T2 and Obesity

[HpprKM]

I have a been, oft times silently, railing against most T2 diagnoses descriptors that I have come across since being diagnosed 18 mths ago. The thing that is niggling me is this:

The implication that nearly all T2 cases are caused by being over weight and eating a poor diet, this is simply not true, certainly not in my own case. It seems my T2 came down to me throught both maternal and paternal grandparents/relatives, although not my parents which left me unsuspecting.

Of course I understand that obesity and poor diet makes a person more susceptible to becoming T2, but I am sure, that like myself, this is just not the case for all T2s. I now feel that confessing to being a T2 implies that I have been sloppy in self-care over the years, this is simply not true, as a 5'5" female I have averaged 8/9 stone for most of my adulthood, tried - always - to eat healthily (aside of my love of chocolate, I have never been a great biscuit or cake eater), and drink extremely modestly! Wondering if anyone else experiences the same views on this? :roll:

 

[hanadr]

I hate that too although I am overweight. I always ate the low fat healthy diet, before diabetes and learning low carb. I cook from scratch and everything is fresh.
I think that the obesity is a symptom of T2, not a cause. I also have a direft line ofMother, grandmother, great-grandmother with T2 My family is from North East Bohemia, farmers, who grew their own food and had healthy diets as well as working hard physically all their lives.

 

[HpprKM]

You have a good point, my daughter is 32 and was raised on healthy foods, in fact, having made a mistake with her two older brothers when really young, I did not raise her on sweet things and she has never really had a sweet tooth! However, both she and one of her brothers have thyroid problems, and try as she might she just cannot lose weight, although not diabetic, she recognises her high predispositon and tries even harder to eat healthily, as a result of her thyroid issues she has a lactose and wheat intolerance, necessitating her to watch everything she eats, she knows more about GI than I do, and yet everyone seems to think that she is overweight due to diet, including for the longest time her own GP! This is something that infuriates her! She also hates to be called obese, she declares she is fat! I understand this is becoming quite common place with people in the "overweight" category. One other thing that really concerns her on this issue is the fact that some hospitals can refuse to treat overweight persons - implying that weight loss is easy if only people cut down on food, or/and eat more healthily - she said in such a situation she would have little or no hope :!:

 

[HpprKM]

Addition to last post:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7273&p=64975&e=64975

, or even worse, it is self inflicted.

 

[cugila]

As has been proved time and again on here - one person's 'Healthy Diet' can be someone elses Poison !! Dieticians are not always right !
You will have to listen to the advice here and make your own mind up.

 

[HpprKM]

Yes, this is true, not all people are the same, but the vast majority of so called 'experts' try to insist one size fits all. I guess it generalisation just makes is easier for them to try and prove their point!

 

[Trinkwasser]

Me too, that's why I tend to bang on endlessly about my background.

Pretty much everyone on one side of the family has some but seldom all markers of "metabolic syndrome" and most of them including the full diabetics are skinny.

It annoys the hell out of me to be told I am "at low risk" of diabetes by those little internet quizzes simply because like about 20% of Type 2s I am not overweight.

It annoys the hell out of me even more when Type 1s are pulled into the "blame the Type 2s for being fat and lazy" scam, they **** well should know better (unlike journalists)

IMO genes make up a large part of it. The genes are expressed by the Heart Healthy High Carb Low Fat diet, so anyone who actually does become obese is probably so because they are eating what they have been told.

Regarding thyroid, this is yet another condition often woefully undertreated and unless controlled knock on into many other endocrine dysfuntions

http://www.drbriffa.com/blog/2009/03/28 ... o-believe/

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/ ... to-do.html

just a couple of recent blog posts on the subject

 

[Grumpy]

I think it was in the 'Bloodsugar 101' book that it said that weight gain can be a SYMPTOM of diabetes, not a cause. I recently went to the surgery for spirometry (breathing test thing for asthmatics/COPD sufferers) and they showed me a chart that showed my weight rocketed about two years/eighteen months before I was diagnosed T2 (diabetic grandparent and great-grandparent on different sides of the family).

 

[HpprKM]

Yes, my weight went to its highest ever (from averaging 8/9 stone) it went to around 10 stone and climbing, I could not understand it, never eaten junk food, or even been a big eater! Once diagnosed it started falling off me, which was rather nice - only problem all my clothes were too big and I am still having to replace them Not sure if that is a plus though, if the diabetes caused me to put on weight in first place

 

[HpprKM]

Trinkwasser - thanks for the links and for coming back on the subject of Thyroid disease, despite this not being a Thyroid website. It too is a really nasty disease, often underated by the uneducated masses, due to lack of information. A diificult disease to diagnose, my son was very ill and no one could find out what was wrong, he complained of feeling tired, his memory was appalling, many people thought he was just lazy and being difficult. I look back at his photos, at that time he was really skinny, he had dark rings under his eyes - even I, who got used to seeing him like this did not realise how ill he looked. He would/could not get up in the mornings, I wondered if he had ME for a while, not understanding what could be wrong with him. At one point he became mentally ill, and was terrified not knowing what was happening to him, mental illness is almost an inevitable result of untreated diseased thyroid. He told me it is liking being drugged, or the feeling after a really heavy sleep of not being able to wake up - that it was like having a fog in his head, but he felt like that all the time! He has been diagnosed for some years now, his sister, luckily recognised the symptoms through her brother's bad experiences and was diagnosed much faster. Both brother and sister have Hashimoto's disease which eats away the thyroid, which in itself is a complex disease that affects the thyroid, my daughter was diagnosed with that quite early on, my son who has been diagnosed wih thyroid problems for over 10 years now, mentioned Hashimoto's to his doctor just last year, she told him he was being ridiculous! It was only in Dec of last year, when he saw an endocronologist that he was diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease! With this disease levels keep changing, and need constant monitoring. It also puts them at high risk for T2 diabetes, so it really is a nasty and understated disease.

 

[Trinkwasser]

There are various interlinks between different parts of the endocrine system. I suspect our familial problem is insulin resistance, but whereas this usually links in to leptin resistance which is responsible for the obesity, in our family this mostly doesn't occur (in fact some of the overweight people measure better than some of us skinnies). There's a lot of ongoing work teasting apart the biochemistry of relatively newly discovered stuff including but not limited to leptin, ghrelin, anandamide etc. and relating it back to insulin.

Yes the connection between hypothyroid and both types of diabetes is well known, also to "treatment resistant" depression, Theoretically it is relatively easy to diagnose and treat, the difficulties come when TSH is normal and T3 or T4 are out of range, when thyroxine often doesn't work too well. The major problem is that TSH may be considered "not treatable" at ridiculous numbers, over time I've seen some remarkable recoveries by people who have moved from an area where thyroid is not treated to one (like here) where they are much more aggressive, including one who lost about half her body weight and one who regained about 50 IQ points simply by bringing TSH to around unity, and a few others who required Armour or iodine or selenium supplementation to get the conversion back in line. Yes it needs monitoring and tweaking but the results can be astonishing.

A few more useful resources

http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog/hypothyroidism

http://www.thyromind.info/

http://www.thyroiduk.org/

 

[HpprKM]

Trinkwasser

Once again many thanks for your replies, I am sending links to my son and daughter, you are much more knowledgeable on the subject than I, my daughter is also very knowledgeable on the subject, I only know lilttle bits and pieces I have picked up from her, and my son - I realise that hypothyrodism is not always so complicated but also that getting the T4 and T3 levels right can be difficult, at least it has been with my offspring, especially my son - he has recently been moved off synthectic thyroxine and the change has caused him some problems, the change was initiated because when he lived in UK he was on natural thyroxine, since his return to Canada he has been on the synthectic route and this has not always proven successful, as mentioned above, he met with an endocronologist for the first time late last year, who diagnosed suspected Hashimoto's disease and prescribed a change in medication!

Conversely, because I was always feeling so tired, with my children's history, and my mother was also found to suffer from hypothyroidism late in her life, I went to my GP and asked for tests to see if I could have also have the disorder, this was when I was told I was T2 diabetic, it was a big shock and completely unsuspected!

 

[Trinkwasser]

Hypothyroid, and Hashimoto's, can both cause weight gain. The specific type of abdominal fat acts like an endocrine organ itself and puts out cytokines which can disable the beta cells in the pancreas, which causes further weight gain. there are a lot of such feedback loops involved in the endocrine system in general and Type 2 in particular which need breaking out of. Sometimes like me you can collect omental fat without any external signs, what Michael Eades calls "metabolic obesity" where you are skinny but have the lipids and BP of a fat person.

A singificant minority of us, also Type 1s and nondiabetics, have extra problems with wheat, other than gluten intolerance/celiac

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/ ... sited.html

We have a familial overreaction to wheat giving BG spikes over and above other grains, even in skinny athletes like one of my cousins. She can get away with rice cakes whereas I have to resort to oatcakes and in much restricted quantities.

I may not be much of an original thinker but I do have the ability to collect and collate information, much of it as a result of trying to discover why I am so weird <G>

 

[HpprKM]

Again, thanks for this info. Particularly the wheat blog, interesting to both Thyroid and Diabetic issues! We realise that Hashimotos and Thyroidism can cause weight gain, but as my daughter remarks, her inability to lose weight cannot be due to this as she is on thyroxine and problem under control, surely then her system would return to near normal and her weight would go - do you know anything about this particular problem please?

 

[Trinkwasser]

See if you can get an actual number for her TSH and especially try to get T3 and T4 tested. Some people need a TSH around unity and some authorities consider anything in single figures to be acceptable. Likewise TSH may be in normal range but the T4/T3 conversion may be broken, sometimes increasing iodine or selenium may help with this, or it may be necessary to switch to Armour from thyroxine.

Have a look round here

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/

William Davis has made not a few posts on thyroid in the past few months (he's a cardiologist and generally knows whereof he writes)

Probably a low carb diet would be a good bet for trying to break out of the weight gain but when more than one factor is involved this can get quite hard to control