When your HbA1C is "normal"...

[verdesca]

back in the very early days I innocently asked my Doctor, "What can I eat?", She replied, "You can eat anything you like but remember there will be consequences."She is very good, I smile as I learn

 

[Bluetit1802]

Remember that Hba1c is only an average reading of your blood sugar over time and that masks the highs you may have experienced and which cause damage balanced out by some lows you may have had with long gaps between meals.

Very true. It is the fallacy of average. Two people can have the same HbA1c. One can have roller coaster swings with very variable peaks and troughs . The other can have minimal variability. The roller coaster person is more likely to experience complications.

 

[singsteve]

I suppose I am looking for a bit of advice/motivation/normality in asking this.

If you have managed to reverse your HbA1C so they are back to " normal levels" i.e. below 42, do you eat normal meals and if so how often?

I know that I have and always will have T2. If I do manage to reverse it (currently at 44) I am curious to understand if I can go back to normal eating every so often, perhaps once a week, once month - you know eat pancakes, doughnuts etc. I'll accept the fact that if I eat gnocchi my bloods will spike but from what I have read that is a fairly normal thing to happen even in the non special (none diabetic) people. But what would be the long term impact of this every so often "normal" meal?

In no way am I anticipating going back to what I was eating before I was diagnosed. With all I have learnt so far, I don't think I could but it would be nice to eat Bolognese with spaghetti again..

Hi,

One of the issues is, what's normal? certainly not a highly processed food diet with a large % of carbs. There is a massive choice of foods outside of what you perceive as normal. I have done low carbs and low processed foods for more than 20 years, I never touch bread and sugar and soda drinks are banned from the house but maybe just once a week i will go for marinara with spaghetti.... Of course, the purists would say use wholegrain spaghetti with homemade sauce and eat it slow.. which is fine but the Italian restaurant close to me is sublime. All my numbers are in the perfect range. After some time away from processed carbs etc, amongst other things, your body will become more sensitive to insulin and what was previously scary, becomes no issue. Just a point; go easy on animal saturated fats. look up 'intracellular-lypotoxicity' and it's contribution high blood sugar. I am involved in a government study in my Country and we have compiled the medical data and we amazed that there are not more publications. i do work in the medical industry and i am a qualified nutritionist. Good luck.

 

[veggirl]

I do eat normal occasionally usually when I go to someone' for a meal and they serve up lots of carbs so i eat a little so as not to cause a fuss potatoes, bread but not cake or obvious sugary stuff. Most people just don't get what carbs are they think it's just sugar and say but fruit is healthy not for me it isn't but then I was ignorant once too

 

[bulkbiker]

Of course, the purists would say use wholegrain spaghetti with homemade sauce and eat it slow..

And those dang keto purists would say just have a steak...

 

[britishpub]

i do work in the medical industry and i am a qualified nutritionist.

I'd keep that quiet

 

[singsteve]

I'd keep that quiet

part of our current study is to explore what people really know (or don't know) so i am hoping to engage with people heavily involved in d2 forums and analyse what they think based upon forum advice from (in some cases) supposed experts....

 

[Resurgam]

The thing about low carb is that it is normal for me - I am eating now the same foods I have always eaten when I could get away with it, because I have always had problems with my weight going up very rapidly when I ate 'normally' - since the mid 1970s low carb has been how I needed to eat. When I was very active I could eat up to 80 gm of carbs a day, usually it was more like 60gm, these days as I have so much more weight to lose it is often about 40 - almost two years of cereals to lower cholesterol and I weighed 264lb at my highest, with a waistline more like an equator, painfully and incompressibly over 50 inches.