I have been struggling with my blood sugar
I’m not in any wise diabetic, but I’m trying to keep it that way- so I’m monitoring my blood glucose and taking it easy.
Mostly, it means not eating anything that tastes good. Well, sweet. See, I don’t have a sweet tooth, I have 32 of them. So I love candy, sweet tea, regular coke, chocolate, any kind of pie cake or pastry you can imagine. And I’m having none of that. Pretty much, if I eat it, it has to have had a face.
And if I screw up, and have something I shouldnt, it ends up causing my blood glucose to soar. And only serious vigilance will bring it back down. No, it doesn’t get dangerously high, yet, but again, thatis what I’m trying to avoid. The worst thing, is the fact that when it does go high, it seems the only effective way to get ti back down quickly is to exercise. And I would rather take a shower in a bombay storm drain than exercise.
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Karl Denniger has a pretty good diet. He also had some running in there.
I have been staying away from carbs in general. Seems to be working. TKD is helping as that is the exercise.
You don’t have to work out hard or long, but it seems to be enough.
Not sure what you would like to do for exercise. If you use a bike be sure to spin. I have seen a lot of super sized people riding bikes to no effect other than endurance.
If you take out the sugars and carbs you should take off some weight and feel a lot better.
Not a regular commenter here, but a regular reader. I also have two diabetics in my family, one who is type 1 AND type 2, and one type 2.
First, make sure that you and your MD are on the same page and he/she knows what is happening.
Second, some supplements that help control but ARE NOT diabetic control drugs: Cinnamon. It comes in capsules, and it improves sure metabolism and really doesn’t have any side affects that I have heard of. One or two capsules a day. Chromium Picolinate. You don’t need to take a lot, and there can be problems with overdosage, but the amount in a standard daily multivitamin helps break down carbohydrates. Tumeric. This is a spice used in cooking. It helps fight pre-diabetes and normalize insulin production. Just use it in cooking.
Monitor your diet and your sugar levels and track what foods affect you most. There are a number of different carbs and each can have a different affect on an individual. My daughter can eat wheat and potatoes with a lot less effect on her sugar levels than rice. Which isn’t fair because we are Chinese.
Also, inflammation can play merry hob with blood sugar levels. Low grade infections, getting dinged by something, arthritis, getting sick, etc. Make sure you have things like that as under control as possible, and be on watch for that.
Finally, I would advise that you familiarize yourself with the symptoms of ketoacidosis, which develops if your sugar goes too high, too long. That requires hospitalization for treatment, and can be fatal. And an attack is frequently the first sign of diabetes developing. You can buy OTC “ketostix” that you pee on and they change color if your ketones are too high if you start having the symptoms. If the sticks do, get to a doctor immediately.
Good luck.
OK, screwed up. Should be:
“it improves sugar metabolism”.
What Paul said, it is not the sweets, it is the carbs. Your body can’t tell sucrose from fructose. Mashed spuds are the same as cake in your blood. When I became diabetic the nutritionist told me the three worst foods are pizza, pasta, and rice. You still have to eat carbs, you just have to control them.
The quickest way to reduce blood sugar is to cut out regular soda. Diet tastes like ass, but you get used to it. Diet Dr Pepper and Coke Zero taste pretty close to the originals.
Ditto the Denniger. I checked A1C, fasting sugar, as well as recovery after a meal. Levels were pretty good, but I still need to work at it.
Just taking one piece of bread off a hamburger, no cokes, and I’ve lost some weight. Main desire is to have correct insulin response.
I didn’t like giving up ice cream….
So, what you’re saying in a roundabout kind of way… is that you’re just too sweet for your own good?
*serpentine run!*
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
If it spikes with just a little cheating then you are probably a good way down the road of insulin resistance (Type II diabetes).
You’ve seen my journey over the past 6 months chronicled on bookface.
I don’t have a glucose meter but aim to get one.
I do have keto stick to verify when I’m in ketosis (rarely use them because I can tell by the taste in my mouth).
Through the sticks I have been able to learn I can cheat enough to kick myself out and get back to ketosis in about 3 days. Hopefully that means I wasn’t very compromised when I started this.
Get a meter. They’re almost free. Get the Glucose buddy app for your phone. it is free. Monitor it and that way you can stay on top of it, and the app allows you to output the data as comma delimited ascii to a spreadsheet.
I don’t hardly ever drink anything carbonated anymore. Almost zero bread. I try to do zero rice. And no potatoes. And no pasta, which I don’t like anymore. Yes, I may well be insulin resistant. I’ve another followup with the MD soon, I’m gonna see how it goes. I do know when I move around it’s better, and when I don’t, it’s worse. I hate exercise with the fury of ten thousand suns, but maybe i can find a way to do more stuff and move more and not exercise for the sake of exercise. I appreciate y’all’s comments.
I’m gonna second Joe’s opinion on Diet DR Pepper and Coke Zero.
The thing to get past is mostly the aftertaste of Aspartame. (Aspartame has it’s own set of problems.)
I can’t drink any carbonated beverages anymore. I mean, once in a great while I may have a diet coke, and i mean like twice a year.
Only exercise I get is either shooting, running a loading machine or doing various projects around the house.
My annual physical was back in April (fasting blood sample on the 14th). I had been on the almost no carbs (doing my best to keep it under 50g per day) since around January 11th.
I was down to 209 from 237 in January. My fasting glucose was 83. My triglycerides which my doc uses as an indicator of pre-diabetes were 50 (150 or less is considered normal).
Friday morning last week I weighed 188.5. Haven’t been that light since I met my wife in 1993.
Unfortunately I had a bad cheat weekend and put 4 pounds on. Back down to 191.5 this morning.
You might consider looking at the work of Michael Mosley, who advocates low carb with intermittent fasting two days a week.
He also has an exercise plan based on alternating very short bursts of intensive exercise surrounded by not so intensive exercise … all in about 15 minutes a day. It sounds brutal but it’s not and there’s some evidence that it’s very effective. Mosley used it along with his 5:2 diet to lose 50 pounds and stave off diabetes.
https://www.fast-exercises.com/
Jenny
The problem is *simple* carbs, not carbs generally. White rice bad, brown rice good. (If you can stand it.) Whole wheat good, white bread bad. (Homemade bread is best, so you know what’s in it.) And so on.
Sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose, bound together. High fructose corn syrup is the same but unbound. Your body snips the link in sucrose at no metabolic cost, so sucrose and hfcs have the same effect on your body – evil. Fruits like apples are high in fructose too, but also high in fiber so the fructose does no harm.
I eat bunches of carbs, but I aim for complex carbs and avoid refined sugars. Considering my age and generous waistline, my doctor is annoyed that I don’t have even a hint of diabetes (or even “pre-diabetes”), but that’s just how I eat. Now if only I could consistently diet and .. shudder .. *exercise*, I might actually look as well as I feel. I walk a fair bit, but that’s not going to fix a lifetime of laziness.
That truly SUCKS… Hope you get it under control.
You just have to be good at brainwashing yourself.
I am a vegan and a Muslim, so I have convinced myself that only the most unsightly garbage is edible.
Even my cat has learned that although my sister’s dinner might be worth investigating, mine is worthless.
Worthless and sugar free!
You’re stronger than I am. I could never be a vegan, sooner or later I’d start eating my own fingers.
I was diagnosed Type 2 in April 2015.
It is a pain in the ass injecting insulin three times a day, but if doing that and watching food intake will keep me out of the hospital again…so be it.
Read some books endorsed by the American Diabetes Assoc.
Learn to love water for your beverage.
Subotai: Sorry I didn’t see your post to release it earlier. All interesting things., I take Turmeric a couple times a day for inflammation. I notice it when I don’t take it. I try to eat oatmeal through the week with a lot of cinnamon on it. Several other things you have suggested, I will be looking into. Thanks.
Hrm, exercise? Or just moving around?
A few years ago I was having trouble with what appeared to be “diabetic nerve pain”. It turned out to be caused by other issues, but in the process I had to go in for multiple blood draws to convince the doc that I wasn’t diabetic.
Discovered really quickly that if I let them schedule the (fasting) blood draws for 0-dark-hundred I’d fall asleep in the chair in between draws and my blood sugar would spike borderline high. If, on the other hand, I made sure to schedule the (fasting) blood draws for a more reasonable hour, so that I was awake, I’d end up moving around in the chair, getting up and pacing a couple circles around the waiting room (to the frustration of the techs), sit back down and fidget…..and hey look, my blood sugar comes back perfectly normal!
Lesson learned, after a meal I try to get up and do some little stuff around the house. Dinner cleanup works. Take the dogs out for a meander around the property lines. Nothing huge, no real exercise. But little things to keep me moving for a bit after I eat.
thats kinda what im doing, trying not to eat late, trying to have a half hour or hour of moderate activity.
See “Dawn phenomenon.” A problem for some people.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expert-answers/dawn-effect/faq-20057937
Jenny
Sorry to hear that.
Please read the why we get fat book, or listen to the audiobook. It goes over all the fun facts of why sugar is evil and how cutting carbs can help.
Also, I hate excersise too, but I found that I love weight lifting. Start on a simple old timer setup like Starting Strength and go for 12 weeks. I hate cardio, but lifting is fun.
Most of us love, Love, LOVE ice cream and giving it up, especially in the summer, is a trial. It’s not just us; I recently read where Dr. Mark Hyman (The Blood Sugar Solution Guy) said he used to eat a bowl of GrapeNuts for breakfast … mixed into ice cream. I totally get that.
He came up with a recipe for a homemade ice cream that you can try that might help get you over that “I miss ice cream” hump.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/healthy-summer-foods_b_3466381.html
Here’s another version:
http://danielplan.com/blogs/dp/healthy-summertime-treat—strawberry-ice-cream/
Actually that base of coconut milk/coconut oil can make all kinds of desserts … just add whatever flavorings you like, extracts, dark chocolate, low glycemic fruit. (Berries seem to work best for this.) You can also consider nuts or almond butter or peanut butter … look for brands with little or no added sugar, they’re out there.
You can also add coconut cream, which is thick and rich and has a low carb count. Make sure that you’ve got coconut cream and not the sweetened “Cream of coconut;” that has added sugar in it and is a ton of carb. Read the label to be sure you’ve got the right one.
IF you’re good with dairy, you can also mix in heavy cream. Hell, make chocolate mousse and freeze that!
http://www.food.com/recipe/chocolate-mousse-low-carb-74651
You can add egg yolks for more richness too. Or cream cheese. An entire brick of Philadelphia cream cheese is 8 grams of carbohydrate total. TOTAL.
I’d substitute a little bit of stevia for the artificial sweeteners in all of these recipes, but YMMV. Use what works for you — even a tiny bit of real sugar if you’re not wildly insulin resistant/carb sensitive. You can also get a “baking blend” of stevia mixed with sugar for something that gives sweetness and a bit of texture, like you need for some things. I wouldn’t eat a bag of it every day but a little bit of something like this is a step in the right direction. I’ve found it’s not huge big steps that made a difference but rather a whole lot of little steps, they add up.
You don’t even necessarily need an ice cream maker to do this; you can whiz this stuff up in a mixer or a blender or a food processor and put it in the freezer. Take it out a little before you intend to eat it, break it up a bit if you like with a blender or even just stir it up with a spoon.
It’s not Ben and Jerry, but it ain’t bad.
Jenny
High doses of vitamin C, especially liposomal vitamin C, will cause errors in several types of blood glucose testing systems.
FAD systems may exhibit errors with as little as 600 mg/day, for instance.
Continued high doses of vitamin C may raise blood serum glucose levels and A1c numbers to the point that you may look like you are a diabetic or a pre-diabetic to a healthcare provider who isn’t adequately clued in.
If you are taking large “Linus Pauling”-styled doses of vitamin C, cut that crap out and back your doses down for a while to what your glucose testing system can tolerate.
Truest words I know: “All things in moderation.”
For most of us for who “Too much is never enough,” it’s a lesson we keep learning.
Jenny
While I’m thinking of it, here are a few additional things to think about when it comes to blood glucose testing errors …..
Paracetamol (acetaminophen) in large doses will interfere with point-of-care, home care, and professional assay blood glucose testing systems. I don’t know if the YSI analyser has improved over the years in terms of being able to reject false highs for paracetamol, but in the past even a 500 mg tablet once per day would be enough to throw it off.
FAD systems appear to be affected at roughly 2000-2500 mg in a single dose, which you might do if you had to take paracetamol to knock the pain down enough to get to an A&E.
Ibuprofen in sufficiently large doses will also cause testing errors.
Hematocrit levels that are far away from textbook norms may also influence test results. If you are concerned, get some tests done.
Xylose, xylitol, and in some cases the common antiseptic chloroxylenol may also trigger testing errors, usually indicating higher than normal test levels. Although chloroxylenol is not really a sugar polyol in a strict sense, it can behave like one as far as the test strips are concerned.
This stuff can be found in Dettol products in the UK and worldwide as well as in Dawn anti-bacterial dish soap in the US.
While we’re on the subject of soap, some sweet-smelling soaps with all sorts of things that are meant to be good for your hands are in fact full of saccharides of various kinds. Those will cause your test results to read erroneously high unless you are very careful about cleaning the test sample site — this is why you’ll see nurses in a point-of-care setting doing a double-bleed technique, just so they can remove surface contamination.
In other words, if things seem off, think about what might be affecting the tests first before accepting oddly high or low numbers.
All good advice and information. I do appreciate it.