uart
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 424
- Type of diabetes
- Type 1.5
- Treatment type
- Insulin
You are very astute Uart. Yes I am overweight and I have been all my adult life, despite an active, hard working, good living lifestyle :-(. The only time I was a "healthy" weight was just before I diagnosed, I had dropped 4 stone in weight, very quickly, with no effort. Despite that obvious type 1 symptom, my GP insisted I was type 2 because I was fat. After 2 years of struggling to control my blood glucose and literally starving myself to keep my sugars down, I begged for insulin and was finally referred to hospital where they the full range of tests, Low and behold, I am Type 1.
Wow FlakeyBake. That's interesting to me, as it really does mirror many aspects of my own case. In my case however, I struggled with pre diabetes and insulin resistance for quite a long time before gradually gaining weight over many years. Then like you did, I had extremely rapid weight loss over just a few weeks prior to being diagnosed T2 with extremely high BGLs.
You may already know this, but perhaps I can give you more insight into your particular case, as some aspects seem so similar to mine. I believe that you probably had insulin resistance over many years, which makes it very easy to put on weight and close to impossible to lose it. This is a metabolic disorder in which the body has difficulty using carbs for energy as efficiently as a normal person does, which in turn makes it much more likely that you'll turn these unutilised carbs into fat. Moreover, the low fat high carb diets that all the "experts" recommend only exacerbates this situation!
During the prediabetes phase the body compensates for your difficulty in moving glucose from your blood into your muscles and cells (where they can be used for energy), by producing more and more insulin. This of course leads to weight gain. As you gain weight the insulin resistance gets worse and eventually you move to full type 2 diabetes or (and this is what I think happened in my case and probably yours as well) the pancreas burns out from over producing for so many years and pretty much stops making insulin. So now you've kind of got the characteristics of both T1 and T2, in that you are at least somewhat insulin resistant and you're also not producing very much of it.
In my case it wasn't until just this year when I started a low carb high fat diet (using dietary fats for energy instead of carbs), that I was suddenly able to not starve and yet lose weight. I've lost 10kg so far, and only probably only need to lose about another 5 or so to be in a relatively healthy weight range. To me this pretty much dispels the myth that weight loss is just "calories in calories out" and "will power". Metabolism, and metabolic problems in particular, plays such a big roll as well. I know for certain that I've tried much harder (and gone a lot hungrier) in the past and had very little success with weight loss. The LCHF diet doesn't exactly cure insulin resistance, it's more like it just bypasses the metabolic problem by shifting from carbs to fat for the bulk dietary energy. If you want to reduce your insulin demand, which in turn greatly helps with weight loss efforts, then take a serious look at the LCHF sub forum here.
I assume that when you say "relieved it wasn't my fault anymore", that you are referring in to how other people perceived your condition rather than how you genuinely felt about it yourself. It really is a shame the way that so many people, including a large percentage of healthcare professionals, see it that way.I was ridiculously relieved, it wasn't my fault anymore. I have lived on the other side and my heart goes out to the type 2s, who faced with so much discrimination every day.
The problem is that it's basically a "chicken and egg" situation, in that being overweight can cause insulin resistance, but equally validly, insulin resistance very strongly drives weight gain. So the question arises as to which of the two occurred first? The reality is that (depending on the individual case) it may have happened either way. However the "it's all your fault crowd" simply assume that it was the former. From my own personal experience however I now strongly believe that the insulin resistance metabolic disorder can be the primary cause rather than the result in many cases.
Take a look at this video to see why it's NOT all your fault.
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