Huh? I did go off. No more insulin resistance.
Yeah, given the way it was worded it sounded like you have been on it for months. How did and are you testing insulin resistance?
It is pretty well established that high fat diets cause insulin resistance. It is actually the usual method for inducing diabetes in animals to make them diabetic...not sugar or carbs. Sure, the most effective way is high fat AND high carbs.
But what you are highlighting is the fact that the issue is much more complicated than most even realize. Insulin is just one factor and it gets way too much credit...although a ketogenic diet can reduce insulin spikes, and in the case where it leads to a caloric deficit it will reduce insulin levels, any caloric deficit will reduce insulin levels. And reduced insulin = impaired carb utilization through reduced glut4 availability.
Of course, at first it may make things better, because high levels of insulin typically trigger increased glut4 translocation, and when this happens and fuel levels remain high anyway, insulin binding to glut4 will basically reduce all the available glut4 to nothing. In this case when you go keto (or any diet) and insulin drops...the glut4 frees up and carb tolerance may actually increase through that mechanism...but with longer periods of low insulin, glut4 receptors will be eliminated and insulin will become slightly less effective.
But if you got obese because you’re insulin resistant, which is typical, I fail to see how keto can be blamed for insulin resistance if you already were. Further, the suggestion of “try coming off” makes little sense. The point of keto, for a lot of people, is their body just can’t handle carbs very well. Done properly, there is little reason to come off for the average person. We’re not talking about peak athletic performance, we’re talking about overall health and “need” in the true sense of the word in hunter gatherer terms.
The "your body can't handle carbs very well" part is the entire point.
Typically one does not become obese because they are insulin resistant. They become insulin resistant and obese because they have high levels of fuel substrate in their blood that they cannot burn and even have a hard time storing.
When you have a high level of calories available and cannot burn them, you cannot just leave them in your blood as the carbs and fat will create toxic results. So you have to store them. And when fat is abundant - as when you become obese - your body has to do something. And in response, it switches its energy production over to burn fat...an attempt to burn as much as possible. Obese people become very efficient at burning fat for energy. But since they get maybe (for example) 75% of their energy from fat and 25% from carbs, after that ...the carbs back up because they cannot be burned. They become good at burning fat and bad at burning carbs.
So...the answer? Avoid carbs altogether, because the body cannot handle them.
So you go on a keto diet and...now your body has no carb sources beyond gluconeogenesis... and now you are at 90-95% fat use for fuel. Great, I am a fat burning furnace.
Except, you took the problem that got you in trouble in the first place - elevated fat and carb intolerance - and made it worse. Now, when you go off, you have a host of rebound concerns.
Not to mention it can become very difficult to lose weight when you get twice the energy from every pound as if you were burning carbs.
But, as you said, this can be a life long situation for some people...why go off?
Well, you can take that approach if you prefer using band aids over healing cuts. Rather than fix the broken health issue, the keto diet just avoids that pathway altogether.
Further, unless you are epileptic, the idea that anyone stays on a keto diet for life is a mistake. Research does indicate that keto diets fail long-term like any other diet and the idea of getting your energy from fat has been known to have health consequences for quite some time. Just to name one big issue - a heart that runs in fat will become unhealthy for a number of reasons. It just is not healthy long-term despite what they say in the internet and in newspapers. Then again, they also act like sodium is the sole reason for high blood pressure in the news. But if you are epileptic, the risk may be worth the benefit of going low carb long term.
Still, I don't want to be too harsh on keto diets. It is a tool that can be effective. As you point out, if you cannot lose weight because you have trouble with carbs (which is usually caused by an abundance of fats)...then avoiding the carb problem altogether may be an effective short or mid-term tactic.