused everyone (I have a habit of doing the latter, but I'm working on improving my communication skillz)