Over a year ago, I have been diagnosed as having developed Diabetes. I initially had an HbA1c of 9.5(high). Now it is 5.7 (normal). I have managed to control my diabetes only with diet. What follows is my musings, soap box speech and what I did to accomplish this.
If you decide to just skip everything and move on to some other site.. The most important advice I can give is: GET A PHYSICAL EVERY YEAR! My doctor said I was fine one year, then the next, my body must have said Enough is Enough! I give up..
How I think Diabetes Works:
At first, I was devastated because my Grandmother had diabetes and remember her taking insulin shots and seeing some marks on her body that do not heal.. After I was diagnosed, I started reading. I am not a doctor, so please do not take what I say in this page as having any authority.. All I know is that I procured a blood sugar meter and starting putting 2 and 2 together as to what works for me..
First off, there are 2 types of diabetes commonly called type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes occurs typically in a person’s younger years and it is basically the condition where your pancreas becomes defective and does not produce insulin. Type 2 diabetes is also sometimes called maturity onset diabetes where your body either does not produce enough insulin to become effective or stops producing insulin all together.
From what I have read, I think of diabetes this way: Your body’s chemistry builds up a chemical coating over the exterior walls of your cells. When you ingest food, your digestive system takes your food and converts it to other useable chemicals and transports it to your cells throughout your body. This could be in the form of fats or glucose.. If you eat fatty foods, you body basically takes the fat and redistributes it around. If you ingest carbohydrates, your body converts the carbohydrates to blood glucose and uses that means to transfer the energy to your body’s cells. Once you have the food in glucose form, your cells need a chemical called insulin to act as a sort of gate keeper. The insulin actually unlocks or breaks open your body’s cell walls to let the glucose in. If you have type 2 diabetes, you do not have enough insulin to unlock your cells. This could be due to pancreas failure or poor diet causing bad chemicals to line your cell walls and require a lot of insulin to unlock the cells and let the glucose in.
Diabetes Complications:
Now, if you do not have enough insulin and your body does not get nourished, your body kind of gets confused and thinks that there are not enough red blood cells available to transport the glucose around.. So, your body goes into overdrive and starts producing more red blood cells to compensate for the lack of nourishment.. That is why one of the indicators of having diabetes is an increased level of red blood cells.
The one immediate complication that diabetes causes is increased blood glucose levels. (high blood sugar).. Some people may say cool, my blood is sweet… But really this is very bad and ultimately life threatening. High blood glucose causes may complications in your body. The main complication is deterioration of your nerves.. This means that you could loose feeling in various places. Some places may make this site unsuitable for young eyes so I will leave this for you to figure out and the other includes your eyesight.
I like to think of my nerves as wires.. (go figure, I’m an engineer) I look at it this way.. Everyone has heard of diabetics loosing limbs.. This is because the longest length of nerves or wires are from your head to your toes.. The length of the nerve makes it statistically more likely that somewhere between your head and toe is likely to get attacked by high sugar and go bad. My doctor describes typical diabetes numbness progression the same as if you are putting on a sock or a pair of gloves. Numbness starts at your fingertips or your toes and slowly works its way upward to your head. The reason why diabetes folks loose limbs is because they lost feeling in them. A simple cut could get infected and diabetic folks do not know something is wrong until they either see the infection or feel it in the good areas of their body. Usually by this time, the infection has spread beyond the point where antibiotics are effective and amputation is the only way to go. Nasty way to go..
High blood sugar also starts deteriorating cell walls. A lot of diabetics also have eyesight problems. I asked my eye doctor what some of the complications of diabetes are in your eyesight.. He said that nerve damage between your brain and eyes occurs, but more often the cell membranes in the back side of your eyes deteriorate and start hemorrhaging. This in turn damages the other cells in the vicinity and causes blindness faster. The treatment in this case is to cauterize the areas that have damaged cells with a laser. This stops the bleeding and preserves the patient’s eyesight a little longer using the remaining good adjacent cells. Unchecked high glucose, though will cause more cells to bleed and ultimately blindness. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have my eyesight. I want to see my daughter graduate, have kids and be able to play with them too..
Diabetes and high glucose also starts deteriorating blood vessel walls and also promotes heart disease and kidney failure
All around, I do not like the consequences and after figuring all this out, I like my eyesight, want to have my extremities, and want to be able to enjoy life in my later years.
Treatment:
So, if you have been diagnosed with diabetes, how is it treated? My doctor tried to initially get me to take Byetta. Byetta is, after reading the manufacturer’s literature, a synthesized hormone that was discovered in some lizard’s saliva. This lizard supposedly could eat once and then survive for weeks without eating again.. The drug is new and the only way to administer it is with a needle and syringe since it deteriorates in your digestive tract and becomes useless. I do not like needles and I am leery about all new drugs. I always hear about drugs that are the best thing since sliced bread and then we later find out that things are bad for you.. Look at Margarine.. When I grew up, butter was bad and margarine was a miracle substitute! Now the authorities say that butter is better than margarine..
Other treatment is oral medications for mild diabetes cases to increase insulin. If you decide to forego any kind of diet, your diabetes will get worse and then shots of insulin are required.
How I am making it:
First, figure out your body mass index. When I was first diagnosed, I was considered obese. The link to the left is what I Googled and was the first hit. The calculations are all the same.. I never got close to normal, but I did loose 50 lbs and went from obese to Overweight. I think that loosing weight is the single most important thing I did to get my bloodwork back to normal.
I decided to forego shots of Byetta and go on a diet.. for the rest of my life..Actually I look at it as not going on a diet, but rather my diet is changed for the rest of my life. I talked to my Doctor and he agreed to let me try it since the year before I was OK. He was skeptical that I would actually make any progress, but I thank him for letting me try.
To get a better idea of where I am coming from with what follows, I suggest you read the Sugar Busters book. It gives you the same type of advice I am writing about here and some insight as to how your body processes different types of foods. Here is a link to an amazon page.
I think what we have discovered is that if food is made commercially for a diabetic you need to watch carbs, sugar and fat. I have found out that I can not mix foods with higher carbs and fat. I can have food with the higher carbs, or sugar, or fat but not any two together. Many people keep away from sugar but I have found out that the carbs can be just as bad as the sugar for my sugar levels. Note most food has all of these naturally. Just keep them all as limited as possible.
The example is whipping cream. No carbs and no sugar, but it is extremely high on the fat. Many people think you have to stop enjoying food. But it is just a matter of changing your food.
What I am describing below is what I have read and what I have figured out on my own based on blood sugar (glucose) readings I have observed after eating foods and how my body reacts to those foods.
Here is how I figured out what is good and what is bad for me to eat. Basically, I take my blood sugar level. Eat a meal, then 2 hours later, take the reading again. My goal was to mix foods such that after 2 hours, my blood sugar returns back to the level I was at just prior to eating the meal.
Here is what I found out in a nutshell: My body responds well to a low carb, low fat diet. Any carbs that I do eat need to be from green vegetables and from low carb whole grains. So basically, I tell people the following when they go down the isles at Walmart. Yes I shop there too and not much elsewhere.
When I go shopping, I look at the label. If the label says added sugar or high fructose corn syrup, I put it back on the shelf. If you did this, it would drive you crazy since almost everything at most major foodstores have added sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Since I also have High Cholesterol, so I also have to look at the cholesterol levels. Also, you need to watch fats.. Transfat is bad. Fats like that found in Olive Oil and Avacados are good. Flax seed is good too. It provides omega 3 fats and if used ground as a flour, it adds moisture to many recipes.
Basically my diet consists of a vitamin supplement, occasionally low fat cuts of beef, lots of chicken, fish, and turkey. Almost all my vegetables are green and for dessert, I found Breyers Rocky Road low carb ice cream is the best to have occasionally.
What I do eat are as follows: 100% whole grain bread, no more than 4 pieces a day. Egg in the morning,, sharp cheddar cheese, a sandwich of no fat turkey breast, one apple, and for dinner fish, chicken, occasionally spaghetti (barilla multigrain) with spaghetti sauce that has 4g sugar per serving. (all tomatoes have built in sugar). For a snack, I eat nature trail mix found at Walmart. The bad part of the mix is raisins. For sugar substitutes, I like sweet and low or splenda. NutraSweet makes me have a headache.
What I stay away from is Orange Juice, most all fruit juices, anything that has high starch like potatoes, corn, white flour.. Anything with processed flour in it. And of course, sugar. I also try to have low fat dinners. However, I found the following unfortunate truth: Foods are either carbs, fat, or protein. If it has no protein, then it is either high in carbs or fat.
I look at it this way.. Our culture’s diet has changed drastically over the last 100 years and it took us millions of years to evolve. 100 years ago, our ancestors did not have processed sugar.. It was way too expensive. They took out the molasses for company.. Now, just about all desserts and foods have added sugar.. I try to think about how to make foods like they may have made them over 100 years ago.
My goal is to try to continue my current course and control my diabetes through diet. I was told once you are diagnosed a diabetic, you are always a diabetic. I can eat right, control the blood sugar levels as best I can. I anticipate, though, that my body will further deteriorate over time and I will probably eventually have to start taking some sort of medicine. If I have to take medicine I hope to only have to take oral meds when I get up there in age..
Approximately 6.3% of the US Population in 2002 have Diabetes. Here is a depressing web page with the Statistics.
Here is a link to the CDC National Center for Cronic Disease. 132 Billion dollars is spent each year according to CDC.
I think that diabetes is actually a big dollar industry that drug companies are making a fortune over. I hope more media attention is given to what I consider a growing epidemic.
Last revised 1/20/2008