Reply to Thread

Guest, we'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the Diabetes Forum Survey 2025 »

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Claire87" data-source="post: 1926944" data-attributes="member: 68396">Hi, it's nice to find another Cushie. I hope you're doing okay.I've recently been referred to an endocrinologist, and it's looking like I've had Cushing's for 32 years. Well, the buffalo hump can be seen in my school photos, and I know the weight gain happened when I was 10 after I fractured my skull. I haven't had the tests, but I have 28 symptoms of Cushing's atm, and I 100% expect to see a big old tumour on that MRI (if I ever get one). I've also got diabetic retinopathy and liver disease this week apparently, so I think I'm deteriorating too quickly. (An article from King's College claims that most Cushing's patients don't live long enough to get diabetic retinopathy, so I think I'm screwed tbh).It's scary. My body is rapidly falling apart, and no one seems to have any answers for me other than 'diet', which is weird since I'm only a stone over my BMI, and I barely eat at all. Maybe it'll get better when I see a specialist. I've got a month to go before that.I have managed to shift that weight over the years though with dangerous low fat dieting, but it always came back. My best weight loss was on the low carb diet because it wasn't unhealthy, and it helped with the diabetes too, but I had to go way low to zero carbs to get into ketosis, and then stick to under 30g carbs a day to lose weight, and I couldn't maintain it without remaining below 50g carbs a day, which isn't easy. But it does give you diabetic remission as well, so it's worth doing in the long run. Losing weight never got rid of moon face or the big tummy though. I still had my fat face and pregnant belly at 9 stone (I'm 5'8, so that's a bit underweight for me). Losing weight with Cushing's just gives you smaller boobs and stick legs. I dropped a couple of dress sizes, and five stone a few times, but at 9 stone, I was still wearing a size 16 around my waist.Ah, memories of being 9 stone, doing 100 sit ups a night on a diet of a yogurt and an apple a day while walking 6 miles a day to work and back, and then having my doctor tell me I was fat and lazy, and it was all my own fault when I enquired about my odd body shape... I've since changed doctors, albeit 30 years too late.It's worth noting that it's tough to exercise and low carb for the first month, especially with Cushing's when your energy is lower anyway. What I read about Cushing's is that it's safer to do Tai Chi or swimming as exercise (low impact on the bones) to avoid breaking anything. Also, make sure you get a lot of Calcium and Vitamin D in your diet. And with low carbing, you skip the exercise on the ketosis days.So for me less than 30g carbs a day, high calcium, low vit D for the diet, and some light dancing and swimming as  exercise. I'm not sure what to do with the Metformin. It doesn't seem to do anything for my blood sugar, and my doctor reckons it needs 50g carbs, so I don't know if I can take it on the low carb diet, probably not. I'm just restarting on the dieting again after a lot of horrifying test results because I thought I was still in  diabetic remission until I changed doctors, and now it's all brain tumours and liver disease, which is so much worse than I imagined.</blockquote>

Verification

Top Bottom

Search

Search

Reply to Thread