Some of us on these forums are graybeards. Maybe we need a thread on this.
I recently became diabetic, type 2, and with diet change and oral medication have done a good job of getting my blood sugar mostly in line. It’s no surprise since it runs in my family, but I hoped the way we all hope that it wouldn’t happen to me, or at least happen later. But here I am.
So any tips? My doctor was pleased after about five weeks of medication and diet change with my results. I went from a glucose reading of 376 down to readings between 110 and 150. He said if I lose 30 pounds and do a good job with diet and exercise, I may reverse it and be able to go off medication. I’m on metformin, btw, for any similar sufferers.
Diabetes wrecked my father, a good man, ruining his last years and effectively killing him at the age of 72. I’d like to avoid losing most of my vision, my kidneys, and my general health the way he did, so any advice is welcome.
What I’ve done is low-carbed my diet. I bring my readers to the grocery store now and check carb counts. I’ve eliminated sweet treats other than fruit, which I try to go easy on. The most difficult thing for me is eating at work, since sandwiches are so easy but bread has become a bit of an enemy due to the carbs.
I haven’t done what I need to do with exercise yet, although I do either ride a bike to work (3 miles) or walk to the bus (1.3 miles) most days, so that’s something. I’m just lazy in the morning and tired after a long day at work.
Just sharing with my Qt3 family! You guys are all friends, many with funny names! :)
Do you have access to a microwave @ work? Cooking at home and bringing in warmable dishes really makes going low-carb much, much easier. But I don’t wanna dump a ton of recommendations on you if it’s not feasible :)
You are where I was around a decade ago. Family disposition, ill father, starting on metformin, the whole bundle. I’ve probably conducted my professional life more cautiously just because I have great health coverage where I am and want to be able to retire with it locked in. Such is life.
Everything your physicians are telling you about exercise and diet is correct, but if you have a genetic predisposition, your condition will probably deteriorate slowly over time. That sounds unpleasant but, there are a lot of new meds out there short of going on insulin, the last resort. I’ve been on Victoza for the last few years with great results, fasting blood sugar around 100-110 every morning and it’s a decent appetite suppressant to boot. Not cheap, though. But from the sound of it you are well on your way to managing the condition as best you can. I know my father didn’t take it seriously enough and paid the price.
Hey RickH, thanks for the reply. My father didn’t take it seriously either, I believe, though I really don’t know how he approached it because he never talked about it. He ended up losing most of his vision, having his kidneys fail, and suffered a debilitating stroke after a kidney transplant. At the end when he died of a staf infection after being hospitalized, he would have had a foot amputated had he lived, so diabetes was devastating to him.
I feel luckier because the medication available is better. My doctor expected to put me on a second med when I had my follow-up visit, but I had lowered my blood sugar enough he was happy. I’ve been militant about carbs in my diet. My doctor told me that diet, exercise, and weight were more effective than medication, so that’s the approach I’ve taken. I realize that my pancreas is damaged and will never be the same, but it can still create insulin so my hope is that a healthier lifestyle will mitigate the damage of excessive blood sugar.
I had an eye exam with an opthamologist and there was no damage, but he did tell me it was inevitable, but good blood sugar control would stave it off, and laser treatment could cauterize the eventual vein damage. So I’m signed up for yearly eye exams. I love to read so the idea of that being difficult, like it became for my father, is a real fear.
As I said the hardest part is the exercise. I’m tired in the evening and lazy in the morning.
Turning 40 this year and my last blood panel was the minimum possible reading you could have for prediabetes. My new doctor went on an impressively long tirade about how I would absolutely have diabetes in 10 years, nothing I could do but try and control it after I got it, etc. The whole time I was thinking fuck that, fuck him, and fuck the horse he rode in on. I just ate too much crap the past year, something I never did before I had a toddler. Toddlers - good for taking the blame.
I think the truth is somewhere in between. It doesn’t run in my family and holy shit my dad has eaten a bowl of ice cream, often with cake, every night for the past 50 years. That’s not hyperbole. Then again an aunt has type 2, but is well into the obese spectrum.
So I plan to cut down on sweets, viz. when the toddler gets treats I do not, and continue my daily exercise. I work from home and invested in a treadmill desk, probably one of the best things I ever did for my health. Every business day I walk a minimum of two hours in the morning at a decent pace of 2.8. Any faster and it gets hard to use the trackball (forget mice on a treadmill desk).
While I think that diet and other factors over life have a lot to do with diabetes forming, a very large part of the disease is genetics. If you got dealt a bad hand of genes, it will probably happen to you in your lifetime. You can’t really beat yourself up on the stuff you ate last year, etc. You could be eating like a champ and in great physical condition, but have terrible genetic disposition for the disease. Conversely, you could eat like a garbage dump your entire life and not so much of have a whiff of diabetes in your life. The genetic and lifestyle factors are hand in hand. There is a great stigma over this disease, (You ate too much cake, you are a couch potato) that are just not the way this disease works.
Just gotta change things moving forward and do the best you can with your doctors to fight the disease. Medical advances in diabetes treatment have definitely improved, and you can bet the pharma companies and research will throw their weight at this disease. Diabetes is going to continue to be more and more prevalent, and the company that finds the cure (or the closest thing) will stand to profit a large amount. As a scientist Diabetes is a fascinating disease, as the mechanics of it are very interesting compared to many other disorders.
I know I will get this disease in my lifetime, got family history on both sides, though on both sides it manifested itself much later in life (70s to 80s in age). I know my mother is pre-diabetic, but working on keeping it that way. I am sure I will be in that boat in the next 2 decades.
The best thing about Diabetes (which completely sucks) is that you can fight it, it isn’t a death sentence, and you are not alone. There are great support groups and online communities that can help a lot with coping with the disease.
it is a royal pain in the arse, the diabetes. My mother in law had it for much of her life and it certainly shortend her life (she died in her 60’s!). I have no info if you already have it, but rather the general one i have about food in general. Eat healthy and eat well, avoid procesed food as much as possible (as it often contains too much sugar) and high sugar ‘junk’ food/snacks. Our modern ‘convenience’ foods are a big part of the growing explosion of diabetes.
Sadly a classic case of prevention is better than cure (as there is no cure).
I’m ‘Type 1’, so living the life of the manual pancreas via multiple daily finger prick tests and insulin injections (minimum four of each per day). My HbA1c is around 110 of your foreign mg/dL, so pretty well controlled.
As you’ve discovered, low carb diet is the best thing for diabetics - the less carb you ingest, the less insulin you need to inject (or whatever soft-core thing you Type 2s do). So much less chance of error, avoiding the roller coaster swings of hyper and hypoglycemia.
It’s certainly tough cutting bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, fruits, breakfast cereal, et. al. let alone cakes, biscuits, and chocolate. But dietary change soon becomes habit given time. I cut fruit because I found my blood glucose level skyrockets after eating it. I stopped drinking alcoholic beverages as well. I don’t smoke, or eat fast food or convenience meals. It’s advisable to become interested in cooking if you are not already. :)
Eating at work - I take a lunchbox to work each day with leafy greens, deli meats, cheeses, avocado. The full-fat no-sugar style mayo. Cucumber, small amounts of tomato. My current favourite thing to add which makes it awesome is a bit of fresh roasted beetroot (avoid the grocery store tins as they have added sugar). It’s very filling, I can’t imagine wrapping it in 2 pieces of bread any more.
Generally eat fresh green stuff and meat and dairy. Pumpkin is awesome (quite low carb but go easy), especially combined with the roast beetroot. Learn how to whip up a hollandaise/bearnaise-style sauce (emulsified eggs, butter, lemon/vinegar, herbs) as most other sauces tend to be thickened with carb-heavy flours. I discovered Tahini recently (the sesame seed paste) which is a bit like peanut butter but with half the carbs.
I don’t get much exercise beyond walking between public transport and work - my cardiologist has advised that half an hour of walking per day is sufficient to mitigate the heart disease risk, and additional heavier exercise doesn’t hold much extra benefit. The low carb diet has made me a lot slimmer than I used to be as well.
A great benefit of this type of diet is that you soon lose cravings for between-meal snacks too. I generally feel satiated for most of the day, and it’s funny to observe work colleagues who constantly have their hands in a bag of sugar. :)
My eldest son is type 1 and he’s managed it well. He’s become something of a gym rat and works out a lot, which I’m sure helps.
Not sure about other type 2 diabetics, but the metformin I take interacts with the liver to encourage my pancreas to produce more insulin, but it’s not something I can take to deal with a blood sugar spike the way an insulin injection might bring it down, so I have to watch everything I eat. So as you say, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and fruit tend to be a bit unhealthy, though I do eat an apple sometimes. I miss bananas. Rice really seems to jump my blood sugar too. I actually went to a cafeteria recently where all the old people eat because I had a craving for vegetables, and it wasn’t bad, but I was the youngest person there.
I’ve heard the same about exercise, that moderate exercise is just as healthy as vigorous exercise. I just need to burn a bit more sugar every day I think. I also need to do some resistance exercise to keep muscle tone.
I’m sure big pharma is working on it, since it’s reaching epidemic levels in the US.
The best takeaway I have is that this will encourage a more healthy lifestyle for me, though I actually have improved my diet over the last few years.
In terms of genetics, me, my father, his two brothers, and his mother all got type 2, so it runs in the family. The best thing to do is keep the belly fat off, from what my doctor said. The more of that you have, the more likely your body is going to become insulin-resistant, which makes your pancreas work harder until it finally gets worn out.
With my dad what happened to him is he developed it in his 40’s and was on oral medication, but I suspect he didn’t do what he needed to do. The drugs weren’t as good back then either. At some point in his early 60’s he woke up one morning and his eyes were clouded. Overnight many of the veins burst. His vision was never right again. Then the kidney failure, followed by a transplant and stroke, and he was never the same, though he did work very hard at recovery and was able to walk again with a walker after the doctor told him he probably wouldn’t.
I’ve already had a full eye exam and there’s no damage, but the doctor told me it would happen. The trick is to get yearly eye exams and when a vein starts to leak, get laser surgery to cauterize it. (It’s kind of weird when you can see your own eyeball giant sized on a computer screen, looking back at you.) He did say that if I keep my blood sugar under control it could be 15-20 years before I see any real damage to the eyes.
If you keep the fat off, I really have no idea how important it is to have a healthy diet. I’m no expert. My guess is that the harder you make your pancreas work, the more likely it is to go on strike and not work. I’ll tell you, if you start trying to avoid bread it’s difficult to eat out or bring lunch to work. That’s been one of my biggest challenges. Thing is, I already eat the healthier breads, multi-grain, sprouted wheat, etc. The stuff is just heavy with carbs, sadly.
Have one last meal of baked mac and cheese and a beer. Tell yourself ‘you know what, this is good but I can live without it; my health, family, friends are far more important.’ Then go on your diet and stick with it like an android.
Note I know nothing about it having lucked out in the genetics department. But I knew a type 2 and I remember thinking ‘jeez I should really follow a similar diet anyways.’
Here Type 1s are required to have yearly eye dilation exams to legally hold a drivers licence. Mine are fine as well, so far. I also get regular full blood and urine tests. Doctor recommended kidney and heart ultrasounds as well. Everyone’s body breaks down at the end, ours will just happen a bit sooner no matter how careful we are.
My guess is that the harder you make your pancreas work, the more likely it is to go on strike and not work.
I’m no expert either but that sounds about right. Manually dosing insulin, you get an idea of how much the body would need to produce to cover various foods - for someone that would eat half a pizza and a bottle of coke for example, that’s a hell of a lot of insulin the pancreas makes to process that huge sugar intake. Like a weeks worth of what I’d take with my diet now, in one hit… imagine the stress on the poor pancreas.
I’ll tell you, if you start trying to avoid bread it’s difficult to eat out or bring lunch to work. That’s been one of my biggest challenges. Thing is, I already eat the healthier breads, multi-grain, sprouted wheat, etc. The stuff is just heavy with carbs, sadly.
Lunch is easy - salad, meat, cheese, in a container. Avocado. Dump the bread. I make mine before work every morning. Prepare a range of witty retorts to the “wow, that looks healthy” comments you’ll get from your fat co-workers. ;)
Dining out is the biggest challenge for me too. I can pretty much guarantee a large blood glucose spike every time, no matter what I eat. The other thing is stress. Stressful situations, being out of the comfort zone, cause the liver to release stored glucose and spike my levels. This may be why a steak and salad at a restaurant still puts my BGL up.
Do you eat salad every day at work? I get tired of it after 2-3 days. I’m not sure I could do salad M-F every day for lunch. I do often start my day with a breakfast of two eggs and and three slices of turkey bacon. I get the Oscar Mayer turkey bacon that has no additives. I feel good starting my day with a zero carb breakfast, though I do have oatmeal once in awhile.
I’ve already decided that dining out is just going to be somewhat unhealthy. We recently went to an upscale Italian place that is known for bringing out awesome cheese bread instead of rolls, so I couldn’t resist that. Then I went with pasta because that’s their speciality. I didn’t even test that night later, but the next morning my blood sugar was still high, something like 180.
So how often do people test? I test in the morning when I get up, before eating, and usually in the evening, sometimes before eating and sometimes after. Since I really have no way of bringing down my sugar level besides going out and jogging five miles, I guess I am testing just to make sure nothing crazy is going on. It’s not like I can much to correct high blood sugar on a given day.
Yeah salad for lunch every day, not just at work. :) Boring I know. You could reheat stuff at work, curries are good if you cut out the rice. Same with stews, or soups. I don’t eat breakfast at all, just have some coffee.
I test when I get up, before I inject any insulin (meals) and before bed. You could always get some insulin if you wanted a way to bring your levels back down.
