Been a member for a while but only lurked

[J_P]

Hi Team - Ive lurked for long enough and thought i should introduce myself

Male / 46 Yrs Old / 99Kg

So i was diagnosed back at the end of Jun with an HbA1C of 114............. after identifying some symptoms and self testing with an BGM and getting a worrying 19.4.

When i finally spoke to the Surgery Diabetic Nurse three weeks later (she was on holiday and then so was i) we have come to an agreement that i could hold off the medication for three months (bloods in Oct) and see if my lifestyle choices made an appreciable difference

Since then i've avoided the medication and have decided to hit the lifestyle and diet route with a vengeance.

Gym - Cardio and strength 3 x week
Diet - ULC and high good fats - almost verging on Keto most of the time
3 x IF (2 x 16 hour and 1 x 24hour) per week (sometimes this slips to only 2)

Currently down at a Fasting of 7.1 and a mid morning of 5.7.

However the weight loss seems to have plateaued and the fasting sugar levels bounce around on a daily basis - lowest 5.6 / highest 8.2 in the last two weeks

Any thoughts and suggestions much appreciated

J

 

[KennyA]

Hi and welcome. Couple of points from my experience:

-fasting blood levels aren't all that relevant. They're often the highest of the day thanks to the dawn phenomenon, and they are usually the last to come down. As they're controlled by your liver, there's not a lot you can do directly via diet to affect them. My liver eventually (it took about a year or so) learnt not to dump as much glucose.

-weight loss isn't steady. I had weeks where I lost a lot, then nothing for a month, then another loss in a short time. Nothing else changed.

- my most effective testing regime is immediately before eating, then two hours later. This is not about seeing how high you go. This is about seeing how well your system responds to the carbs and sugars in what you just ate, and how efficiently it gets glucose out of your blood. By two hours, you should be roughly back where you started - you're looking for the second reading to be no more than 2mmol/l higher than the first, and not above 7.8.

- everyone's blood sugar varies, all the time. The damage to be avoided is caused by sustained high blood glucose levels, over time. I am not concerned by a rapid rise and fall in blood glucose over say an hour: that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Glucose extracted from food efficiently, hits bloodstream, and is equally quickly moved into cells. I take care not to overload my system these days by limiting the carbs I eat, but I'm very happy that my system can deal well with what I do eat.

Best of luck!

 

[lovinglife]

Hi & welcome to the forum

Lots of great advice from @KennyA so I won’t repeat it but just wanted to say on the weight loss front, I’m much the same as @KennyA in that I went up, down, static and it can be disheartening.

I used to weigh myself every day and it became too obsessive so I changed to once a week and still saw ups and downs so I decided just to weigh myself on the 1st of every month, I felt it gave me a much bigger picture of actual weight loss as I was always lighter - sometimes only by a couple of lbs sometimes by quite a few. It stopped me obsessing about my weight too.

 

[J_P]

Thank you for both your replies and advice - have already tailed of the weighing to once a week - might push it to once every two weeks to get a better overall picture.

Should i just bin the fasting glucose first thing in the morning - im not currently measuring more than 1 or 2 times daily - would i be better do pre and post meals only ?

 

[ianf0ster]

Hi @JustinP and welcome to the forum.

Like the other 2 replies you got, I put my T2 Diabetes into remission by testing the meals I ate and learning which meals my body could easily cope with, avoiding the others. This was quite a big change for me since as Type2's we find hat what is generally said to be healthy (lots of whole grains, fruit and low fat) turns out not to be healthy for use since it's so high in carbohydrates (both starches and sugars) which all turn into glucose in our bloodstream when they are digested.

Here is a little blog entry by one of our members which describes it very well:

The Nutritional Thingy

There’s a few things you should know. 1. Practically all carbs turn to glucose once ingested , so not just straight sugars, but starches...

josekalsbeek.blogspot.com

 

[Paul_]

Should i just bin the fasting glucose first thing in the morning - im not currently measuring more than 1 or 2 times daily - would i be better do pre and post meals only ?

Welcome to the forum, Justin. I was diagnosed with T2D 5 weeks ago and have been on a very similar change of lifestyle to you.

For the fasting reading first thing, it's up to you ultimately. Personally, I still track it, mainly because I have a significant amount of weight to lose and it's been interesting/motivating to see it reduce from 15s when I was first diagnosed, to 6s now after 5 weeks of low carbing and 3st 3lb (20kg ish) of weight loss since my peak 12 weeks ago. The main thing though is to not be obsessed by it. Our livers, whilst wonderfully clever and adaptive, don't always behave predictably when they're dumping that morning glucose release into our systems to wake us up.

Keep up the great work, your progress is amazing!

Edit: With the weight loss plateau, two main options I'd suggest first:

1) Depends how long it's been. Worth remembering that as you tone/build muscle due to exercise, while losing fat mass, that new/toned muscle will weigh more than the fat you've lost. If you suspect this, power through and it'll smooth out in the end.

2) Check you're eating enough, you're exercising a decent amount there, plus adding IF into the mix too. Consuming too few calories, especially while pushing an exercise regime, can put your body under stress and cause it to slow its metabolism. It's sometimes called "starvation mode".

 

[KennyA]

Thank you for both your replies and advice - have already tailed of the weighing to once a week - might push it to once every two weeks to get a better overall picture.

Should i just bin the fasting glucose first thing in the morning - im not currently measuring more than 1 or 2 times daily - would i be better do pre and post meals only ?

I'll answer a different question. In my book the before and after meals tests are the most informative and will give you the data you need to make beneficial changes. Fasting tests - you don't know why it is what it is, and you can't do much about it, whatever your reading is. No reason why you shouldn't do both, but if you're only going to do one set, I'd strongly recommend testing around meals.

I dropped regular morning tests in October 2020 and haven't done them much since - I'll do a full week every so often (eg once a year) just as monitoring.

 

[J_P]

Welcome to the forum, Justin. I was diagnosed with T2D 5 weeks ago and have been on a very similar change of lifestyle to you.

For the fasting reading first thing, it's up to you ultimately. Personally, I still track it, mainly because I have a significant amount of weight to lose and it's been interesting/motivating to see it reduce from 15s when I was first diagnosed, to 6s now after 5 weeks of low carbing and 3st 3lb (20kg ish) of weight loss since my peak 12 weeks ago. The main thing though is to not be obsessed by it. Our livers, whilst wonderfully clever and adaptive, don't always behave predictably when they're dumping that morning glucose release into our systems to wake us up.

Keep up the great work, your progress is amazing!

Edit: With the weight loss plateau, two main options I'd suggest first:

1) Depends how long it's been. Worth remembering that as you tone/build muscle due to exercise, while losing fat mass, that new/toned muscle will weigh more than the fat you've lost. If you suspect this, power through and it'll smooth out in the end.

2) Check you're eating enough, you're exercising a decent amount there, plus adding IF into the mix too. Consuming too few calories, especially while pushing an exercise regime, can put your body under stress and cause it to slow its metabolism. It's sometimes called "starvation mode".

Can i ask what your diet and exercise regime is ? Losing 20Kg in 5 weeks is pretty impressive !!!

 

[Paul_]

Can i ask what your diet and exercise regime is ? Losing 20Kg in 5 weeks is pretty impressive !!!

It's been 20kg in 12 weeks, the last 5 weeks has been since diabetes diagnosis, and I've lost 12 of that 20kg in that time.

Basically reached my peak weight ever 12 weeks ago, 25st 11lb (164kg), after many years of neglecting diet and exercise, plus making every stupid excuse going as to why I couldn't sort it out. Went on a regular low calorie diet, but started getting gradual but increasingly obvious diabetes symptoms. Lost 1st 5lb (8.5kg) on the low cal diet in 7 weeks, but losing weight is actually pretty easy when you've reached my weight - the hard bit is sticking to the diet of course.

Went to the doctors, got diagnosed, and started low carb shortly after (50g carbs at first, naturally progressing into keto territory of 20-30g carbs fairly quickly as I saw positive effects on BG levels). Started exercising too, just whatever I could manage at first, but fairly quickly getting myself up to 30 mins of a brisk walk per day. As of this morning, I've lost 1st 13lb (12kg) on this phase of my dieting in 5 weeks, however I'd estimate approx 10lb of that is from water weight loss due to glycogen burn in the early stages of keto. Weight loss has slowed the last two weeks to more normal levels of 2-3lb.

My diet and exercise regime have largely been cobbled together and then adapted over the past 5 weeks, based on what I found on this forum for the most successful areas of it. It's by no means the finished article, but for now it's working at least.

You mentioned your BG readings are bouncing around. Are you tracking carb intake?

 

[Lupf]

Hi @JustinP , welcome to the forum, it appears that you are doing quite well.
We are all different and have different tolerances, so need to do what works for each one of us, individually.
In addition to the many useful suggestions: the point that I want to make is
that we, i.e. you, me and all T2 who want to control it, are in this for the long haul,
thus you will need to find a diet and control that is sustainable.
Your next HbA1c test will hopefully tell you that you are on the right track.
For context this is rather different from what happened to me 9 years ago when I got diagnosed
with over 100. I wasn't told anything, but thought that by going cold turkey on fizzy drinks
I would be ok, but two months later I was put on Metformin.

Regarding testing: I started testing first thing in the morning. While I understand what @KennyA is saying,
this is the test, which I am still doing together with weighing myself about once per week.
I don't fret about individual results, but the trend/pattern tells me if I am as usual or something is amiss.
I started testing in the mornings when deciding to lose weight to reduce my still too high HbA1c
(and not to take the Gliclazide that I had been prescribed).
This worked and I've reduced my HbA1c to low 40s.
I only then joined this forum and learned that I should test before and after eating.
I did this for a while and found out which foods I tolerate better than others,
but now I don't see the need to repeat this, so I don't.
That said, I am not suggesting that you should do the same.
Most people here are often or always testing before and after eating, and it works for them.
Just like you I do IF, twice a week, for me fast days are ~600 calories (no lunch, sometime no breakfast so 24 h fast),
with very few carbs, mainly vegetables, salads or soups, an egg, a bit of chicken or fish.
With this I've been able to keep my HbA1c below 48 for most of 4 years.