Going Bonkers

Hi, are you testing?

Add some cream, butter, olive oil, bacon, lamb, mackerel, herring, lard, duck, goose and their fats, cheese, nuts, Etc, The world is full of non-carby foods if you look.

Go through the low-carb section here and see if you find anything that suits you.

And as Andy said, have you got a meter? It makes the food choices so much easier I find.

Try this lamb stew with pearl barley recipe



Test before and 2 hours after. Pearl barley is very low GI and so shouldn't spike you too much. If it works, you can experiment with similar recipes. Often, slow cooked one pots or stews and casseroles are OK. Pulses too, lentils, chickpeas are usually good. You can use pearl barley as a rice substitute too, for risottos or kedgeree. If you have a morrisons nearby, they do a long grain parboiled brown rice which is very low carb and low calorie. It's a bit chewy but it shouldn't affect your BG much. Start experimenting with spices and herbs too. They lift many boring foods and can make them quite special.

The good thing about this forum is that there are real people with real Diabetes that deal with it in different ways although most do limit their carb intake .The advice is test before and 1 and/or 2 hours after eating and find out what works for you
CAROL

you dont need to fear anything, reduce your carbs where ever is reasonble, the obvious stuff is rice, pasta, potatoes and bread, that isnt to say you cant eat them at all just choose the healthy types, if you potatoes have couple of new potatoes or better still try replacing them with cauliflower mash, if you want to eat rice, choose wholemeal rice and only have a small portion, bread is kinda hard to give up so if you cant try to eat burgen soy and linseed or better still go to waitrose (and some morrisons) and pick up some livlife bread, choose wholemeal pasta instead of white and only have a small portion, up the amounts of the other stuff that is "ok to eat" all the time testing as described will give you an idea of which foods push your blood glucose up you can then with the aid of a food and bg diary start to build up a picture and plan of what will suit you, this has to be a life long lifestyle change, not a 2 month diet so make sure whatever you decide to do you will be happy eating like it for good, its ok to be obsessive at first and get your bg number down to a nice level, you can then test what dosent push you up and what you can get away with, people like me find they have to eat very low carb because this suits our lifestyles and keeps our bgs really good but others manage well on portion control or low fat regimes, its trial and error and what suits you, for now if your stuck for food try to eat plenty or meat, cheese, salads, above grown vegetables (the ones that grown beneath the grown tend to be more starchy) nuts are great, oily fish, full fat cream is very nice and sugar free jelly makes a great afters with the cream (yum) and as others have said read the recipe section, theres lots of ideas there you may find that this suits you, may find you can eat much more carbs but you will only know by testing regularily, this all becomes second nature and gets easier with time, people like me dont wory about fat at all, we lose weight and have better cholesterol eat plenty of fats, this is hard to believe because we have been brainwashed our whole lives to fear fat, apart from trans fats, i believe fat is good especially when im tucking into a fry up there are benefits to low carb diets

Alison louise said:

Thank u Totto. I am really trying to be positive and seeing this a journey that I was destined to go on but not having a lot of support from people around me, their view is, u are on meds now so everything should be fine! I am not really sure on the whole carb thing, some people say eat carbs others say don't!

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You need to test to see what you can tolerate. It is individual, you see. I go for LCHF and that works wonderfully for me.

It is OK to be devastated after a diabetes diagnosis and it takes time to get to terms with it. I was diagnosed two weeks ago and it was both a shock and a relief, the latter because this may explain the strange symptoms I have had for some time. Since diagnosis I have been unable to focus on much else but now this has to stop, I have some important things to get done.

I find that I feel so much better if I stay off grain, probably due to the fact that grains sends my bg really high.

Hi Alison, like you I am newly diagnosed, (12 December 2013) so since then I've been on a low carb diet. My diagnosis 'score' was 7.3. But DN told me there's no such thing as borderline anymore so I was given the diagnosis. She gave me a test meter straight away and I dieted for 8 weeks before having another hbA1c test where the result showed a significant improvement but I had to follow virtually an Atkins style diet to achieve that. DN was still not satisfied so started me on Metformin which I have now taken for almost a month with side effects of daily bouts of diarrhoea, but I thought I could start to introduce more carbs to my diet, however the mere sniff of carbs still sends my average up. My 7 day average fasting readings have come down to 6.1 if I don't eat carbs, Now she's warning me to watch my fat intake for cholesterol numbers which are about to go out of the normal range and has threatened me with statins. What I wanted to say is I've really found it a hard slog, I suffer from depression and this counting numbers , consulting lists and constantly trying to find something different to eat is taking it's toll. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that there's more to life than being bullied by health professionals who are adhering to NICE or NHS guidelines. Good luck, I hope you cope better than I am doing. Regards Jan.

Jan if you are on a low cab high fat diet your cholesterol will rise BUT what you need to do to take control back. It isn't the overall amount that counts it is what the different numbers/types are. Carbohydrates cause small sticky dangerous LDL the LCHF causes big fluffy safe LDL. Loads of info out there. Read it and don't let the woman bully you.

Google:
Cholesterol on a Low Carb High Fat diet
Scientific papers on Cholesterol on a Low Carb High Fat diet
You can also search on here as well lots of info about

I was diagnosed 9 weeks ago. I have been on the Newcastle diet and lost 30lbs. But my levels are unpredictable - I can eat exactly the same things and on two consecutive days have readings of 4.2 and 6.2! I am increasingly depressed with all this focus on my health and measuring levels and find the thought of his for the rest of my life awful. I feel I am becoming completely obsessed and think about it all the time. I have read a lot and scared myself with the possible complications. Tempted to simply put my head in the sand. If I can't get the levels down on 600 calories and no carbs or fat for all this time then it seems hopeless. What will happen now if I eat carbs, through the roof again. Sorry to moan. A colleague said at least it wasn't a cancer diagnosis so I should feel lucky!

You may want to look into LCHF. Keeping both fat and carbs down leaves you with only protein for energy, and protein can turn to glucose in your blood, too. I find that fat works fine and so long as you stay off carbs or at least keep them low you will loose weight even if you eat a decent amount of fat. In my experience LCHF keeps my bg normal, I don't get very hungry and it can be a very easy way to reach a normal weight. A low-calorie diet isn't good for you in the long run and it will put your body in starvation mode so it refuses to let off any weight at all. LCHF was more or less the only diabetes treatment available until they discovered how to use insulin.