How long .....?

[JenniferW]

I was diagnosed T2 in May (3 months ago), changed to a low-carb diet after finding this website, but am also having to deal with binge eating, i.e. I overeat. The overeating's not as bad as it has been, but it's not normal eating.

I'm not getting much of drop in blood glucose levels - some drop, and I'm mostly in the target range for T2 (pre-meal: 4 - 7 mmol/L and under 8.5 mmol/L). My pre-breakfast levels range from 6.1 to 9.0 mmol/L. My goal would be to reverse this and get down to normal levels.

Given that I've increased my level of exercise to about as much as I can cope with (and it's slowly increasing), and I'm similarly paying more and more attention to each and every food I eat so that carb levels are often around 50g / day, and that's coming mostly from vegetables, where do I go from here?

As well as my binge eating (a condition which developed some years ago), I've been being tested for almost 10 years and have been in the pre-diabetic range almost all that time. So does this mean it's going to a long slow haul to get the levels down?

 

[ButtterflyLady]

I wouldn't use the phrase "long slow haul", I would say it's not going to happen overnight, but you should get there eventually. It might be too early to tell, but if you were having no more than 50g of carbs every day, which would mean no binge eating, and you were still not making much progress after another 3 months, then you might need to really look into whether something else is going on. But you are not at that point yet.

If you are honest with yourself about how much you are eating when you binge eat, and keep a record of when you binge, it should be possible to adjust that 50g to take the extra carbs into account. If your average daily carbs are, for argument's sake, 100g, or 150g or more, I think you would be able to see why you aren't getting your levels down. But a binge once a week or less often wouldn't change the daily average much.

I think the HbA1c would give a good reflection of how things are going. If you look at the big picture, taking 6 or even 9 months to achieve your BG goals isn't that much worse than taking 3 months. Every day you are not clocking up the levels you used to, is a good day, with lower risk of complications. It's hard to be patient. But you are heading in the right direction.

 

[JenniferW]

I wouldn't use the phrase "long slow haul", I would say it's not going to happen overnight, but you should get there eventually. ...

Thanks for this. That's a thoughtfully helpful response.

I live on my own, do all my own shopping, etc, so one strategy is that I just don't buy carb foods now. As a result, when I binge, I binge on cheese, eggs, yoghurt, milk, nuts and / or vegetables. I'm a sad case of someone who will just eat what's there! That's how come I can keep the overall level of carbs down, still. Over the decades (I'm now in my 60s), I was a serial dieter, and looking back, realise I was the same about low calorie foods - I could eat way more of them than was 'normal'. I think I'm inherently pretty easy-going about food, sort of the opposite of faddy.

My 3-monthly HbA1c is on the horizon, so that'll be a good point to reflect on what I've managed so far. I see a nurse at the GP's whose been good to talk with about the binge eating, and she's said that we're just going to have to work with it. I overeat most days (in the evening - usually), and have a bad attack maybe a couple of times a week. But I have had really high stress levels for some years which coincidentally look as if they're about to drop away in the near future. So I'm not completely pessimistic.